Who we are is what we create

Story & photos by Gretchen Ammerman

Oregon Coast TODAY

Since starting this series of stories about items found in the ashes of the Echo Mountain fire, I’ve heard tales of loss and resilience, grace under pressure and the strength that can come from focusing on gratitude. But no story touched me like the one told to me by Julie Starr.

“We lost more than our home,” Julie said. “We lost our hearts.”

Among art pieces and a lifetime of collectables held within the home she and her husband started building in 1994, were the remains of the couple’s twin daughters, Jennae and Jolene Wong.

Almost unimaginably, the silver urn that held Jennae’s cremains was stolen by looters, who took anything of value before the couple was able to return to the property. The box that held the bones of Jolene was incinerated, leaving only the further burned cremains that the couple have been slowly finding as they search for anything salvageable.

Jolene, who lost her battle with cancer last year, had helped her parents with end-of-life planning.

“When you are cremated they put the bones through a pulverizer,” Julie said. “That really bothered her, so she bought a chest and instructed the crematory to put her bones into it and that’s what we had had. The chest burned away, but some of her bones didn’t. That’s all that’s left, so she’s a permanent part of the property now.” 

During the evacuation from their Highland Estates property, the couple suffered additional stress when they were forced to leave behind their three rescue horses.

“When we were in the early stages of the evacuation notices, we reached out to someone that was evacuating horses and asked what we should be doing and they said, ‘You’re fine,’ so we didn’t take any further action. Then, that night, we got a knock on the door and were told we needed to evacuate immediately. At that point, no one was able to drive up the road so we couldn’t even have anyone come and get them.”

The couple spent two terrible nights wondering if their “forest horses,” had survived. Luckily, their treasured equine friends, one of whom had been on the way to a butchering factory when they rescued her, had made it unscathed.

“We broke the fire line as soon as we could because we had to know what happened to them,” Julie said. “How they made it I have no idea. It’s a miracle they survived, it really is.”

While the couple continue on their journey home, going from “couch surfers to hotel rats and now trailer park denizens,” the horses are being boarded, but their time is running out.

“There’s a farm that is letting us keep them there,” she said. “But they thought they were going to have one horse for a few weeks, not three for many months, so we need to find somewhere else soon.”

You can see the horses and follow their journey at the @stashhorse page on Facebook.

Of the four buildings on the property that were completely destroyed, Julie said the newly constructed pump house had a singular sting.

“Our first well died and we didn’t have the money to put in a new one for a while,” she said. “We had a friend that let us fill a water tank, and my husband would haul it up the road every week. The pump house was part of a new well system we had finally been able to construct using money we inherited from my daughter.”

Julie is still making discoveries as she sifts through the ashes.

“I feel like an archaeologist, finding bits of our past.” she said. “It’s also fascinating from a scientific point of view; it was such intense heat so the way things melted, like a glass heart that now feels like plastic, stacks of fusible glass that fused together and now are starting to pull apart again. All our vehicles, radiators and such are now just pools of aluminum running through the property.”

Some of Julie’s finds will be on display in the “From the Ashes” show at the Chessman Gallery, including family art that has survived in different forms.

“We have found some pieces of pottery that were made by our daughters and my mom, so I will submit some of those,” Julie said. “A little ceramic kitty that I made was in the best shape — it actually wasn’t damaged at all.”

Those small reminders became especially important to Julie when she was unable to find Jolene’s printing plates, which would have enabled her to reproduce some of her daughter’s art.

“As I go through and find these little bits of our lives, I’m finding little bits of myself,” she said. “That’s why art is so important. Finding things that my daughters have made, that was them, even more so than their remains. Who we are is what we create, not what we’re made out of.”