By Julie Charpentrat
SANTA ROSA, California—At a certain point, I just began to run out of words to describe the devastation. Desolate. Lunar. Apocalyptic. What else can you say when hundreds and hundreds of homes turned to ash surround you as far as the eye can see?
Just weeks before, in August, I had driven down the lush, verdant hills of California’s wine country with my family. The region did not disappoint—beautiful, with good wine, good food, friendly, laid-back people pouring their heart and energy into the world-class wines they were producing. We had sandwiches and wine in gorgeous vineyards, under blue skies, surrounded by beautiful trees and flowers. The house we rented overlooked green rolling hills. It was all so peaceful and green. Idyllic. Heavenly, you could say.
And now I was back, but how the landscape had changed. It was now hellish. Smoke was everywhere, scratching the throat, stinging the eyes. The sky was mostly yellow. And fire was never far away.
California is used to wildfires. It’s an annual part of life in this lively state, just like the threat of an earthquake. Sometimes people lose their property. Sometimes there are fatalities.
But the fires that broke out in October 2017 have been wildly ferocious in their intensity and speed, fed by strong winds that sometimes propelled the embers across six-lane motorways.
People literally fled for their lives, sometimes beating the flames that devoured their homes by mere minutes. And the number of people who have been affected this year has been unprecedented. Dozens dead. Thousands left homeless.
“I’ve been with Calfire for 30 years and I’ve seen big fires, but this is extraordinary—having that many and that large and going so fast,” one veteran firefighter told me.
The policeman who let me through one roadblock was surprised to see that I was from an international media company. “Why are you here? I mean, it’s local news.”
“Watch out for downed electricity lines. If you see looters, don’t intervene. Stay safe.” [I didn’t see a single looter.]
Entering the affected areas felt like being on a set of an apocalypse movie. Or in the aftermath of an atomic bomb. In Coffey Park, a neighborhood of Santa Rosa, I drove slowly through the streets. Dozens and dozens of houses had been reduced to ashes. Not ruins. Ashes. Most of the homes here were made of wood and the flames annihilated them in minutes. Later, when I saw the aerial pictures, I would realize that hundreds and hundreds of homes had met this fate.
Many of the cars, parked in what used to be garages, have partially melted, as have the garage doors. Bizarrely, many of the metal mailboxes standing at the entrance of the driveways didn’t.
In some places, the little that remained was still smoldering. For a moment, I wondered with alarm if the fires could break out again here, but then remembered what a firefighter told me earlier in a devastated parking lot of a supermarket. “There is nothing left to burn around here.”
Amid this utter devastation, I was struck by the optimism of the residents who had come back to look for any things that hadn’t been incinerated. They may have been crying as they picked through the ashes, but every single one whom we met was fiercely looking to the future. “Tomorrow is another day,” said one.
Like Michael Desmond, a stocky retired 63-year-old policeman. He cried, his voice choking, as he told us that his life was in this house now reduced to naught. With his nephew, he managed to recover a plate bought in Disneyland and a mug with an inscription “It’s wiser to be in Ireland.” He also made sure to take his mailbox—the metal type on a pole that is typical of American suburbs.
“I took my mailbox because it’s going to go back up,” he told us, holding it up defiantly.