Photo by Abe Nesbitt, Peter's nephew, as he walked his son to school in Chico, looking towards Paradise.
It's been a year since my 95-year-old mom drove through fire.
A year ago, on November 8, I was repeatedly calling the landline my mom had had since 1973, and found it strange that at 8 am no one was answering. Neither were my mom, or her husband of five years, Mark, picking up their cell phones.
I currently live and work on the other side of the world in Muscat, Oman, in the Middle East, but early last November I had come back to northern California for a short trip. After a long illness, my sister had died, and I was home to attend her memorial. My sister-in-law Ludmilla is a famously early riser, and I was dealing with 12-hour-time-difference jet-lag, watching the sun come up from our house at Lake Tahoe. In the early morning, Ludmilla and I had been chatting about the mid-term elections that had occurred the day before and my sister's upcoming memorial. After our chat ended, she wrote me again, alerting me to the fire in Paradise.
Initially, I wasn't super concerned about the fire, because Paradise, situated on a ridge in the foothills of the Sierra, although made of ponderosa pines, had been threatened by fire numerous times before. The previous summer, my mom and Mark had kept their vintage motorhome packed and ready to roll just in case they needed to evacuate. Overkill, I thought.
Before the fire, my mom and sister, in front of my mom's house in Paradise.
As the sun got higher in the sky, 9, 10, 11 am, not being able to reach my mom was strange. I started reading updates the Paradise evacuation. I was pretty sure Mom and Mark would drive out in the motor home. As the light in the house, where I was now glued to my phone and fire updates online, changed to the strong sunshine of early afternoon, I still hadn't heard from Mom and Mark. I started calling shelters. The Red Cross referred me to a church that was taking in evacuees. The church couldn't give out information regarding who they were sheltering. I called every friend and relative in the area who Mom might call.
Should I drive to shelters and start looking for them? As the random red-neck town where I grew up was being wiped off the map, while simultaneously being put on the map by the “most disastrous wildfire in California history," I called area hospitals and left my name and number in case anyone saw Joanne Bernardin, age 95, or Mark Forsythe, age 85. (My mom refers to herself as a cougar.) In the afternoon, a bit of good news came, sort of. My aunt in Grants Pass, Oregon, had gotten a call from Mark, but the connection was so bad, she couldn't understand what he was saying, except that they had to leave the motorhome behind.
That morning at 6:30 am, when a power line had sparked some dry grass on Camp Creek Road in rural Butte County, Mark had left the house to walk Fritz, the miniature schnauzer. By the time he got home at 7 am, the phone was ringing, with an alarming message to EVACUATE! EVACUATE! My mom can't hear without her hearing aids, she would not have heard the phone or gotten the evacuation message if Mark hadn't told her. Mark was incredulous, he'd just been walking the dog and there hadn't even been any smoke. The fire had progressed so much in half an hour, the now-famous burn rate of a football-field a second. By 7:45, "Oh honey," my mom said later, "the sky was red with smoke! I could smell it and see trees burning from my bedroom window!"
My mom grabbed the suitcase of clothes she had already packed for the trip to my sister's memorial. My mom drove the Honda Civic with Fritz in the front seat. Mark was behind the wheel of the motorhome, towing his van. They drove out their little road, saying good-bye to fleeing neighbors, onto one of the only three roads that led out of the town of thirty thousand people.
They turned on to Pentz Road where houses burned, cars exploded, and towering pines lit up like torches against a black sky. Burning embers swarmed in the air and rolled down the street pushed by the wind. My mom says God saved her because she prayed as she drove through the fire. Did the squirrel she see running frantically through a yard say the same prayer? To the same God who burned the all hummingbird feeders? People abandoned their vehicles, running down the street, stomping out embers stuck to their shoes. In my mom's car, Fritz panted from the heat. Mark rolled down the window of the motorhome to touch the side of his vehicle, and burned his hand.
Maybe God did save my mom. Or maybe a fire-fighter, the recipient of tax-dollar-funded training, knew what he was doing when, after my mom had sat on the road blocked with abandoned cars for an hour and had gone less than a mile, told her to turn around and drive to Feather River Hospital.
At Feather River Hospital, with doctors and nurses who’d called husbands, wives, and children to say final good-byes, my mom waited on the helipad for a transport vehicle to arrive. While she waited, a lady who lived across the street from the hospital said, "My house is next." The two of them watched the embers blow, the lady's house catch fire, and burn to a shell. Mom saw a truck stop, saw the driver jump out, and watched the truck burn to a twisted piece of metal. The hospital loaded up every vehicle they could find, and my mom, in her first ever ride in a sheriff’s paddy wagon, rode to safety. Mark, who had taken some time to turn motorhome and van around, and then to unhitch the van, followed the sheriff's caravan to a hospital in Oroville.
The old sign that welcomed drivers into town, heavy with Rotary, Elk Club and E Clampus Vitus badges, and read “Paradise, May You Find it to be All the Name Implies,” went up in a hellfire. The streets my aunts and uncles built houses on, played cards in, had heart attacks in, and called ambulances to, are gone. My high school was left untouched. The McDonalds burned, but the sign remains. The hospice where my dad died is, like him, ashes.
The places where I was fired for the first time, had my first unwanted sexual encounter, and failed the drivers test twice are no more. The ditch into which I drove my pee-poop-colored 1972 Chevelle, a car purchased for me when what I really wanted for the same price was a purple MG, is likely though, still there.
The purposely misspelled signs, the fence my boyfriend jumped over when my dad unexpectedly came home for lunch, and the long letter my sister wrote my mother berating her for remarrying after my dad died, are no more. The tree my cousin lit on fire, playing our "camping" game, burned once again. The three-story wooden covered bridge built in 1880 that spanned the clear, cold swimming spot on Butte Creek where my teenage friends and I laid on the smooth rocks and complained about our hair, our boyfriends, our perfect bodies, is gone.
If it had been only my mother’s garage that had burned down, with its boxes of photos my great-grandfather took, and Mark's tools, and Mom's three-wheeled bikes–just the garage burning down would have been a tragedy we’d talk about for years. For years my husband’s telling of his parents’ house burning down when he was 19 has been a steady source of stories and entertainment. But not only did my mother’s house go up in flames, but her street, her grocery store, her church that held "dinner dances" on Fridays where Mark played harmonica in the band, the mom and pop grocery store my mom and pop had owned, the office where they went on to operate an accounting business for 40 years, the entire town are gone. Forty-five years of memories are only memories; no war, and yet a war zone.
And it's not the loss of the house that upset my mom the most, it’s the ceramic angel on the dining room table, and her mother's driving-competition awards and the newspaper articles documenting them. Not the total loss of property, but the meat in the freezer, the bag of walnuts by the back door, the cook book my sister had written. “I lost my trailer and my weed-wacker!” my mom’s husband wailed, a man who after the fire owned one pair of pants.
As the day wore on and I didn't hear from them, I packed my car with water, a blanket, and change of clothes, knowing looking though shelters would be a long waste of time, but lacked other options. Finally, around the time of the early November sunset,I got a phone call from an unknown number. A social worker in a hospital in Oroville was taking care of my mom and Mark and had seen my message. I looked at google maps, "I'll be there in two and half hours," I said. I drove through the forest of Tahoe to Butte county, where from you could see the fires from the dark hospital parking lot. My mom and Mark were sitting in the waiting room of the Oroville hospital. They had the dog on a string–they'd run out of the house without a leash.
Rune Lazuli says,"Inside the chaos, build a temple of love." We spent the first week after the fire building the temple with the most basic tools: eating, sleeping, short walks with the dog. Everyone, including Fritz, needed a bath to get rid of the smoke smell. We started dealing with insurance. We took trips to the pharmacy. Bought them some new clothes. My mom started wearing a familiar down vest of my husband's she found in the closet. A year later, the van still smells like smoke.
We swore off quick decisions, but once we knew insurance would pay out for the house, spent hours looking at houses on Zillow. An 85-year-old and 95-year-old have no interest in waiting to rebuild. Because of high California housing prices, we sadly crossed dream places off the list: Huntington Beach, Monterey. Since I am now my mom's only child, and I live overseas most of the time, I encouraged them to look in towns where we have family. They decided to relocate to Grants Pass, Oregon where my aunt and cousins live, and prices were affordable. After my sister's memorial, where my mom had everyone write down their contact information in a new address book, we drove up to Grants Pass and started house shopping, furniture shopping, salt-and-pepper shaker shopping. "This is the easiest move I've ever made!" my mom quipped as she rolled her one suitcase into their temporary-housing hotel.
I kept wanting to call my sister and get her take on this whole thing. This is the house, after. (Newer stucco houses, in the background.)
Mom and Mark stayed in the hotel for a month, waiting for the new house to close and were moved in by Christmas. They were a couple of the lucky ones. Well, was it luck, or Mark making sure the Paradise house was sufficiently insured? For me, it wasn’t so much luck or God as it was well-funded public services that saved my mom's life. In the last 13 years, I've lived in five different countries, and I know one of the good things about the U.S. –our well-developed disaster plans. In another country, she could have been running down the street, looking for a place to hide, like the squirrel she saw.
A childhood friend's mom, a devout Catholic who I'm sure was praying, was one of the 89 who died that day.
Somewhere in the smoke and ashes are my mom's diamond earrings, the picture of my dad in military uniform in front of the Taj Mahal, and the sign I painted for my mom that read, "Another Day in Paradise." The rocks that tumble against each other in Butte Creek, in the shadow of the covered bridge for 150 years, now are suddenly in full bright sun.
They survived Paradise. Mom, Mark and Fritz in front of their new place.
twenty-something years of "what have you been up to?" 