For me, last week began with a terrifying drive through a sirocco-like, Santa Rosa windstorm just after midnight on Monday, October 9th.
Following our movie, my grandson and I got in the car at about 11:30 pm. As soon as I merged onto Highway 101 in downtown Santa Rosa, the car was buffeted by a gust of wind so violent that we were pushed into oncoming traffic.
Visibility was almost zero. Dust and debris filled the car, and the ambient temperature was 75 degrees. Suddenly my grandson pointed east. Hundred-foot flames were whipping through the ridge tops. We exited the freeway, trying to determine what was going on, visibility still nonexistent.
By then, I’d heard Potter Valley was on fire. Returning to the freeway, we came upon an accident going north and fires burning on the freeway southbound. The wind would completely stop for a few minutes, and then, as if in a dystopian desert, we’d hear a roar, and thousands of particles of dust, leaves and small branches would scour the car.
Already on high emotional alert, I was still not prepared for what I saw as we climbed down Burke Hill into the Ukiah Valley. I called my family and my friends first, then my partner at the Ukiah Daily Journal, Chief Photographer Chris Pugh. “The ridge is on fire!”
I’ve lived here more than half my life. It’ll be 40 years soon. As a reporter and a resident, I’ve known for decades that the potential for deadly fire in our area could not be overstated. I can’t count the stories I’ve written about defensible space, the Fire Safe Council, other fires and other victims. My guy was a volunteer with UFD for ten years. Yet nothing prepared me for that image- a line of searing, brilliant red streaking along the ridge tops. Gigantic flames visible from Ukiah were illuminating the hills just east of Redwood Valley, the fire already snaking north to the border of southern Willits.
Chris and I have worked together for years now, but I am certain this was the first time I called him screaming in the dead of night. It only took him a few seconds listening to the scanner and he was dressed and in the car. We called KC from the road and headed to Redwood Valley, the town the Chris grew up in. Since that night, like many of our friends, family and neighbors, we haven’t stopped.
Journalists are never supposed to be “part of the story.” But this is different. For our community, this is not a “story.” This is the full mélange- happening to all of us, simultaneously. Human tragedy and redemption, horror, terror and solace, rage, tears, and consolation. Unspeakable, bottomless grief woven into the most absolutely non-random acts of kindness I have ever seen.
For Chris and me, we “hit our wall” last Friday touring northwestern Redwood Valley. At that point, aside from legions of law enforcement personnel, utility workers, tree crews, Animal Care officers and building and planning staff, we were among the only civilians in an area that I can only compare to something resembling a nuclear blast zone.
If one’s eyes could switch, like our smart phones, to Black and White, what we observed would sync up perfectly with that monochromatic landscape.
One can drive for hundreds of yards and see the same scene, played out again and again: literal square blocks of scorched earth, the fire so intense that white ash is all that is left of some properties- that, and twisted hulks of metal so deformed and misshapen it boggles the mind to even guess what they once were- a storage shed? A chicken coop?
The husks of cars are everywhere. Aluminum alloy, once sporty rims on someone’s truck is now melted- transformed into macabre, silvery blobs, pooling near what was once the vehicle’s wheels.
Leafless trees are a study in carbonized black and white- something worthy of Tim Burton’s Halloween Town. There is something unnerving about the sheer nakedness of these leafless, evergreen trees- as if they are showing us parts of them we are not supposed to see.
And then there’s the smell. I was grateful there was very little wind that day, as the odors of thousands of acres of acrid-smelling burnt vegetation were already affecting our breathing. The other smells rising up from the residential debris fields are literally beyond description. What is the smell of melted plastic, combined with the metallic tang of super-heated car bodies? What is the smell of ink melted down from entire library of books and magazines? What is the smell of silverware? Of photo albums? Of computer hard drives? Of a pair animal shears, or the insidious, secretive aroma of lead paint or asbestos?
Chris and I each hit our wall separately. Mine occurred when we found ourselves at the home of one of my best friends. We knew they were safe, and they knew their home had been destroyed, along with their chickens and ducks.
As I walked onto their property, I had an experience of almost reverence. It was as if I was walking on hallowed ground. And perhaps it is- ground that has now become the repository of all the feelings, hopes, hard work, struggles and memories of hundreds and hundreds of families. It was so quiet. There were none of the familiar sounds of daily life- the buzz of a car down West Road, the yells of children, the monotonous hum of machines at work or the yammering of a talking head on someone’s television. But as I picked my way to what was once their backyard, there was one sound. A single duck quacked in the distance. “No way that was their duck,” a neighbor told me later. Probably not, but for me, it was the quack that rocked my world, and my dispassionate, focused, reporter-persona vaporized into the wind, carried along with the millions of pounds of ash floating through the Valley.
There truly was nothing left. His cars, his computer, her lifetime of art work and art supplies, her recumbent bike, his tools, their CD collection, their life. All reduced to a pile of white ash, with one corner of one wall almost defiantly, but definitely dangerously perched atop the debris.
Chris gave me some space, of course. He knows me well. I sobbed, and sobbed some more. I found one page of a children’s’ book that had somehow survived- a picture of two houses and a cloud. The text reads, “The Clouds pushed upward and away. The Cloud pushed downward and touched the tops of the houses and the trees.”
But we had stories to file, and soon enough, it was time to move on. We found ourselves at the Redwood Valley Rancheria, only a few hundred yards from the neighborhood where Chris grew up.
Chris’s first job was as a meat cutter at the Redwood Valley Market, one of the reasons he knows everyone in the Valley. He worked there for years, and when tribal chairwoman Debra Rodriguez saw Chris, she recognized him immediately.
We stood in front of the Rancheria office, looking at disbelief at the evidence of how closely the fire came to their residences. As we’ve previously reported, it was a small cadre of heroic tribal members and neighbors who saved the Rancheria, and I believe the southeastern portion of the Valley, from certain conflagration.
As a kid, Chris played in the creeks near his house, just barely a mile away.. He learned how to ride a bike and drive a car on East Road. Everything good about being a kid in a rural neighborhood happened to Chris, within just a few hundred yards of that fire line. Standing there with Debra, who has known Chris since childhood, all of his barriers just fell away, just as mine had only ½ hour earlier. She just hugged him and held him while he wept.
The anger, finger pointing and long political slog are just around the corner, as are the winter rains which will add their own elemental pastiche onto our disaster landscape. People ask, “What can I do?” I believe that what all of us can and should do is stay close to our hearts, and the hearts of others.
I have had what is called Complex PTSD for decades. You’ve never seen me when I’ve been triggered, because I’ve learned through years of trial, error and training how to care for myself. But what we will see now is what I’m calling “WE-TSD.” We must now deploy all available units of compassion, tenderness and self-care to the front lines. Now, with little time to lose, we must all prepare for this next part of the disaster- the courageous, unflinching tenderness that will be needed to support our community members as they visit and return from what is left of their homes.
When I told my friends about the condition of their home, they said, “We know we’re still in denial, but we’re going to ride with that for as long as possible.” Soon, very soon- the adrenaline will burn out and we will all be tasked with the longer, less dramatic and incredibly stressful work of rebuilding and redefining not just our homes, but our mental health and our notions of safety and security and community. When you, a stranger or a loved one demonstrates the symptoms of WE-TSD, remember that a little smidge of kindness, respect and compassion, as it did for Chris and me, will get you through the next day and take you to wherever and whatever your next “story” may be.
