Lost and Gained

Moonrise over Pepperwood last weekend

Rain's prompt for this week's Thursday Art and Dinner Date is Lost. I first thought I skip this, but then I realized that this prompt actually falls into a time when we, as a community in my city, commemorate a date that is engraved into our minds. Last weekend marked the fifth anniversary of the firestorm.

The night of October 8th to October 9th, 2017 - Sunday to Monday - was a night when many people in our county lost their homes and everything in it to the flames of extremely fast moving wildfires that actually were a firestorm. In my city alone entire neighborhoods burnt to the ground. 24 people lost their lives. About two weeks after the fire I wrote a more detailed post about it which you can read here.

On Saturday evening we went up to Pepperwood Preserve - we are members of this nature preserve, Kaefer had done an internship here and we enjoy the many interesting events. Pepperwood had burned badly in the firestorm and is a great example for how quickly nature comes back after a natural disaster. Their way of commemorating the anniversary was the showing of the documentary film "Embers of Awakening: From Firestorms to Climate Healing". This film was directed and produced by Phyllis Rosenfield and her Listening for a Change non-profit organisation whose mission is to promote understanding and acceptance of human diversity through education, oral history and the arts. I met Phyllis 20 years ago for the first time; she is a remarkable woman.

Here is a preview of the film (it's about 6 minutes):

While there was a tremendous amount of loss for way too many people, we have also gained much from the fires. There is a better understanding that we MUST do something about climate change, since these extreme fires happen because of the changing climate (now we just need to get the rest of the country on the same page). Many people are becoming more conscious of the way they live their life and are changing old habits. There is better "forest management" (can you ever manage nature?), but that seems to be the smallest change since most of our forests are on federal land, and federal is - well, slow (you know, they don't have enough rakes... sorry, I couldn't help myself). There is a tendency to listen to the indigenous people who have lived on this land for hundreds of years and know how to deal with fire. Our emergency alert system has been updated, and "Watch Duty" is currently my preferred system since they are in Sonoma County and report every fire here. I feel better informed. We know how to pack our bags real quick, we do have two grab-and-go boxes that are always ready to go and a list what needs to be done in a hurry. 

Now, let's go to the dinner part - much more pleasant.

Sometimes I'm not in the mood to cook and do some simple things or even grab some frozen items. I call this the "lazy cook". Recently we had a lazy cook dinner - oven-roasted asparagus.

It's so simple it almost makes you cry... Place a bunch of trimmed asparagus spears in a bowl and drizzle with 3 TB olive oil. Toss to coat, then sprinkle with 1 1/2 TB grated Parmesan, one clove minced garlic, 1/2 tsp sea salt and 1/2 tsp ground black pepper. Arrange the asparagus on a baking sheet in a single layer. Bake in a 425 F preheated oven until just tender, 12 to 15 minutes depending on thickness. Sprinkle with lemon juice just before serving. Have a glass of dry Riesling with it.

The Journey of a Japanese Pagoda

In 1999, when we were still living in Germany, the Geek had to go on a business trip to Japan. He had a free weekend during that trip and beside some sight seeing he also looked for little things he could bring back to us. Among them were two small concrete pagodas that I loved to use as decor among the flowers on my balcony.

When we moved to California, thinking we would return after three years, the pagodas went to storage. Since after those three years we decided to stay in the US and had received the Green Card, all our belongings were shipped to the home we lived in at that time - the Brookdale House.

You can see both of them sitting on the ground - as you can imagine, I wanted to take a photo of Ginger and only years later, when I was looking for it, discovered that the pagodas were in the picture.

I remember having them sit there for quite a while before I made up my mind where they should go. They first went into a container with some plants.

Finally, they both went into the ivy that was growing in one corner of the backyard. They were hard to see after a while.

Eventually they had almost completely disappeared under the ivy.

When we moved out of the Brookdale House, they ivy had taken over and the pagodas were hidden somewhere beneath it. In all the chaos of moving I had totally forgotten about them. Only a few weeks later I remembered them, but by then it was too late to go back to the house and ask the new tenants whether I could look for them in the backyard.

The Brookdale House burnt down during the October firestorm in 2017. Three weeks later, when we went up to our old home for the first time after the fires, we got the permission to enter the property. We walked around what was left of the house (it wasn't much) and recalled where everything used to be in the house. We also went into what used to be the backyard. Of the beautiful redwood deck only parts of the concrete foundation remained; there was a stump of the plum tree that my friend Jo harvested every fall; a skeleton of the persimmon tree. This tree used to be in the midst of the ivy, but nothing of the ivy was left. Everything was burnt.

But then... when I turned around I saw this:

I first couldn't believe my eyes and thought I was hallucinating. One of my pagodas had survived the inferno! I never found the second one, but I was over joyed (and crying) that this one was still there.

Since it was mine I took it with me. For the longest time it was sitting on our dining table. Sometimes I turned it around - it had a "beautiful" side (in the top photo), but it also had the telling side with the burn marks.

When spring came it moved outside into one of the big flower pots.

Finally I moved it into the garden, right beneath a young vitex. Over the months it has changed its color and looks more terracotta now. It will never live among the ivy again.

Tomorrow, Wednesday, October 9th, is the second anniversary of the 2017 firestorm. It is ironic that we have very similar weather conditions again and as a preventative step our utility company will shut off the power over a large part of Northern California. The outage will start tonight and last at least until Thursday evening, but restoring the power can take up to five days. If you don't hear from me, you know why.

The Fires One Year Later

Today it's been a year since we woke up to what would become the most destructive wildfire in the history of California.

Crown Hill in Fountaingrove

Some call it the first anniversary. The students at my high school, however, prefer the term "the fires one year later". One in nine of our students have lost their home during those fires.

One. In. Nine. Of 1600 students.

It still feels like yesterday that we woke up at 2:00 am to the worst week in our life. When I went to bed yesterday I had this huge knot in my stomach when I remembered a year ago. How we went to bed not knowing what would happen only a few hours later, and how much it would change our lives.

Of course our lives hadn't changed as much as for those people who lost their homes in the fires, far from it. They are still struggling with insurances, building permits, architects, rents that are way too high. Some are in the middle of rebuilding with some homes being ready to move in pretty soon. Others are still in the planning process. Others are frustrated about the many hurdles. And others got the money from the insurance and moved away.

The school year has been awful and each and every one of us - teachers and staff - were relieved when summer came and we could leave school behind for a couple months. This year we have a new administration and we have been off to a really good start. We will commemorate October 9th by having a "normal" day, but there will be a safe space in the library and we will have therapy dogs on campus. Last year after the fires these things helped a lot.

It's been a year, and still every conversation sooner or later turns to the fires. Talking about it is a way to go through it. Even though the nightmare is in our past, it's still there - in the burnt down neighborhoods we drive through daily, when we hear the sirens of police cars and fire trucks - especially the fire trucks. The smell of smoke, even only from a barbecue, brings up terrifying memories. I think we all have Nixle on our phone now and the emergency systems have been tested.

When I go to Davis and want to take the back roads I check weather conditions and Nixle alerts. I sure don't want to be trapped by a fire in the huge wooden area. Every time I drive along those roads I remember the drive we took there on the eve of the fires. I suspect it will always stay with me.

Crown Hill in the photo above is a neighborhood in Fountaingrove. We used to live right below it, and when we moved into our old house back in 2001 those homes on the hill were just in the process of being built. I remember the constant noise of construction. Now most of the homes are gone and some time in the future, the construction noise will be back. As it is in so many neighborhoods. It's good to see homes getting up again and hopefully families being able to move in and rebuild their lives.

As for our old house - the landlord has decided not to rebuild. The property has been cleared and is just dirt right now. It still makes me sad.

Laughter And Joy Were Living Here

This house... a regular, completely unspectacular Ranch style house, sitting in a neighborhood nestled among the slopes of hills. Work was in walking distance and so was the elementary school.

The California poppies loved it here, too.

There was a Liquidambar next to the house that exploded in the most fantastic colors in the fall.

And so did the Crepe Myrtles in front of the house.

The mailbox was guarded by a colorful coyote and the house was decorated for Halloween and Christmas.

The backyard had a colorful garden that became more beautiful each year.

It had a pear tree with a purple clematis growing into it.

At Easter there were egg hunts in the backyard with the help of whichever neighborhood cat was residing there at that moment.

We lived a lot in that backyard. Roasting marshmallows over the fire pit, drinking wine in the evening and chatting with each other, having breakfast on the beautiful redwood deck with pancakes and homemade plum jam made by my friend Jo who had picked the fruit from our plum tree.

The plum tree is not there anymore...

We celebrated many birthdays here...

baked cookies for Christmas...

and the girl learned how to inline skate, do hula hoops with the Geek and cheered for the German soccer team.

We took photos for Christmas cards - and not all of them made it in the final selection.

In 2012 we bought our own house and left the neighborhood, but we still stayed in touch with some of our neighbors here. These were 11 very happy years when we made a lot of memories.

We will need those memories.

Last weekend, we went up to our old neighborhood. There isn't much left.

When she was little, Kaefer loved to climb this gate in front of our house.

The gate survived the fire. As did the street sign - sort of.

And the school? It completely burned down. It hurts to see what is left of it. This was Kaefer's kindergarten class.

I prefer to remember her first school this way...

*******

The Redwood Credit Union, our local paper The Press Democrat and our State Senator Mike McGuire have set up the North Bay Fire Relief Fund where every donated dollar goes directly to aid relief efforts and help the victims of the fires.

Living From Moment To Moment

It's been a harrowing 10 days.

Thank you to all of you who sent their love, thoughts and prayers for my town and my county. Your kind words, your checking in on Facebook and your emails have been a light in the gray thickness of the past days. Thank you, thank you from the bottom of my heart.

I don't even know where to start. The past 12 days are partly crystal clear and partly a mere blur. I'm not sure I remember everything in the right order. I don't know whether I will get through writing this post without crying. Everything is still very raw and we're just beginning to get out of this.

On Sunday, October 8th, we were visiting Kaefer in Davis. While it was rather calm here, it was extremely windy in Davis. The air was dusty and the dust seemed to settle everywhere. But I wasn't really worried - this is a very flat part of the country and Kaefer often told me that it is very windy.

When we drove home in the evening we took the back roads - it was such a lovely day, the forests, hills and vineyards were covered in the beautiful glow of the evening sun. We took the very same route that only a few hours later the Tubbs Fire would take. I remember how much I enjoyed this peaceful drive.

Back home we relaxed a bit, and then the wind picked up. It was pretty crazy. I remember that I once thought that this wind would feed a fire, but I still wasn't worried because this is California and we have wildfires every year. They don't get into urban areas.

We went to bed and slept well until around 2:00 am when the house phone rang. It is in another room and we knew that we weren't quick enough to pick it up, so we let it go. The Geek went back to sleep, but I was a bit restless. I smelled smoke. So I got up, walked around the house - everything was fine - and looked outside - nothing but darkness. I went back to bed. It was 2:22 am by then - I remember that so clearly because I looked at the clock by the Geek's bedside and loved the combination of  the numbers. Then I noticed that there were cars driving by our house, one after the other. That was unusual. This is a very quiet neighborhood, and so many cars at this late (or early) hour didn't bode well. I also heard popping sounds over and over. So I got up again because I thought it might be a good idea to check my cell phone. I saw a text message from my close friend Lyz which said "Are you guys safe from the fire?".

That's when I realized we were in trouble.

I woke the Geek, and we went downstairs, turned on the local radio station and heard what was going on. The neighborhoods on the hill, Fountaingrove, were burning. The cars that I heard were coming down from there (it's just up the hill from us). The fire was burning up smaller neighborhoods at the slopes and bottom of the hill, then jumped the six lanes (!) highway and burnt down another entire neighborhood, Coffey Park. There was no stopping the fire.

I grabbed our "grab and go" box and we packed our bags with some clothes and things we deemed important, sleeping bags, and put them right by the front door. I rolled the car out of the garage and parked it in the driveway. We were ready to go any minute if they told us we had to leave.

Then I went outside to take a few pictures. The photos are all blurry because I was shaking, but I still decided to include them.

Right across our street:

And up the hill a bit further down the road:

Then I went back upstairs and took a shot out of our bedroom window:

We constantly heard the popping sounds when transformers or propane gas tanks blew up. I remember that I ran to those of our neighbors' houses that had no light on to wake them up. We told the elderly couple next door to pack a bag and put it in the car. Just in case...

At daybreak there was thick smoke, an eerie light with no chance for the sun to get through.

At seven in the morning our phone rang. It was my friend G who had to evacuate at 1:00 am and had been sitting in the Safeway parking lot since two in the morning. She came to our house where we fed her and brewed a big pot of coffee. We would need it.

From then on, things start to get blurry. The three of us were glued to both the TV and the local radio station. One of the stations had to stop airing when the fire burnt the trees in the backyard of their building. Later they would be back on the air, just working with a generator and some very basic equipment, but they informed us all day, every day.

We saw the first pictures of Coffey Park - devastation (the picture is in my last post). It was hard to believe our eyes. I have friends and aquaintances in Coffey Park. It is a normal middle class neighborhood. They had to leave in the middle of the night, often with only 10 or 15 minutes to spare. What do you take when you have to leave so suddenly? For many it was only the clothes on their backs and some important papers and documents. Some didn't even get that.

They not only lost their house, but their home with everything in it.

Later that day Kaefer's old kindergarten teacher posted photos of what used to be her elementary school:

This was the first time that I cried.

We used to live very close to that school. I walked Kaefer to school every morning, it was just a 10-15 minutes walk through our old neighborhood. We knew so many people here - we had lived there for 11 years before we bought our current home. We went trick-or-treat, sold Girl Scout cookies, had block parties, chatted with neighbors walking by while I was working in the front garden.

All gone.

source

G stayed with us. She was shaky - she is 75 years old and only two years ago lost her husband, and now, it seemed, her home, too (we would later found out that by some kind of miracle her house survived). Lyz, who had sent me that email in the night, had lost her home, in G's neighborhood. The neighborhoods on Fountaingrove were gone. A retirement mobile home park was gone. Two hotels and the old round barn and many businesses were gone. Two hospitals were evacuated. Nurses were transporting patients in their personal cars with the IV sticking out the window.

The following days were mere chaos. The amount of misinformation was immense. We heard of more and more friends, colleagues and aquaintances who had lost their homes. We learned that at one time there were 17 fires burning (or even more, I can't remember) all over Sonoma, Napa, Lake and Mendocino Counties. The newspaper reported about the fires for days - and we really weren't interested in anything else.

But there were inspiring stories as well. The owner of Safari West, a wildlife preserve, saved all his animals while his own home was burning down. A cat was rescued from a drain (and is now in the UC Davis veterinary center). There were a lot of stories of true heroes.

For the first couple days we didn't dare to separately leave the house. We only have one car, which was packed with our important belongings, and we were absolutely certain that the mandatory evacuation order would come when one of us was away in the car. So we did everything together. We weren't the only ones who drove around town with a fully packed car - everybody seemed to do that. Some of them actually lived in their car because they didn't want to go to one of the many evacuation shelters. We didn't sleep particularly well; I was getting up several times during the night to check that there were no new fires in our vicinity. We ate a lot of chocolate and drank wine (we were not going to leave the wine for the fire!). We didn't make any plans because we had no idea where we would be the next day. We were living from moment to moment. On Wednesday night we received the order for voluntary evacuation. I remember we were sitting in our neighbor's house, drinking wine when the Nixle alert came (we had signed up for every alert system that was available for our area). The women became restless, the men were cool... there were some very tense moments. In the end, almost the entire corner of my neighborhood decided to stay. We slept in shifts. I spent the night on the couch in the living room to make sure that I would hear the police when they were banging on the door.

Fortunately this call never came.

One day a German friend of ours who had lost his home called us. His Koi fish had survived, but the person who was supposed to bring them to a safe pond didn't turn up. So the Geek and I jumped into the car to rescue his fish. This may sound weird, but if you have lost everything, those fish are everything you have. The fish were in a huge bucket, and they were wasting away. They needed oxygen. So the Geek, practical as he is, took a protector sheet from our folder with the documents, rolled it up and used it as a straw, blowing air into the bucket. There we were by the side of the road right next to a burnt down neighborhood, trying to rescue fish. Completely crazy and insane, but these were crazy and insane times. The fish, by the way, made it.

Everywhere people were helping each other. The community really pulled together. Yes, there were some bad apples in the form of looters, but the kindness of people was overwhelming. No one in this community has been unscathed by this inferno. Everybody wears some kind of scar from this disaster, some bigger, some smaller.

On Friday evening our evacuation order was lifted. There was still a big fire burning and I was still restless. And indeed, on Saturday morning at 4:40 my cell phone exploded with Nixle alerts. There was a new mandatory evacuation order for some neighborhoods to the east. And this is what it looked like from our bedroom window:

Fire and smoke. I was rattled.

The air had been bad all week. Whenever we had to go outside we wore our N95 masks. We couldn't open our windows. It was hot and stinky. Ashes were raining to the ground. But everybody was still helping - donating clothes and food, collecting school supplies. Everybody stepped up.

In between there were sparks of humor. The Tubbs fire was renamed to Chubbs fire because we had all been stress eating. The statue of General Vallejo in Sonoma was wearing a N95 mask.

People were partying. I now fully understand the people in London during the Blitz who were partying like there was no tomorrow. And for many there wasn't.

For quite some time we didn't know whether we still had a job. There were rumors that the Geek's work was completely destroyed (the company is smack in the middle of the fire zone). Someone said my high school had burned down. Days later we found out that none of  this was true. While it will take a long time for the Geek's work to return to their damaged site, he can work remote from home or go to the building that they have rented as an interim solution. My school started today with a staff meeting, and on Friday the students will return. About 145 students in my school alone have lost their homes.

The fires are almost completely contained. Entire neighborhoods are destroyed. Over 40 people have perished in the fires. 6800 structures have burnt down, most of them homes. Now we're moving into the hard time of rebuilding and recovery. It will take a very long time.

And we will never  forget the true heroes in this disaster.

*******

The Redwood Credit Union, our local paper The Press Democrat and our State Senator Mike McGuire have set up the North Bay Fire Relief Fund where every donated dollar goes directly to aid relief efforts and help the victims of the fires.