On goat farm, Oso rescuers usher new life into world after devastating year
DARRINGTON, Wash. -- When volunteer firefighters Jeff and Jan McClelland first got word that a massive mudslide had swept through a quiet neighborhood near Oso, they were just a few miles away, bringing new life into the world.
The McClellands live and work on a small goat farm just outside the town of Darrington. On that day last March 22, they were in the middle of a busy birthing season and Jan was elbow-deep in placenta.
“I had just delivered twins and was still up in the barn, covered in all kinds of goop,” Jan said. “The pagers went off and we looked at it and it said: ‘Single engine response. Mud on the road. Barn roof on the road.’ So we just figured it was something small.”
Jeff and Jan were among the first to arrive on scene that day.
"I think my strongest memory from the slide is just driving up there and seeing destruction and a scene that I couldn’t really put words to. I couldn’t understand what was happening,” Jeff said.
“I saw people that needed help and started talking to them,” he recalled. “There was this woman and child standing next to me and they were all muddy. I think I asked them, ‘Where’d you come from?’ And they said, ‘We don’t know.’”
The couple could hear people calling out for help and a man was screaming that his arm was gone.
"I figured that if his arm was amputated or missing, he was going to bleed out on us,” Jeff said.
It took more than an hour to get to the man, who was later identified as Mark Lambert.
“He was in shock. He was hypothermic,” Jan said. “I was just so afraid we were going to lose him and I was trying to keep him talking and I said to him, ‘I have a goat farm and I just delivered baby goats. And as soon as you’re better, buddy, you’re coming up to the farm and I’m going to feed you goat cheese.”
Mark survived the ordeal, and Jan plans to make good on her promise.
“We’ve been talking recently and he’s coming up for dinner and he’s going to help me bottle-feed the babies. He’s really excited about coming up,” she said.
And there will be plenty on the farm to see.
The baby goats that were born the day of the mudslide, March 22, are about to turn 1-year-old. Two of them are aptly nicknamed “Oso” and “Darrington.”
Meanwhile, Jeff and Jan are getting ready for as many as 80 new baby goats -- kids -- to be born. They expect that some will come on the anniversary of the mudslide – new life, on a day when so many lives were taken away.
“I am really looking forward to the birthing season and having all these little kids around,” Jan said. “I mean they are so adorable and it does your heart good. And we’re really going to need that this year.”
Jan helped deliver the first baby goat of the year on Wednesday – a male with a white coat and a small, brown patch of fur shaped like a heart.
She nicknamed him “Deeter,” short for “Determination.”
Jan said she chose the name because, “it's with heart and determination our communities were able to deal with everything that has happened since the day of the slide.”