‘We just had to get home’: the Californians who rebuild despite the danger of wildfires
Legend has it that enough wildfires have blown through the foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada mountains over the centuries, that patrons of the Iron Door Saloon in Groveland would just shut the bar’s giant namesake whenever the flames came close, and continue drinking.
In a state shaped by catastrophe, devastation is as much a part of its folklore as its natural beauty. Resilience is a character in these stories, not just a trait. Every year as the hillsides burn, locals recall how California’s native people once painted with flames and used smoke to cool the heat.
But as the climate crisis and decades of bad environmental policies give way to more massive and destructive fires than ever before, the tales of grit at times feel more grim than endearing.
Californians who lost properties in past fires spoke to the Guardian about their decision to stay and rebuild. They talked about the meaning of home and community, of trauma and the challenges of having to start over. “There was never any doubt in our mind,” said Jill Richardson, 65, who lost her family’s Santa Rosa home in the 2017 Tubbs fire. “We just knew we had to get home.”
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Many acknowledged the circumstances that allowed them to rebuild: the insurance companies willing to work with them, the accumulated savings, the societal safeguards in place for them where they may not be for others.
As Californians up and down a state ravaged by wildfires these past weeks contemplate their next steps, here are three of those stories.
‘It was our little slice of heaven’
When Richardson and her family were allowed back into their Santa Rosa neighborhood two weeks after the Tubbs fire ripped through, she found her cement bird bath still standing, and not much else.
With the world around her in ashes, Richardson would fill up water bottles wherever her family was sheltering that night and lug them back to the bird bath the next day. “It’s home,” she said simply, for why she did this. “I had a little bit of lawn that didn’t burn, and every day I would see the little deer tracks where the deer would come in and drink water and eat my lawn. Half my vegetable bed survived, so I started planting vegetables and sunflowers.”
She hadn’t heard of this neighborhood of Hidden Valley before she and her then fiance came to look at a house nearly 30 years earlier. But as a lifelong north bay resident, she knew when she found her home. “We drove up and I thought, I just have to live here,” Richardson said. “There were wooded hillsides on either side. It had this fabulous microclimate for a vegetable garden. It was quiet, it was peaceful. It was our little slice of heaven.”
Back in 2017, nobody believed populated, non-rural places like Santa Rosa could burn during wildfire seasons. The Tubbs fire changed everything, wiping out entire neighborhoods and killing 22. Homeowners are still rebuilding in Santa Rosa after that fire, stuck in a limbo between home and almost home. Richardson still has neighbors who are living out of temporary units.
Richardson and her husband threw themselves into rebuilding their house, predicting correctly how competitive it would get in the region for contractors, architects and materials. Even if they would have considered leaving Santa Rosa at the time, they have a 23-year-old son with neurological disabilities. “Getting the infrastructure in place for someone with special needs to live as full a life as they possibly can is a lot,” Richardson explained. “His day program, his social group, that’s all here. That would be really hard to set that all up again, finding those resources and those social connections for him.”
They officially moved into their new home in June 2019. Four months later, the Kincade fire struck, cloaking the region in an all-too familiar smoky haze and prompting widespread evacuations. This year, the neighborhood was ordered to evacuate again as the nearby LNU Lightning Complex fire grew into the fourth-largest fire in state history. “We refused to leave,” Richardson said. “We had everything staged and packed at the door so if we had to bug out we could do so quickly, but we just stuck it out.”
“Where are we going to go?” Richardson continued. “We ended up in Berkeley the first time. With the Kincade fire, they evacuated half the county and there was no lodging. My husband just said, ‘I’m not going to go. I’m going to stay and defend this house we just built.’”
Richardson and her husband have decided that if the house burns again, they won’t rebuild. “But where are we going to go?” she asked. “Go to tornado alley? Go where there are hurricanes? Global warming is affecting every community in the world, some greater, some lesser. We’re both over 65 and we have a special-needs kid. We can’t just pick up and go.”
More than anything else, she’d be hard-pressed to find somewhere that spoke to her as only a home could. “It’s home. It’s our community. It’s that connection with the place and the land,” she said. “I need the green of the hills and trees in my soul.”
‘I’m a crazy fire person’
Lisa Frazee, 54, never thought she’d be among the ones staying to rebuild. Yet amid the haze of the Glass fire choking the air, she found herself watching the contractors finally pour the foundation of her family’s new home outside Santa Rosa, three full years after the Tubbs fire destroyed it.
“I always thought about those crazy river people, why do they keep rebuilding when their houses get flooded all the time?” she laughed. “And now here I am. I’m a crazy fire person.”
Had it just been up to her, she would have preferred to just walk away. The past three years have been a prolonged fight with the insurance company, with Pacific Gas and Electric – the utility settled for an undisclosed amount with a group of victims of the Tubbs fire. But the fire had taken more from her family than just a house.
The night the flames swept through their community of Wikiup, she and her husband looked into each other’s eyes and made one of those snap agreements that don’t need to be said aloud among couples that have been together as long as Frazee and her husband have been together.
“We just looked at each other and thought, there is so much history in that house but is any of it worth it without any of us?” she said.
They packed up their cars, grabbed their teenage son and dogs and got out, watching as deer and rabbits ran alongside their vehicles in the smoky haze. Neighbors that evacuated after them told them that their house went up in flames just 15 minutes after they left.
The night of the fire was their 25th wedding anniversary, Frazee said – they’ve been together for 38 years – but she didn’t realize until later how deeply that night affected her husband.
“There are these gender roles that are more fluid for the younger generation, but my husband grew up with a mom who stayed home and a father who worked. For him, the father’s job was to take care of the family,” Frazee said. “I didn’t get it until he said it, but he felt a sense of failure that he should have stayed to save our home.”
Long after the ash had washed away and the charred landscapes grew back green, trauma remained. But in the process of rebuilding, Frazee and her family have been able to find purpose. They’re building large enough so that her mother, who also lost her home in Calistoga in the fire, can move in with them. Frazee has been very deliberate in the construction plans, making sure everything is not just fire-resistant but eco-friendly.
As the fires blew through once again last week, forcing mass evacuations, Frazee found herself looking at new windows. “It’s surreal,” she said. “I’m sitting here, going through a window order for my new house that’s almost in an evacuation zone.”
Even if her family wanted to leave now, they couldn’t, with their house half-rebuilt.
“One of the things you can’t stop facing as a fire survivor, whatever you want to call us, is the powerlessness,” Frazee said. “As adults, we fight mightily for that not to happen to us. We want to be the ones to make our own decisions. And that is one of the hardest lessons as a fire victim because throughout this process, that feeling will keep coming back to you. I’m powerless in this situation. So what is the best decision I can make? Right now, the best decision I can makeis to make sure I have the right window order. Which is stupid.”
‘We have this thing we can attach to’
Chris Loh has lost count of the number of wildfires he’s lived through in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Growing up in Oakland, he still remembers the plumes of smoke from the 1991 Oakland Hills fire that killed 25, the third deadliest wildfire in state history. Now as the co-owner of the Iron Door Saloon in Groveland, with every fire season comes the legends from the days of the gold rush and 49ers.
Before August’s lightning siege and megafires, the cloud of smoke so monstrous that it blocked the sun on the east coast, there was the Rim fire in 2013. The ninth largest fire in state history, it burned 10% of Yosemite national park and was not declared officially out until more than a year later in 2014.
The fire engines rolling through Groveland’s main street became a familiar sight that year, with the community’s children posting bright signs along the stretch to thank them for their service. Loh knew many of the frontline firefighters personally, so when his wife’s family property at Spinning Wheel Yosemite burned, “a lot of our friends ended up calling us, crying, because they couldn’t save our property”, he said.
“It was like, what are you talking about? Save yourselves,” he said. When the family got to the destroyed property, they found left-behind hoses and backpacks, strewn everywhere. “You could tell, they had to run,” Loh said. “They had to drop everything and get out of there. What a horrific thought.”
The family mourned the loss of a place with significant meaning that had been with them for more than three decades. Spinning Wheel began as a family retreat before expanding into a bed-and-breakfast, with creative flourishes from Loh’s in-laws, Peter and Bettike Barsotti. Peter was the creative director for legendary rock concert promoter Bill Graham, and had died from cancer the year before the Rim fire.
But without the destruction, they never would have been able to see the beauty that came afterwards.
“The ferns were poking through the ashes two days later,” Loh said. “There’s always lupine in the valley, but then the harlequin lupine started poking out, more pink than purple. And then seeing the foliage that doesn’t grow unless you have a big fire. The resilience of how Mother Nature bounces back. That was really cool to witness.”
Loh considers the concept of resilience more than he’d like these days, as the smoke and firefighting aircrafts roll overhead and his community is called upon once again to be strong and come together. He thinks there’s something about places like Groveland that fuel that resilience, that encourage the attitude to just shut the iron doors when a wildfire comes through, and keep drinking.
“There’s still that pioneering spirit in Americans, especially when we’re on the outskirts a little bit,” Loh said. “There’s still this thought and feel of the wild west, that old school pioneering feeling, that I’m out here trying to create my own destiny. When fire comes through, that spirit almost gets rekindled in people to a certain extent.”
He paused. “Now that I’ve been through so many fires and we’ve been sitting in smoke for so long, thoughts of why we’re living here have come and gone But before, those thoughts weren’t really that strong for me. It was always rebuild, rebuild. We have a spot. We have our spot. We have our place, this thing we can attach on to and attach our own identity to.”
