Editor’s note: On July 9, Gordon Gregory
reports that he and his family were forced to move again. The house
they’d found to rent after wildfire destroyed their home on the
southern edge of Paradise turned out to be in the path of a new
advancing fire.
I live close to tall trees in
Northern California, and on the afternoon of June 12, I held our
mare, Millie, and watched wildfire advance toward the draw not
1,000 away where my wife and I had almost finished building our
home. We’d been working on the house for almost four years.
The wind pushed a towering cloud of black smoke west of
our place. I found hope in the lateral drift. I believed that the
inferno then burning for a second day would slide by us.
But when I heard explosions, caused by God knows what as fire
consumed the homes farther up the road — explosions that grew
louder as the homes of nearer neighbors were hit — hope began to
fade.
And it vanished altogether when I saw whole trees
torch off and heard the roar of destruction that nothing would
quiet. Not the DC 10 dropping its 12,000 gallons of fire retardant,
not the engines staged along the gravel roadway, and certainly not
my silent prayers, offered far too late. When a fireman yelled
“Get the hell out!” I felt the kind of sickness that
comes from powerlessness in the path of fury.
Jogging
away from the inferno, Millie tossing her head against the roped
halter, I couldn’t imagine how I would tell my wife and our
14-year-old daughter that every board and nail, every ill-hung door
and crooked tile, every left-behind artifact of our lives was gone.
All of it: Georgia’s ribbons, her childhood
drawings of cats, her notes of love; the books and writings, the
framed family pictures, the glass art and paintings from my sister
and mother, my brother’s ink drawings, and my father’s
watch, the one he wore the day he died and which I wear — wore —
when I need his support. All of it violently rendered into nothing
more than a smoldering statistical blip.
By 2:30 p.m.
that day, our house had become rubble. It was one of more than 70
homes lost to the Humboldt Fire, and one of 102 residences
destroyed by wildfire that week alone in Butte County, Calif. As I
write this three weeks later, the fires still rage, people are
still fleeing, and on July 9, another 40 homes were lost in a
nearby community.
Our experience, like everyone’s,
is simple. It is also entirely commonplace.
We thought we
were safe. We thought disasters were only stories. We thought that
human action could forestall calamity. Surely, a retardant-laden
jet and all those fire trucks, coupled with the stucco siding and
tile roof, not to mention the home-sprinkler system backed by a
5,000-gallon water tank — surely, all of this would be enough to
defeat something as simple, as archaic, as fire.
Such
silliness.
So what does fire teach? Perspective, I
suppose, though that depends on your vantage point. The one
I’m sitting on now teeters between gratitude and grief. The
support and aid we’ve received from neighbors and strangers
has been remarkable, and our appreciation for this community has
grown immeasurably. But the loss of our house and belongings will
haunt the three of us for a good time. I doubt we’ll connect
with another dwelling as fully as we did the ruined one. I fear we
will never again put down our roots as deeply.
Sometimes
I look for meaning, or at least symmetry. The land we lived on was
untouched until we borrowed it from nature. We took away many of
the trees and the brush and we changed the habitat, putting our
needs first. Then the brush and the trees conspired with a spark to
take it back.
But that’s too simple. Wildfire is
not something to which one can attach a meaning. It is simply the
chaos of nature taking over, and maybe that’s the lesson. We
think that because we can turn jetliners into air tankers, we are
in control. We think we can fix anything if we just put enough
technology, money and bureaucracy into the effort. But we delude
ourselves, just as I deluded myself for a time June 12.
The reality is that, here in the West, we live in fire’s
realm. It is less a neighbor than an inattentive overlord, an
absentee landlord who might ignore you for generations and then, on
a whim, suddenly decide to burn down your house. When it’s
your house that’s taken, you may become a refugee, fleeing
with only what you can carry or lead away.
Then, after
the initial shock, you’ll have to ask yourself: Now what?
What do I do? My family lost almost everything we owned. But
we’ve held on to our stubbornness. We will rebuild, right
here, back in that draw.
That’s the decision,
though I don’t think I truly believe it yet. It probably
won’t sink in until I am finally able to lead Millie back
home.
Gordon Gregory is a freelance writer who
lives somewhere near the town of Paradise, in Northern
California.
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