DARRINGTON — It’s baseball season again.
Quinton Kuntz has a new mitt. The first home game is Saturday.
It’s a slice of familiar for a family rebuilding a life that changed a year ago.
On March 22, Cory and Julie Kuntz were driving to Tacoma for Quinton’s high school baseball game when their cellphones started ringing: The hill fell. People were missing. Their house between Oso and Darrington was gone.
Cory and Julie met at Darrington High School, married in 1994 and later moved to the former dairy that’d been in his family since the 1940s. They lived on 8 acres next to Uncle Mac and Aunt Linda, south of Highway 530.
Uncle Mac and Aunt Linda were home that Saturday morning. Longtime librarian Linda McPherson was killed. Gary “Mac” McPherson survived and now lives east of the mountains.
Longing for own home
The Kuntzes are renting a little yellow house in Darrington with a fireplace and a comfortable donated couch. Before they moved in, friends cleaned the house, rebuilt the deck and weeded the flower beds. There’s one bathroom and no dog door for Buddy, their chocolate Lab.
The Kuntzes still make payments on the home the slide destroyed. They understand it might take years to get money from a potential buyout. They’re still waiting on someone to make the decision.
Until then, they’ll keep renting. Otherwise, they would have to take on a double mortgage.
“You get to where you want a home again and it’s something you call yours and we don’t have it,” Cory said.
Bits of good news
On the day of the slide, Darrington volunteer firefighters Jeff and Jan McClelland and others rescued a man who’d been tossed onto a berm near C-Post Road. It took 45 minutes and 600 feet of rope to cross the soup of mud, clay and timber to reach Mark Lambert, whose limp arm dangled by his side. He was in shock and hypothermic. The McClellands warmed him up and flagged down a helicopter.
Lambert lived. “That was huge, absolutely huge to us,” Jan said.
As darkness fell, there was a report of a child whimpering in the rubble. Jan joined those who went to look. They heard nothing and were called away. Jan left tired and worried.
She learned the next day that the whimpering was Buddy, the Kuntz dog, who was rescued after being entombed in debris for a day and a half.
Jan later met Julie and Buddy and had a photo taken together.
“We needed something,” she said. “Everyone was over-the-moon happy.”
A symbol of renewal
On Day 2, Cory and Julie saw how their house had folded up. Cory’s boat was 10 yards up in a root ball. Julie’s clothes were scattered. They never found any of Quinton’s room.
The Kuntzes surveyed the devastation with friends from their “Second Sunday” group of eight couples who gathered certain Sundays for a meal and a project. Most of them grew up in Darrington and married locals.
In January 2014, the group had helped remodel the family’s kitchen, painting cabinets and installing new tile. After the slide, five of the friends got tattoos of a lotus with eight petals, one petal for each couple. Julie’s is on her left foot.
In some cultures, the lotus is a symbol of renewal. It is beauty that rises from mud.
Julie and Cory won’t ask the Second Sunday group to build them a new house. That would be too much, even though Cory already knows what the answer would be: “What time?”
Hurting and healing
Julie keeps a story book in the freezer. It is wrapped in an evidence envelope with butcher paper tucked between the pages. Its title is “Love You Forever.” Aunt Linda gave it to Quinton when he was born. The book was salvaged from the mud in April and frozen. The pages have to be thawed and dried slowly, so they won’t crumble.
Julie can’t bring herself to do that yet. The thought of seeing the inscription in Linda’s handwriting catches in her throat.
The Kuntzes don’t plan to attend the one-year remembrance event near their former home. Cory and Julie often have to drive past to get to Arlington, and Quinton’s bus takes the route on the way to his diesel mechanics classes.
Still, they’ve visited. Their former neighbors, the Youngs, built a campsite on the Kuntz property at a spot where trees obscure the vast emptiness where the mountain stood.
One sunny day when the highway was closed, Julie walked the new pavement with Buddy. It’s hard to predict what will hurt and what will help, she said. That walk was healing.
Quinton turns 17 next month and has his driver’s license. By the time he starts his senior year, the Kuntzes hope to have a home, preferably one with two bathrooms and a yard for Buddy.
It’s hard to look at houses. Julie and Quinton get excited. Cory thinks about promises made to settle the debt on their old place, and how that hasn’t happened yet.
They can’t move back to the disaster zone. Cory saw too much in the mud. He considers the place a graveyard.
Besides, all the love shown by neighbors reminds them Darrington is home.
They can’t leave. Not now.
Kari Bray: 425-339-3439; kbray@heraldnet.com.
Dedication
The Darrington Library will dedicate the community room in honor of Linda McPherson at 11 a.m. Saturday, with a plaque featuring McPherson’s portrait.
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