An Impossible Reality
By M.C. Dwyer
On August 16th, we woke up at 3:00 am and went outside to watch a bizarre dry summer lightning storm. As lightning zig zagged across the skies overhead, booming thunder quickly followed. We went back to sleep.
By Tuesday afternoon, Boulder Creek was shrouded in smoke and stifling hot. The evacuation warning for our home came at 8:00 pm. We packed our suitcases and threw the dog crate and sentimentals into our vehicles. Later that night, a helicopter flew over my husband’s property up Big Basin Way; his tenants were told to get out.
At the Cheseborough lookout point at 10:00 pm, we parked beside dozens of evacuees. We were riveted by about 20 fires on Ben Lomond Mountain lighting up the night sky. It was eerily beautiful and terribly frightening all at once. Cats were crying inside their carriers. People were milling around, talking in hushed tones, taking pictures and videos. One woman was sobbing because she couldn’t convince her father to leave.
Earlier this summer, all the grass surrounding my husband’s home was mowed. So Thursday, when I spotted fires on the maps near his place, I took comfort knowing his property was defendable. What we didn’t know was that our local firefighters were overwhelmed and that calls to other districts hadn’t been answered yet. Local firefighters were practicing triage–salvaging what they could.
By early morning on the 21st, my husband got the call from his neighbor that everything on his property was destroyed. Still, we went back to help save the rest of the neighborhood. Because there were no firefighters.
At the end of the road, power lines were strewn all over the driveway. The air was scorching and thickly smokey–like doomsday. There were hotspots smoldering everywhere. I was observing an impossible reality. The school bus my husband had converted into a custom tiny home, where we fell in love, was just an empty, broken, twisted shell. The RV in which we took four epic trips was destroyed. His tenants lost everything including gardens, project cars, and an Airstream. One of the tenant’s trucks was parked in the field. The short mowed grass was burned under it, but the truck itself was untouched. The tires were still inflated, and a sweatshirt hung, intact, on the side mirror.
The remains of the home my husband designed and built himself were still smoldering. Metal gas lines in the home had melted and the leaking propane coming was on fire. All that survived were bits of pottery, a cast iron tub, a metal chaise lounge. Everything was reduced to skeletons or ash. Over a hundred redwood trees were scorched all the way to their tops. Massive old oaks and madrones were reduced to gaping smoldering holes in the ground.
We joined forces with eight men clearing firebreaks with hand tools and a lone backhoe. I was the only woman there. The men loaded water tanks into two trucks and filled them from a holding tank. They trained me to be the water tender, turning the generator on when they needed water to douse flames, and turning it off when not needed. While I was safe on the driveway, the men were working right up along the fire. Occasionally you could hear the sickening sound of a tree cracking, shattering, then crashing to the ground.
A deer was grazing by a burned down home, and birds were visiting the feeders and birdbaths. We were lucky–the winds were mild and blew most of the flames back onto already burned areas. The few times the winds picked up, the music from all the windchimes changed from gentle melody to loud cacophony.
We’ve heard stories of firefighters getting surrounded by fire and perishing. These men–husbands, fathers, sons, and brothers–had no protective gear except the masks they wore against COVID-19.
Later that night we left, exhausted, but several neighbors stayed and held the fires at bay. No more homes in that neighborhood were lost. We never saw a firefighter that day. As we drove toward town, we passed entire neighborhoods already leveled, and I cried.
Over the following days, stories began circulating about Boulder Creek locals who’d stayed to fight fires and save homes. They cut fire breaks and felled trees even though evacuation orders were mandatory.
Within a few days, firefighters from cooperating agencies outside of the area began arriving. Cal Fire finally showed up. These reinforcements turned the fight around, saving our downtown.
The resilience of this community is amazing. Most people are determined to stay. Now it’s time for us to support each other as much as we can.
“M.C.” Dwyer is an MBA, REALTOR® who resides in Boulder Creek, California.
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