When a cluster of snowflakes lands gently on your forehead and you wipe it away, it melts quickly, dissipating or disappearing almost instantaneously, as if it was never there. Even the memory of the cold from that intricate cluster of ice crystals is hard to hold onto.
When ash lands gently on your forehead and you wipe it away, it leaves a streak of gray. Stains the skin dark. Memories connected to that flake of dusty residue are difficult to forget.
It seemed like something out of a disaster movie, minus the screaming. That was what felt the most surreal, I think—a dirty orange sky, ash drifting in clumps like snowflakes, neighbors congregated on the sidewalks with their chins pointed skyward, and no running or shouting. Not even raised voices or doors slammed in panic. Just quick and quiet shuffling in and out of townhomes as residents loaded their Subarus with family heirlooms and important documents and pillows. Those of us standing on the concrete glanced at each other every few minutes or so, waiting for someone to suggest what to do.
An audience unsure of what they were watching, or if we would become a part of it.
I lived on Martina Avenue in the southwestern corner of Santa Rosa in October of 2017. The mandatory evacuation zone ended just 1.5 miles northeast of my apartment, though many of my neighbors chose to vacate preemptively, just in case. Unknown to me yet, tens of thousands of cars choked the roads heading south towards San Francisco while mine remained parked on Martina Ave as my roommates and I waited to hear . . . anything. Any word from city officials that our residence was at risk, any instruction as to whether we were to stay put or join the throngs of evacuees. We stayed, at limbo on the sidewalk. Orange and gray sky, nervous energy, little sound. Ash kissing my forehead.
My friend Kyler had called me that morning at about 2 am. His response to my groggy “hello?” was a militant “are you awake?”
I said “no.”
He said “get awake.”
I said “what happened?”
By now one of my roommates had woken up and flipped on the bedroom light with her eyes still closed, body still mostly asleep. I heard, “Santa Rosa is on fire.”
Click.
Confused, I checked the phone screen to confirm that Kyler had, indeed, hung up on me. Thinking back to that call and knowing his flair for the dramatics, I’m sure some part of him got a rush at the opportunity to bear shocking news. Concerned about the implications of shocking news, certainly, but the man loved a mic drop.
I looked at my roommates who were standing by my bed waiting for me to relay the 2 am wake-up call—“Something about a fire?” I said.
Tubbs Road connects California State Routes 128 and 29, right above the small town of Calistoga. Only 1.3 miles long, it divides the land on either side into residential properties worth bajillions on the north, and vineyard fields and undeveloped lots covered in tall, yellowing grasses on the south.
At 9:43 on Sunday, October 8, 2017, somewhere along that brief 1.3 mile stretch, a “private electrical system adjacent to a residential structure” malfunctioned. It overheated, tripped, sputtered, coughed, crashed—whatever happened to that electrical system that night when no one was around to see, newscasts and articles would simply summarize as “failure.”
The electrical circuitry and wiring sparked, and the surrounding miles of autumn-dried vineyard became perfect kindling. Infamous and aptly named “diablo winds” swept flames across fields with abandon, some gusts reaching 70 mph. By midnight the fire had crawled almost 14 miles southwest towards Santa Rosa.
Another couple of hours later it had consumed entire neighborhoods. By 2 am Monday morning: 500 homes and buildings in Larkfield Wikiup. 3 am: 1,400 homes and buildings in Fountaingrove. By 4 am: 1,300 homes and buildings in Coffey Park, where the fire had launched over Highway 101.
The “Tubbs Fire” incinerated 36,800 acres of wine country, and leveled 5,600 structures (including 5,300 homes). To that date it was the largest wildfire in California history.
It also took 22 lives. Donna Halbur died in her garage; her husband Leroy died on the driveway. Both were 80 years old. 75-year-old Valerie Evans died trying to save her dogs. In fact, most of those who were taken by the Tubbs fire were elderly individuals living at home, mostly alone, who could not move quickly enough to escape the smoke and then flames. All but Christina Hanson, who used a wheelchair. She was 27.
I think of the fear that would go through your mind, watching flames boldly spill towards you. Willing your body to move faster than it’s able. Praying it’s only a nightmare, and the heat that you feel is all in your mind, and that the home that you have built that contains so much of your memory and legacy and represents everything that you care about and have dedicated your life to is not about to be disintegrated into chemical dust. I think of what might go through your head, the images of your plans for next week and the last conversation you had with your child. I think of whether you would beg God or curse Him; if you’d reconsider your beliefs of His existence or lack thereof. How many thoughts might go through your mind about how long death might take, or how painful it might be, while you’re watching a blinding orange and yellow mass of carbon atoms swallow your neighbor’s house.
When heat produces light, it’s called “incandescence.”
Incandescent is also the word for “passion” or “strong emotion.” The word that describes what fire does also describes what it is: it is riled, raging, wroth. Furious, fuming, foaming at the mouth. Unforgiving anger.
I think of the fear that would enter me, facing that behemoth. I don’t know if it would numb me or make me acutely aware of every singed hair. That’s visceral fear, the kind of terror that would make you shiver uncontrollably in front of 2000°F.
By sunrise the fire was still burning but had halted its spread. Coffey Park, where the fire was finally controlled by first responders, was five miles from my home on Martina Ave. I didn’t know the fire was under control until late in the day—the only information we could find on its status was through Facebook, and our internet connection was so bad that the updates came slowly. Kyler called again at around 8 am and said our local church had been turned into a refuge for hundreds. We met him there.
Some people stayed huddled in the pews, bundled in their blankets, not speaking a word, staring at points on the wall for hours on end. Trying to recover from that terror of fleeing flames, or imagining their loved ones doing so. Some were working through the fact that they had no home to return to. Others fidgeted and scuttled around the basketball court to the hallways to the chapel and back to the basketball court, speaking anxiously to anyone who would hear them, asking the same questions knowing no one had the answers. And still others, like me, sat in the pews hoping to stay out of the way of administrators, until the stress of doing nothing to help pulled us to our feet and we begged anyone for some task to make us feel useful. The answer was always no, or not yet. “We’ll let you know when the trucks come in with more food to divvy up. Just help keep the peace here, that’s a huge help.” And we’d again sit nervously in the pews.
My apartment was still in a “safe” zone, so my roommates and I stayed there that evening, though we didn’t feel quite safe enough for sleep. October 9th bled into October 10th, and we went back to the church where they finally put us to work picking up deliveries, sorting relief supplies out for the evacuees, helping the older individuals call their children and finding ways to entertain young kids in the antiquated, bare halls of the church building.
The week that followed is hazy in my memory. I remember those first two days so vividly, but after that I mostly get just flashes of gray—gray clouds melting into gray earth on either side of the gray Highway 101. Bare, gray shelves lining the aisles at FoodMaxx. Gray news speaking bleakly of families whose lives were now gray too, having lost family members and homes and other things precious to them. The landscape was gray, the air gray, and a lot of Sonoma County’s people looked a little gray, too. No one could really do anything but wait inside friends’ homes or churches like ours until their streets were opened again, and so monotony and lack of stimulation turned resting expressions gray.
I think if I were to associate a color with the word “tired,” it would be gray.
I think “silence” might be gray too. Silence is the sound “empty” makes. Silence reminds you of what you’re missing. The hum of your air conditioner, the drone of your TV, the clanking of your dishes in your sink in your kitchen. Silence can drive a person crazy.
Or, at least, provide the ideal environment for anxious thoughts to materialize. When “what if”s echo in silence they expand, bloom. They multiply like weeds until you have a toxic terrarium of dandelions and crabgrass and morning glory, which all seem harmless until they debilitate any healthy growth. (Ironically, my mom says she often looks at the morning glory that has engulfed the side of our house and thinks “I wish I could just set it on fire.”)
Anxious thoughts engulf the brain.
Where do I live now? Is there anything left of my home? How long until I can see it? Did I save the family videos to the Cloud? What had I moved to the storage unit? How can I afford to start over? What next what next what next?
Adrenaline rises and so, consequentially, does your heart rate. There’s an uptick of energy and nowhere to put it; sometimes even the brain that is secreting the adrenaline is also saying “don’t. move.” And you become paralytic. And then that overabundance of adrenaline is also raising your blood pressure, and your body desperately tries to pump thick blood through buzzing veins while your body is struck still. And you’re frozen in a church pew, bundled in blankets, staring at a spot on the wall where the paint is chipped in the shape of the lamp that you can’t remember if you turned off before you fled your home that no longer stands.
Anxious thoughts take up so much room—draining nutrients like dandelions and crabgrass and morning glory do—that you forget to do things that normally are subconscious, like breathing. When you have so many things to worry about as your brain fills empty silence, sucking air in and expelling air out can feel like a chore. When you are trying to recover from trauma, the fear that you are trying to forget sneaks off to the side, changes costumes to something mottled and gray and blurred, and appears suddenly in front of you. Subconscious inhales and exhales are replaced with fearful, bated breaths. Lungs constrict, refusing to stretch like they did before because before you had space, your own space, and you were free to go wherever you wanted and feel safe, and return when you needed familiarity again, but now you have only the unfamiliar walls of a church or a community center or a local yoga studio that has converted into a camp. Every sip of oxygen in is restrained, because oxygen feels heavy now. Fear knocks the wind out of you and keeps it out.
Silence, anxious thoughts, and fear, turn the world gray.
The first colorful moment I remember in the middle of the monochrome was brown cardboard boxes with bold, black sharpie lettering, overflowing with red and blue and neon pink and yellow and green shirts, dresses, pants, socks, jackets, sweaters, skirts. Dozens of these boxes. And at least three dozen people lined up, each with a mountain of colorful clothing in front of them to sort by size.
We sorted an 18-wheeler’s worth of donated clothing that day. I wrote in my journal, “cars waited in line for an hour to add donations to the mountain of clothes.” At one point, one of the volunteer coordinators used a megaphone to announce that we had more donations coming in than we had room or use for and encouraged donors to consider holding onto their donations until more were ready to be processed in coming weeks.
More colors: yellow pineapples on the counters of the church’s kitchen and the red Campbell’s labels on pallets of canned soup, stacked on the kitchen floor, all brought by the foodbank volunteers. White knuckles on hands gripping hands in comfort. Green foam pads rolled out from blue Walmart trucks, unloaded by workers in neon orange vests. And people in every color embracing friends and family and even complete strangers, refusing to let go for minutes on end.
I don’t remember where I first saw the signs pop up but it seemed like suddenly they were everywhere: on street lamps and bulletin boards and bus shelters and community hubs and stop light poles, 8.5x11 inch sheets of paper, crudely taped for drivers and passersby: “THE LOVE IN THE AIR IS THICKER THAN THE SMOKE” they read. “#SONOMASTRONG.”
And the smoke was thick—plumes of it still saturating the air even days after the flames were tamed. Its acrid taste stung your nose and irritated the back of your throat so you felt like you were choking. Suffocating and heavy and unavoidable. Impossible to ignore.
But then there was “the love,” and it felt thick too. It choked people with tears of relief and gratitude. It hung ever-present, substantial, determined. Easy to see in every cardboard box of donations and extra car parked in driveways, every long embrace and hand squeezing hand.
Fire can be good for the earth. It removes damaging underbrush and gets rid of clutter, allowing more sunlight to pass through. It also nourishes the soil with the base elements left behind when fire breaks things down to their atoms. Controlled fires are used all the time by farmers and foresters, to rejuvenate areas for greater growth.
I don’t believe the Tubbs Fire was good to the people in Santa Rosa. The damage—physical and mental—is lasting. It’s been six years and construction is still going on to replace what was lost. But I watched that community nourish each other. Neighbors that had kept largely to themselves were standing shoulder to shoulder with people they’d only ever waved at over the roar of a lawnmower. There’s a strength to the community that wasn’t visible before this crucible made it evident.
Since then, there have been more fires in Northern California. Bigger ones, even, that have likewise shocked hundreds of thousands of people into a state of quiet processing.
And they too find that anxious thoughts are thicker than silence. And that fearfully restricted breaths are thicker than anxious thoughts. And that smoke is thicker than fearful, bated breaths. And that the love in the air is thicker than the smoke.
