The Fire That Revived Life and Rekindled Our Trust in Nature

A conflagration that nearly consumed our backcountry homestead instead deepened our trust in the regenerative cycles of nature

Two decades ago, a catastrophic fire incinerated 11,000 acres of old-growth and second-growth redwoods in the 53,000-acre Humboldt Redwoods State Park. It was the largest conflagration in the park’s recorded history. With 57,000 acres of old-growth redwoods hundreds and often thousands of years old, Humboldt Redwoods is the largest contiguous expanse of sequoia sempervirens left on the planet. The park lay just over the hill from our remote wilderness homestead in the coastal mountains of Northern California. My wife Sandi and I had built our home there in 1979 and for a quarter century had maintained an eighty-acre, self-reliant spread in a natural meadow surrounded by 150-foot Douglas fir trees, tanoaks and madrones.

Growing most of our own fruits, vegetables, and nuts, we raised dairy goats for milk and cheese, bees for honey, and ducks for eggs. We were tucked into a meadow backed up to thousands of acres of federal wilderness. Once a month, we would drive an hour down potholed dirt roads to pick up our mail and another hour to our primary source of supplies we couldn’t provide for ourselves.

By the time the Canoe Fire broke out in late summer 2003, we had already moved two hours north and built a new home by the open Pacific. But we continued to spend long weekends at our beloved backcountry homestead. So when our neighbor Del called one evening in early September to tell us that the then-month-long conflagration had suddenly shifted in the direction of our home and was just a quarter-mile away, I was stricken with alarm. “I showed them your place and they say it’s indefensible,” he told me. “It’s made entirely of wood with redwood shakes on the roof. They say it would go in two minutes.”

Though we had moved north eight years before, we still spent long summer weekends on the homestead and had left many of our most precious possessions there. The thought of leaving all those treasures and memories to be incinerated without attempting to save what could still be plucked from the flames felt to me like an abandonment of all we had done there building a unique way of life.

Before dawn the next morning , my brother-in-law Wayne and I drove two hours south and west into the coastal hills. As we climbed towards Elk Ridge, dawn’s early light turned the smoke an unearthly pink. It was so dense that it smited my eyes and choked my throat. Numerous neighbors had already evacuated but some were determined to stay and, if need be, fight the flames on their own. As the winds shifted in our direction, the odds were nil that we would escape the holocaust.

When we pulled up to our house, we found it both altogether familiar and suddenly strange. I had known it as a crystalline clear mountain retreat with meadows surrounded by conifer forests cascading into the distance. But now it was smothered in smoke. The hills in the direction of the conflagration were scarcely discernible through the haze. While we couldn’t see flames, we knew they were raging just over the ridge. Facing the immolation of twenty-five years of labor and love, I found myself refusing to accept that fate. Not in anger but with tender affection for all that we’d done and experienced in this, our first true home.

We set about ferrying everything we could carry from the house to Wayne’s pickup — furniture, clothes, tools and utensils, anything we could lift. Once it had all been transferred to safety, we stood before our beloved Findlay Oval wood cookstove, a classic model that had been the heart of our home for decades. It had warmed us in three ways — by cooking our food, heating the house, and warming our water. It would have taken four or more men to lift the stove, and no telling if they could have carried it up the steep hill to the pickup. With an inferno approaching and some neighbors having already evacuated, there were not four strong men available to lift it. Regretfully, we turned away, leaving it to melt into the earth like a molten anchor mooring our memories in place.

Just as Wayne started the engine and we prepared to pull out, a pickup roared up the driveway from the opposite direction and our neighbor Jack jumped out with a fire marshal from the California Division of Forestry (CDF).

“He wants to know if there’s another way out of here besides the one-lane road back down to town,” Jack asked breathlessly.

“No, there isn’t,” I told him. “We’re the last homestead on the road. From here on, it’s BLM land for thousands of acres, all roadless.”

But as they turned to head back, I called after them and asked if the fire marshal could take a look at our homestead. Might they reconsider CDF’s judgment that our place was indefensible? The marshal surveyed our house while I described the measures I’d taken while building it to fight a forest fire should it someday threaten our homestead.

“I put sprinklers on the roof,” I offered.

“Yes, but where would you get the water to run through them?” he asked.

I pointed to the large swimming pond less than a hundred feet away. We’d built it ten years earlier. “You could throw a pump in the pond and have access to a hundred thousand gallons or more,” I told him.

The fire marshal nodded. “Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll see if I can get my supervisor to come and take another look. No promises.”

As Jack turned around and pulled away, I looked at the landscaping surrounding the house and glanced at the back of the pickup. Wayne grabbed the chainsaw while I fetched wire cutters from a nearby toolshed. While he limbed up the low-hanging branches of the grand old Douglas fir we called Gramps, I cut away lengths of fencing between redwood posts to make it easier for vehicles and heavy equipment to gain access to the house and pond.

Half an hour later, a red CDF fire truck pulled up and two fire marshals jumped out. I relayed to them what I had told the first inspector. They nodded and surveyed the house and pond. Then they stepped away to speak privately. On their return, the lead marshal laid out their verdict.

“This is a pretty indefensible place,” he told us. “You’re surrounded by giant firs that would torch the whole meadow in a hot flash. You’ve got landscaping around the whole house, including that wisteria. It’s literally climbing all over the deck. I’m not going to endanger my men by putting them in a situation where they have no ready access to exit if or when the fire consumes your place. That’s a one-lane, two-mile dirt road with overhanging brush and trees. We’d have to ford a creek just to get back out.”

I nodded, fully familiar with our homestead’s difficulty of access. It was an hour-long, seventeen-mile winding dirt road back to the main highway, the last seven of which were riddled with potholes deep enough to swallow a tire. Twice in the early eighties, the final two miles had washed out half a mile from our homestead, requiring us to hoof all our supplies on our backs from late fall through late spring. Nonetheless, I persisted, hoping to persuade the marshals to change their minds.

“What do I need to do to raise the odds that my home could be saved?” I asked.

“Well, for starters, you’d need to cut down all the landscaping — the wisteria vines, the grapevines, all of it.” I gazed at twenty-five years of planting and cultivation and sighed, then nodded.

“Okay,” I said. “Done. What else?”

“You’d have to mow all this tall grass in the meadow back two hundred feet in all directions.”

“Fine,” I said, wondering where I’d find a weed whacker to do the job.

“And you’d have to limb up all the low-hanging tree limbs on the edges of the meadow.” He gestured towards Gramps. Since Wayne had already begun limbing it, he’d already accomplished some of the heavy lifting.

“And you’d have to drag the limbs to a place far from the house and any outbuildings,” he added.

I nodded.

“So you’re willing to do all that?” asked the fire marshal, his face and voice betraying his skepticism.

“Yes.”

He paused, then shook his head in wonder. “Well then, I’ll send in a crew. Mind you, they won’t stay around if the fire gets too close for safety. And I’d advise you to leave then as well.”

As the fire marshals pulled out, I headed over to my nearest neighbor’s homestead. He had grown up in those parts and was far more experienced than I in the ways of the woods. His father and uncle had been gyppo loggers back in the day and he had made it his life mission to repair the damage done by timber companies when they swept through these woods in the forties and fifties. He and his family had decided to remain at home for the duration, regardless of how close the fire came. He lent me his weedwhacker for the day.

Over the next six hours, Wayne and I plunged into the work. A crew of hardy eighteen-year-olds from the Central Valley supplied me with bottled water while I hoed, mowed and scraped the grasses clear to bare soil and cut the wisteria draping the house down to its bare base. The crew stood by with a mix of perplexity and awe. At three times their age, I threw myself into nonstop motion with suddenly boundless energy.

With my head down and sweat dripping from my brow, I gagged for oxygen amid the smoke. Yet I felt strangely exhilarated. At age fifty-eight, I was tapping into an earlier phase of life, with the added impetus of a lifetime’s commitment to this place. For once, my mind wasn’t on the hopelessness of it all but on the singular task at hand. I felt a curious relief to be able for once to pour my heart, hands, back and soul into the protection of all I had come to cherish — a home I had spent decades establishing on the land and in my soul.

In late afternoon, eyes still focused on the patch of earth directly in front of me, I sensed a different quality of light, a burnished gold in place of the steel gray haze of burning smoke. I glanced up at the sky to find a narrow patch of blue above my head. Over the next hour, it slowly broadened into clear skies. Entirely on its own, the fire had begun to shift and retreat.

I laughed and shook my head, knowing full well that I hadn’t had any part in this miraculous turn of events. Chance had sent the wind and fire in our direction, and chance had shifted them away again. My only contribution had been to throw myself wholeheartedly into the impossible task of defying the odds and asserting life in the face of seemingly certain immolation. I’d never felt better in my life.

Facing what today looks like a terminal incineration of freedom, democracy and decency in this country and much of the world, we often succumb to premature surrender. “Well, we’ve had a good run,” some say. “Maybe it’s for the best that we humans extinguish ourselves and let the rest of nature reclaim the earth.” I can understand our disgust at what a mess some few of us have made of things, but this attitude strikes me as both delusional and self-defeating. The extinction of humanity, or even the “mere” loss of millions or billions of individuals, would not be like turning out a light or surgically removing a cancerous tumor. It would inflict excruciating pain on every affected individual and the entire living world, whether directly in the slow deaths of all we hold dear or indirectly in witnessing the destruction of so many beings besides ourselves, so many creatures that don’t deserve to suffer or die.

What I discovered in the course of throwing myself into a seemingly lost cause was how wondrous it feels to discover what’s worth fighting for. We simply never know how much our efforts matter. I surely didn’t steer the wind and fire away from our homestead, but nonetheless they turned. Call it nature’s mercy. The following spring produced an incandescent bloom of wildflowers, the natural regeneration of life from fire to light and death back into life. And our role in this perpetual cycle of ruin and renewal is to cherish and protect with a fierce, tender love all that is still worth preserving and celebrating in this rare, improbable miracle of being.