After the Fires
Is it just me
or are the hills
really darker than before
I mourn the absence of a thousand lighted windows.
Strange birds
singing in my backyard.
I try to find reasons
to visit the places
that I don't have a reason to visit
other than that they're gone.
I sleep with the windows open again on hot nights.
Always listening.
The night
feels so much darker.
I think of quiet ruins
of ashes settling.
The moon illuminates all that was lost.
I wander through my house
restlessly.
Imprinting my memory
with the void
that each thing
would have left behind.
October 28, 2017
A Visit to Coffey Park
Today our friends Paul and Sue took us on a tour of their neighborhood in Coffey Park. Ever since we got back to Santa Rosa after the fires, I have felt the need to see the devastation with my own eyes. I’ve felt guilty. And afraid. And compelled. Paul insisted. “You guys need to see this. It’s part of our city’s history. You have to see this before it gets cleaned up and erased.”
They pick us up in their minivan. It’s a beautiful sunny fall day in Sonoma County. We drive up Mendocino Avenue, the charred hills of Fountaingrove to the East of us. You could almost pretend that it’s simply brown grass, dried out from the summer. Except for all those really dark patches. And the missing houses.
We get on 101 North, take the Bicentennial Exit instead of Mendocino O/C. None of us want to go past Journey’s End Mobile Home Park again. Still, I catch glimpses of it from the freeway, And of the corner of Fountaingrove Parkway and Mendocino, where the Hilton and the Fountaingrove Inn and the historic Fountaingrove Round Barn once stood. All gone. Nothing left. It just looks like an empty hillside. It takes effort to remember what was there.
On the corner of Piner and Range, the gigantic taxidermied grizzly bear (or is it a black bear) is the only thing that remains of Schmidt Firearms, Inc. That, and some of the big fat gun safes. The bear looms large and fierce, its fur singed. How it survived the fire is a mystery to me. Perhaps all the preservatives serve as flame retardant.
We drive down Piner and turn right onto Coffey Lane. Everything looks normal here, until we get to a roadblock, guarded by military personnel. Paul flashes his lime green residency permit pass and they let us through. Paul tells them “You guys are doing a great job, and you’re almost done.” He is so kind.
It starts very suddenly.
A block of unharmed homes. Then a burned one. Then we enter a wasteland of ash, rubble, and twisted metal. Block after block after block.
Surprisingly, I don’t cry.
We turn onto San Miguel Road and park in front of Paul and Sue’s home. Except there’s nothing left of it. Nothing but rubble and ash and twisted metal and melted aluminum and weird artefacts. A cactus that looks like something out of a Salvador Dali painting. Ash-grey ceramic pots. Black stick figure plants, the planter boxes have burned away but the soil is still intact in a square around them. The carcass of a refrigerator. The husks of two classic cars in the ashes of their garage. This, like most of the homes here, was a two story house. All that’s left is the foundation, cracked and withered.
You can see for miles. Open views. Sue says “I kind of like that the fences are gone. We have met some of our neighbors we’ve never seen before.” It doesn’t look like a neighborhood. It’s hard to believe that this was filled with homes just 3 weeks ago. Wasteland is the only word that comes to mind.
What strikes me most is how absurdly peaceful it is. Almost beautiful. Bright blue skies, not a cloud. Sunny and warm. No breeze disturbs the ashes. Birds singing cheerfully in the blackened limbs of dead trees. A bucolic wasteland.
Neighbors walk up wearing hazmat suits and ask to borrow a screwdriver. Hugs and stories. Their house burned to the ground, but the fire spared a pair of wooden adirondack chairs in what used to be their backyard. Wooden. Chairs. Completely unscathed. Their collection of semi-precious stones, including a gigantic geode, has melted away into nothing.
Paul and Sue pick up random artefacts and toss them back. “Oh look, this was part of our breaker box.” “I think Sue made this vase in a pottery class 20 years ago.” Sue points to what looks like tiny shriveled black footballs. “This was where our Guava Tree stood. It was loaded with fruit.”
I stand there, bearing witness.The devastation defies words. All I can say is “wow”. And ask, like a child, “what’s this?”. Exclaim, “look at that!”
I feel very young and very old at the same time.
After about twenty minutes, we all decide it’s time to move on. Paul takes us on a driving tour of the neighborhood.
A few impressions:
How come most of the street signs are perfectly intact? Not even the coating has been tarnished. They stand tall, bright beacons of color in an ashen moonscape.They bear the names of streets that are no more. Signify warnings no longer relevant. Children at play. No parking. Street cleaning.
Further down Hopper, we see a few signs where the lettering has started to bubble and look like a badly drawn cartoon.
The randomness of it all. Rows and rows of burned out lots. Then one house, totally fine. Structures obliterated, but a plastic lawn bambi still standing. A patch of bright green lawn surrounded by ash. A singed tree decorated for Halloween in front of nothing. EPA vans and people in white hazmat suits. Like some post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie.
The fact that there aren’t even ruins.
Everything is flat. Like Paul says, the world has gone from three dimensional to two dimensional in a matter of hours.
At the outer edges of the destruction, new construction and for sale signs.
We drive to Simply Vietnam Express for lunch. Past the remains of K-Mart. Past the Carl’s Junior that caught fire long after the fires died down, while broiling hundreds of burgers for firefighters. Past scorched patches of grass and trees and melted guardrails off 101. They are taking down severely injured redwood trees on Cleveland. Next to Simply Vietnam Express, the shell of Puerto Vallarta Mexican Restaurant.
We eat, we laugh, we talk about rebuilding and the joys and pains of home ownership, we talk about beautifully restored cars lost to flames, we talk about work and family, we talk about old age and sickness, we remember people and places, we shake our heads, we are dumbfounded, we are humans connected through shared history who have not seen each other in years, now reconnected through tragedy. We sheepishly remember how much we like each other.
Our friends take us home. They comment on how beautiful our house is and I feel guilty. We talk some more, standing in the street. It’s hard to pull away. As we finally hug goodbye on this sunny Saturday afternoon, Paul says to Steve and I “Now you’ve seen it. Now it’s your responsibility to tell the story.”
We’ll try. It is our duty and our honor.
Post Script:
Steve and I continue to wonder why we both have been feeling such a strong, almost physical need to visit the devastated neighborhoods of our hometown.
Perhaps it’s survivor’s guilt. In a strange way I have been feeling like an outsider, excluded from a club no one in their right mind actually wants to belong to. I needed to feel connected again. It’s a little bit like cutting your skin to make sure you can still feel something. I got a rose-ilience tattoo the week after we returned, and welcomed the faint burning sensation of the needle. It was grounding somehow. The tiny waves of pain that welled up every few seconds were nothing compared to the deep heartbreak I’ve been feeling for my community.
Perhaps it’s because everything has felt so surreal. We can drive around our immediate area and downtown for days and pretend that nothing happened. Perhaps we needed to see with our own eyes what happened right here in our city, just a few blocks away, so it can truly sink in that these were not just satellite images and photographs of some distant war zone. This happened to our town. Our friends. Our neighbors.
Standing there, amidst the ash and the rubble of Coffey Park, we became part of it. Our feet shuffled through the vaporized remains of our friends’ lives. Our lungs breathed the same air as our friends did, oddly fresh and clean now, compared to even a week ago, but as we inhaled more deeply, filled with invisible toxins, and permeated by grief and loss that will forever become part of the cellular structure of our fragile bodies.
Perhaps it’s also because our friends needed us to see this. They needed us to join them, not just with our hearts and minds, but physically. To literally stand with them. To say yes, I see this. It’s real. This happened to you. I know it now. I believe you. I cry with you. I laugh with you at the absurdity of it all. I hold your hand if you need me and I won’t let go. I’m with you. You are not alone.
In the words of Santa Rosa’s own Gabe Meline from Santiago’s Rosenbergs After Dark:
“We are everywhere.”
