From the issue dated October 20, 2000
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Collecting Memories From the Aftermath of a TragedyBy LAWRENCE BIEMILLER
College Station, Tex.
Three hundred boxes brimming with grief are stacked in an archaeology lab down the hall from Sylvia Grider's office at Texas A&M University. Three hundred boxes of pocket Bibles, toy tractors, faded silk flowers, and blue jeans patched with duct tape. Boxes of poems, Beanie Babies, and baseball caps inscribed "To the Chosen 12." Nearby are the handmade posters -- neatly rolled now -- and the memorial plaque that someone cast in bronze almost overnight, and the plywood message boards so dense with Scripture and sadness that latecomers had to write on the narrow ends until those, too, were full.And even though nearly a year has passed since the bonfire collapse that killed 11 students and one alumnus here, Ms. Grider says she still never knows when she's going to be moved to tears by one of the 3,000 or so items that mourners left at the site, or one of the 20,000 e-mail messages about the accident that people have forwarded to a Web site she helped set up. The Wednesday before the log stack fell, she says, she was finishing a scholarly article on the use of petrified wood in architectural ornaments. By Sunday, she was organizing the Bonfire Memorabilia Collection Project. Ms. Grider, an associate professor of anthropology whose specialty is folklore, has been a faculty member here since 1976. After the accident -- at 2:30 a.m. on Thursday, November 18 -- football players helped move the fallen logs, and thousands of students kept a vigil at the site until the last body was recovered, but Ms. Grider decided that she needed to get out of town for a couple of days, "to get my head together." She came back on Saturday, and that night she ran into some students who asked if she had seen what was taking place along the orange-mesh fence surrounding the bonfire site. "I drove over at 1 in the morning, and in the lights I could see the fence already had hundreds of objects. I sat in my car crying." The next morning she started calling other people in the anthropology department. "It was apparent to me, and to my colleagues, that the material on that fence had to be preserved," she says. The thousands of items, she thought, might form the nucleus of a collection that could be both a memorial to the 12 young people and a research archive for the study of grieving communities. Her colleagues in the department readily agreed, and the university's president, Ray M. Bowen, gave the go-ahead shortly thereafter. Ms. Grider and her colleagues scrambled to prepare, getting in touch with university offices and student organizations, and at the same time figuring out how to record what was collected where. "The biggest problem we had to solve from a methodological point of view was that the stuff was vertical," she says. "Archaeologists don't do vertical. They do horizontal." Eventually they marked off the fence in 10-meter sections -- 82 of them -- and the department chairman, David Carlson, walked around it with a video camera to make a visual record that could be referred to later. As a scholar, Ms. Grider has a particular interest in spontaneous shrines, like those created by mourners in 1995 at the site of the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, and in 1997 in front of London's Kensington Palace after the death of the Princess of Wales. Early last year, Ms. Grider gave a presentation at a conference of the International Society for Contemporary Legends Research about the first such shrine she visited, one that appeared in Austin in 1988, after a tree known as the Treaty Oak was intentionally poisoned. The conference was in May. "In November, I had a shrine in my back yard," she says. The bonfire site had 12 identical wooden crosses and thousands of offerings -- flowers of every description, Christmas ornaments in the shapes of angels, even a 12-pack of Pearl beer. Especially poignant were items left by other students who had been involved in building the bonfire, which was to have been shaped like a six-tiered, 55-foot-high wedding cake and was to have been burned on Thanksgiving night, just hours before the final football game of the season, in which Texas A&M traditionally plays the University of Texas at Austin. Teams of students from various residence halls, and from the units of the university's Corps of Cadets, had been working on the bonfire since September. Following tradition, the crew members refrained from washing their "grodes," the clothes in which they worked on the logs. After the collapse, whole sets of grodes, neatly folded, were left by the mesh fence, some of them with pairs of work boots. Also left at the site were a number of "pots" -- the much-decorated helmets worn by members of the bonfire crews. "I don't know of anything that was inappropriate" at the site, Ms. Grider says, but she adds that students or others may have edited the offerings. "Nobody controls what goes up or comes down" at a spontaneous shrine. "It's totally fascinating." She worked with Patricia Clabaugh, collections manager in the anthropology department's Center for Ecological Archaeology, to organize the collection process. Volunteers gathered some of the memorabilia in mid-December, but left the most prominent parts of the shrine untouched until the day before the university closed for the winter holiday. Many of the artifacts had been outside for almost a month. "We faced an incredible array of technical challenges," Ms. Grider says. "How do you conserve a wet T-shirt that's been written on with Sharpie?" As it happens, the anthropology department is also home to the university's Institute of Nautical Archaeology. "We're used to working with waterlogged 17th-century ship timbers," she says. "But wet things are wet things." Staff members from the university's Cushing Memorial Library, which houses special collections, put paper items in archival freezers. Groundskeepers took away dozens of trash bags full of wilted flowers -- and then, on their own, removed the wires, ribbons, and plastic so that the plant material could be composted and possibly used in a more permanent shrine. "There is a committee in place to determine what kind of permanent memorial will be created," Ms. Grider says. "I hope that the memorabilia will in some way become part of that memorial, but that's a university decision. At this point, we're the stewards. We have to get the collection stabilized and organized so it can be turned over to the university." It's not a quick or easy task. Staff members, work-study students, and volunteers have completed the cataloging, but the message boards are still waiting to be transcribed, and the condition of every artifact needs to be checked. Ms. Clabaugh, the collections manager, says she thinks 95 percent of the material is in stable shape. But there are also Bibles whose pages had been reduced to "porridge" by dampness, and teddy bears (with which the archaeology lab has little experience), and the grodes, which present a seemingly intractable dilemma. "We can't conserve these with all this contamination," says Ms. Grider, looking down at a clear plastic bag containing boxer shorts, socks, and a gray T-shirt. "If we preserve all this salt and sweat and dirt, they'll rot." But washing them would violate traditions that have evolved since the first Aggie bonfire, back in 1909. "We're going to have to meet with a bunch of students from the corps and student leaders and ask them how to proceed." Less troublesome are the 20,000 or so bonfire-related e-mail messages that Ms. Grider's project collected this spring to provide background material for researchers. The messages, some of which circulated widely, include prayers, chain letters, and what she refers to as "miracle stories" of people who were supposed to have been working on the bonfire that night, but for some reason were not. Through the Web site (http://bonfire.tamu.edu), the project also asked people who had left memorabilia to specify what they had left and when, whether they had done so on the spur of the moment, and whether they had known any of the 12 people killed. Such information, she says, will help researchers learn more about how communities grieve -- and will almost certainly provide thesis topics for some of the department's graduate students. But usefulness doesn't make the bonfire memorabilia any easier to work with, says Ms. Grider, who adds that she chokes up even now while she's checking artifact descriptions. "I thought I had objectified this project to the point where I didn't cry anymore, but I do," she says. It has been a somber year for her, as for so many others here. And her manuscript on petrified-wood architectural ornaments is still "right where I left it that day," Ms. Grider says. "I'm anxious to finish it and send it on. I've lived 10 lifetimes since November." http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Page: A72
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Copyright © 2000 by The Chronicle of Higher Education