“Wildfire Weeds” with Wildfire Reflections

Wildfires

I woke up to a firestorm lighting the sky at 1 a.m. in October 2017 with the urgent news that we had to evacuate because of wildfires at once. After throwing on some clothes I attempted to gather up some important items to take with me to no avail; my child starting shouting, panicked, and we were soon outside our cabin fleeing from a several hundred foot tall wall of fire that was aggressively approaching our property. Upon hearing that our main access road was engulfed in flames, we hopped in the back of our aunt’s pickup truck and self evacuated from the valley, roughly an hour before our home and neighborhood burnt to the ground.

A novel about wildfires is born

A nomadic tour spurred on by my homelessness began that morning, whereby I relied on the kindnesses of my friends to sustain me. Prior to the blaze, I had spent a dozen years homesteading in Mendocino County, in Northern California, where my in laws owned and operated an organic winery and vineyards. After one sweep by the firestorm, the family compound lay in ruins. The fires wiped out not only my homestead but the homes of almost everyone I had called neighbor for miles around. All across my rural valley, the land we loved had been reduced to rubble. As the seasons passed and I adjusted to my life post-fire-initiation, I determined to capture something of the collective experience of my community in novel form.

 Over the course of that first year, we fire survivors rode the emotional roller coaster of grief and loss. At first gratitude ruled the day: to be alive sufficed. Juxtaposed against the intensity of the firewall we had witnessed and the tragic and untimely deaths of several people in our community, our only marching orders were to keep breathing. We staged impromptu reunions in the County seat of Ukiah, where we would meet up to embrace, describe where we were staying, muse on where we were going, and discuss what plans we had for healing ourselves. 

As the months worn on, I failed to acquire housing. While my initial intrigue at being liberated from all of my earthly possessions had been a spiritual experience, I came to realize that I was  also technically homeless. The cost of living in California has always daunted me as someone rich in happiness but rather economically poor. For me, the natural disaster coupled itself with a larger leap into the veritable unknown as my ties to everything I had worked so hard to create fizzled out, and I had to start from scratch. No insurance buffer to help me along, I relied on the generosity of friend’s who hadn’t been burnt out to get by. Embodying a deep concern about how to intimately slow dance with uncertainty, I divided my time between my friend’s homes, the open road, and several house-sitting gigs. 

 I made the decision to become an author; I had always had a natural proclivity for writing, and suddenly I had a very important story to tell. I readily agreed to house-sit for friends around Northern California which I believed would enable me to have the groundedness to hunker down and write my book! Eager to translate what felt excruciatingly personal into a broader social perspective, I began to craft my story, setting it in the social, economic, and cultural contexts of Mendocino County rural living. As a result, my story about wildfires, quickly also became a story about pot legalization affecting the small local weed farmers.

Telling the story of the wildfires

 During the first winter after the fire, I set my mind to the task of expressing the heart wrenching affair my community had lived through. Throughout the spring I outlined and planned what I wanted to cover in my debut novel, weaving in a completely fictional storyline based on the conversations the pot growing community shared with me. By the summertime, I felt confident that I could complete my first book in about 10 full days of writing, over the course of 3 different house sitting sessions. This timing, I mused, would allow me enough time to flush out a skeletal draft that could then be fleshed out and polished up by the end of the summer of 2018.

 Because I was still home free and also home-schooling my son, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to get much writing done except when he was staying with his dad. My writing retreats were to be focused, nose to the grindstone sessions of writing fervor. So, as I went to my house-sit with computer in tow, I did so with the conviction that I would be cranking out the first phases of my book. 

 The first weekend I went on writing retreat my phone starting blaring with evacuation notices and alerts for the county where I was staying. As I watched the sky turn the color of a bruise, I held my breath, and hoped for a prompt containment. Instead, that first fire marked the beginning of a long haul with regard to an immersive study of California’s fire ecology. As the summer months endured, more fires sprang up and the intensity of my stress became obvious as I witnessed my own edges turn sharp inside me. Fires were not going away in California. I knew that first summer after my firestorm would challenge me, but I had always lived in Northern California, and I didn’t know where else to go. 

 My next house-sit was located on a ridge top at the end of a long dirt road, travelled best at 15 miles per hour. In the golden hills of summertime, fuel extended out from my house-sit in all directions. One day, while typing away on my book, the sky turned smoky and the omnipresent sound of planes echoed fear in my ears. Coincidentally I had situated myself between the Ukiah airport and a fire that had sprung up in Boonville; while I wasn’t in actual danger, I watched as the columns of smoke crept over the hilltops, wondering just how safe I was out here in the boonies. Grudgingly I continued writing in stints between making my frantic plans for evacuation. Consumed by the fire reporting, I tuned into any and all news in a way that can best be described as post traumatic. Glued to my computer screen and the dynamic vista of smoke signals, I realized during that second writing retreat that I was still very much terrified by the fire situation in California.

Wildfire Triggers

 My body still held tightly to the dramatic flourishes of my own emergency from the previous Fall. I thought that I had integrated my experience rather well. But my heartbeat quickened with every Cal-Fire plane passing overhead; the relentless sound of engines blared as the planes scouted on high for things I could not see from my perspective. I tracked the grayish haze out every window, anxious, and bewildered about how I could stop the triggers from making me crazy. My single saving grace amidst the stresses of my first fire season after being burned out was that I had plenty of material coursing through me, once again. I didn’t have to dredge up my feelings to write about them; California gave me plenty of familiar situations to set the appropriate tone for my writing quest. 

 In July, my family took a road trip to the Pacific Northwest. We breathed clean air and felt totally safe from fires with all the lush greens of Oregon and Washington. On the way back home, we had a week to decompress at a hot springs in the forest with no cell service. Spectacularly relaxed, we hit the road bound for California, feeling mighty fine. As we emerged from the woods, a few bars lit up on my phone and text messages begin flooding in. My friends wanted to know if I was okay. How was I handling these new fires? How was I dealing with the smoke? I had not idea what they were talking about until I got out onto the main highway. Then, we had to drive through half a dozen active blazes to get home, including passing by the ashen remains of another fire that had started as we were traveling North weeks prior. The final two fires I had to cross through were particularly horrific, as they were surrounding the Ukiah valley, where I was staying, from all sides. The River and the Ranch fires lit up the sky as I wove my car through them, trying not to babble incoherently as I made the last several miles to my mom’s apartment. 

Quickly, I realized that the roads would soon be closed (the fires had literally been on the side of the highway for a stretch) and most of my things were stored at a friend’s house in Lake County. She wasn’t under evacuation, but I didn’t know how I could get to her place if the road access got cut off due to the Mendocino Complex fire. Weaving my way back through the fires, again, I made it to her house quite altered, and exhausted. We prepared dinner, intending to pack up my things after catching a breath and getting some food in my belly. Contentedly dining, we were surprised by the doorbell ringing. Once. Twice. We looked at each other and then my friend got up to go to the front door; as she did, I turned and looked outside the sliding glass doors toward the backyard, and my mouth fell. Another fire had sprung up within sight of the house. The neighbors had come to let us know about the fire danger. I stared for a minute into the distance, watching the fire growing and glowing, trying to gauge if we had time to evacuate. If I saw flames, it was probably time to go.

But, I hadn’t had time to take anything with me during the previous Fall evacuation, and this time, I hoped to get all of my newly acquired possessions with me. The fire was small, though growing, and it felt like a safe risk, even though my heart threatened to pound through my chest. I began a circuit wherein I ran upstairs to my friend’s closet, grabbed my things, ran back downstairs, tossed them in my car, and then went to look out the glass to see how the fire was progressing. I did probably five passes in this manner before I could see that there were police cars and fire engines surrounding the fire now. The fire didn’t appear to be growing much anymore, to my relief. I helped my friend evacuate her things, and before long we were both ready to go. We watched the flames hold their ground. We could hear a bulldozer making a fire break around the shrinking blaze, and within the hour, the fire had been put out and the lights from all the vehicles were gone. 

 I relived the firestorm throughout the entire summer of 2018. I knew the first summer and fire season would be restimulating to any wounds still malingering but I had no way of knowing just how close to home the fires would come again. I snapped back into fiery focus to accept that my world, the West Coast of the U.S. was burning. Innocenty, stupidly, I thought that there was no way that the fires could come so close to me again; they couldn’t hurt me personally anymore, could they? Me, who lost all my earthly things in the fire; I didn’t need to worry about future blazes did I? But I was wrong, for air is the most precious and primary need I have.

 The next day at dusk, driving back towards my mom’s apartment, I watched the flames lick at the hillsides. A red sun amidst the copper colored smoke sky which refused to set loomed above me. Driving between the disasters, too close for comfort, I wondered when the roads would close. Shouldn’t they be closed by now? The River fire burned, the Ranch fire blazed, and I tried to remain as clear headed as possible when fresh, clean air was a scarce resource. 

For months, my stomach tightened whenever I drove through Lake County, watching familiar landscapes charred with black streaks. The land where I had lived had begun to reforest itself with baby seedlings and green growth. But, newly burnt ground would remain black until the rains could come. When would the rains come? And when they came, would they put out the fires or would they trickle? Would they gush such that the hillsides would erode away, no longer held tightly by tree roots and shrubberies? 

 In the early Fall I began a house sit down a long dirt road in Laytonville. Removed from the world, I was able to drop into my solo writer’s retreat with fervor. I couldn’t let the wildfires stop me from writing this book any longer. It was time to get her done! But, the road to get into the property was winding and slow, and I devised an evacuation plan so that I could sleep at night. There was a pond on the property, and I planned to climb into my wetsuit and wait out the wake of fire destruction from the middle of the pond on a Huckleberry Finn style raft. I really would have preferred to have a full throttle apocalyptic gas mask with me, but one of my disposable N99 nose and mouth covers would have to suffice. 

 Unmitigated fear and terror accompanied me throughout each day. Any time the winds picked up, or I could smell smoke, delirium set in, and I had to convince myself that everything would be okay. Nothing would have to be truly wrong to set me reeling; because my world changed without notice, my brain still pathologized some moments that otherwise resembled the conditions of the night that took my homestead from me. Suffice to say, my writing project took longer than I had initially intended. At the one year anniversary of the fires, I was still forced to wear breathing masks, waiting to understand when and if the threat of fire would ever come to a close.

Phoenix from the ashes: Wildfire Weeds

 And then, after hardly being on the land for a year, we returned to the winery property that I had once called home for the annual grape juice fill up in the midst of the grape crush. Not much of a drinker, one of the biggest perks of living on a winery, in my opinion, was access to loads of grape juice on tap. Our morning visit started with blue skies and bittersweet reunions with friends and family who had all been forced to relocate as a result of the October 2017 wildfires. As we loaded up the car with grape juice, I felt sad to be so removed from the land I had loved. Literally the very moment we decided to leave the property, we noticed a haze in the skies; immediately we began to research where the fire was coming from and if we were safe. “This smoke is coming from Butte County” said the alerts on our phones. We couldn’t smell smoke, but we watched an eerie darkness set in all over the valley. By noon, the fires in Paradise had blown a smoke layer all across Mendocino County, which caused a darkening of the skies: a smoke screen eclipse. In the days that followed, ashes covered the world in a layer of soot. Malingering smoke required that we wear respirators to go outside for another couple weeks. Each day without rain carried an anxious uncertainty that late Fall dryness could result in more fires; when would we be able to breathe freely again?

 Luckily, the Winter finally came, and the skies opened up and poured down. Although I have cherished rain in the past, I have never felt such peace accompany the darkest times of the year. My entire energy body soaked up all the luscious wetness like a dry sponge. With a renewed nervous system, I was able to finally finish my first draft of my novel! Simultaneously with my completion of the writing, I took on the project of learning all the marketing and outreach needed to get a book from my computer to the masses. My novel began to be edited,  formatted, and otherwise prepared for publication. As I’m submitting my final draft to be formatted for publishing, I’m watching the last rains of the spring come to Mendocino County. I’m not really prepared for the summer; I don’t think anybody really is prepared to deal with the threat of fires. But, my hope is that my book “Wildfire Weeds” will offer something constructive to this climate chaos. 

You can check out more about “Wildfire Weeds” or purchase my book online at Amazon.