The first painting in The Dark Side direction of my recently released poetry book “Diary” is called “Resilience in the Redwoods.” I’m particularly keen to share it here in my blog because the dimensions prevented me from showing all of it in the print book. I had to chose the section that looked best in that context but it meant cutting off the bottom, which shows new life emerging from the flames. This picture was painted not long after the fires that ravaged Sonoma County last October. In fact, some of them were still burning.
The night the fires began the smell of smoke was everywhere. When I first smelled it I wondered what idiot had started their fire pit in this wind. At midnight I was out checking the tarp I’d used to cover the garage sale fodder in my driveway. I had planed to haul the leftovers off on Monday but the wind was whipping the tarp everywhere and the air was hot and eerie. I noticed it came from the east and fragments of Mary Poppins came to mind...”like somethin’ is brewin’ about to begin.”
I tried to sleep but it was impossible. I was checking the tarp again a little later when I saw a flash like lightning. It was probably a transformer blowing but I watched in that direction for a while to be sure there was no fire. There had been Nixle alerts telling people about a fire in Napa and saying not to call 911 just because of a smoke smell. Only call if you see fire. I didn’t see fire so I went inside, but as I turned back and looked through my front window flames were leaping up behind the houses across the street.
I ran back out and started pounding on doors. After the third house I ran into another neighbor coming the other way pounding on doors. He said nobody could get through to 911. I keep nonemergency police numbers on my cell phone so I started calling. The city police line was busy too but I finally got through to the sheriffs. It took ten minutes for firemen to arrive even though the fire house in only two blocks away so I guessed they had to come from elsewhere and they didn’t come to the neighborhood side of the fire. The field that was burning behind those houses had an auto parts store and a gas station on the other side. They came at it from that direction to prevent a possible explosion.
I ran in to wake my husband and he joined the fight with hoses along fence lines. I had two 50’ hoses in my yard that got detached and sent across to the neighbors. Ash and embers were falling all over the neighborhood. I still had my phone in hand and when the Nixle alert came that the fire had jumped the freeway I started texting a friend in Coffee Park. A fire that could cross a six lane freeway would not be easily stopped. When Coffee Park officially evacuated I called my mother in law in an adjacent neighborhood and told her to prepare to evacuate. She lives with an older woman who has limited mobility. They were ready when they got the evacuation call.
The fire we’d been fighting was not directly connected to the main Tubbs fire. It was one of over sixty spot fires that caught in Sonoma County that night as embers blew miles overhead and landed in dry grassy areas. It was fire weather if ever anything could be called that. It was like nothing else I’ve ever felt. When the evacuation alerts stopped coming our house ended up across the street just outside the evacuation zone and only a few blocks from the Finley Center, the first shelter to open and last to close. We sheltered in place without gas or electricity for a week. We discovered that a new icon appears up on the signal bar part of our cell phones when they’re connecting to mobile cell towers. Over 70 cell towers burned so we walked down to the Finley Center to use their WiFi to communicate with family until those mobile towers went up. We took in my mother in law and another friend when evacuations were advised in their area.
No one went to work or to school. We knocked on over 100 doors in our neighborhood checking on everyone who had stayed. We donated everything in our fridge to the shelter as soon is the electricity went out. I knew it wasn’t coming back soon and I’d just stocked my freezer at Costco. Because we were close and it was the first day they welcomed the food. It wasn’t long after that they were so overwhelmed with donations they had to turn them away.
I’ve never been prouder to be part of this community. The way everyone came together to get people out of shelters and into better situations was astounding. The donations poured in and then warehouse space was also donated to contain the donations until they would be needed. Bosses told their people not to worry about coming in to work for a week, they’d still get paid. Wherever possible businesses helped their employees. And those that were off work got out and volunteered. Trials reveal our character and the character of our community is amazingly generous and strong.
A few weeks later, the kids weren’t back in school yet but I had power and gas so I could do laundry. I was putting clothes away in my room and at the bottom of the pile was my bathrobe. The one I’d been wearing as I flew across the street to pound on my neighbors doors that night. The night we’ll all mark time from for the rest of our lives. The smell of smoke on it brought everything rushing back to me. It wasn’t a normal smoke smell. The clean burn of wood smoke doesn’t bother me. This was the smell of the whole world burning.
It brought me back vividly to that night. By 4 am the fire department had rushed off to fight another fire, thinking ours extinguished, but my husband was keeping an eye on the field because he remembered a mobile home fire that happened when he was a child where everyone had believed the fire extinguished and gone back to sleep only to have it flare up worse than before. Sure enough, around 4:30 in the morning the fire flared up again.
When it caught a Redwood tree it would blaze up the center all in an instant, burning the dry surface material, but the fresh green out at the ends of the branches never caught. Within moments most of its fuel would be gone and it would drop again to the grass. But in that furious blaze...it was...there are no words. There is only this painting to express what I saw that night, and the life on the fringes that survived, and the new growth that is coming because Redwood trees only sprout from the cones they drop after they’ve been through fire. That’s what this painting is about. The fury and the awe and the endurance. I don’t think it’s coincidental that yellow, the color that flared up the center of those trees and lit the sky, is also the color of healing in prophetic art. So, in this depiction that represents our world burning, are also the elements of healing and new life.
As word slowly got around of who had lost everything, we found ourselves in the awkward position of carrying trauma that is not...as bad. I wouldn’t call it survivors guilt though that tried to have its way for a moment. But we carry on because we must until everyone who has it worse is taken care of. Four months later my friends who lost it all are semi settled and moving forward, but I’m fighting stress hives. My body is reminding me of what I’ve been carrying and insisting I take better care of myself and my family now. What we went through was traumatic too and must be dealt with no matter how much worse it was for others. It’s not a competition. It’s just biology.
But humans are like those redwoods, built for resilience. The layer of char won’t disappear, but we will slowly rebuild the veins that nurture us, we will throw up new branches in new directions because this brush with disaster has changed how we see our lives, and new growth will emerge all around us. When I was a child I stood in the burned out hollow of a Redwood tree’s base big enough to set up housekeeping. The tree went on growing for a few hundred more years and is still growing after that much destruction! It’s a picture of hope for me.
