In California, Fire Season Is Never Over

Mary Lake. Photo by Matt Grigsby.

As I write this, the western edge of Redding lies in smoldering ruin, incinerated by the Carr Fire that roared through the city’s hillside subdivisions on Thursday night, July 26^th, five days ago now. Six people, including two firefighters, have been killed. More than 700 homes have been destroyed in Shasta County by the 103,000-acre fire. It continues to burn toward the west and Trinity County, consuming any fuel—brush, trees, houses, barns and sheds—in its path.

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This morning, Monday, Cal-Fire lifted evacuation notices for some of Redding’s scorched neighborhoods. Apparently these areas have been deemed safe enough to re-populate. But from where I’m sitting, in the middle of the woods 30 miles east of Redding, far from the Carr Fire, nothing feels safe anymore.

The truth is, there’s no safe place to hide from the wildfires that now ravage California throughout the year. It seems superfluous to discuss “fire season” in the destructive wake of the Tubbs Fire, which ripped through Napa, Sonoma and Lake Counties last year—in late October—killing 22 people. Right now, 20 wildfires are burning from San Diego to the Oregon border. It never stops. The whole damned state is burning down, year-round.

I’ll admit that I suffer from a more than mild case of pyrophobia, stemming from the time I almost burned to death in a bone-dry Victorian fourplex in midtown Sacramento in 1992. It was springtime. Someone threw a lit cigarette into our flammable plastic garbage can next to the house and poof! The whole place went up like balsa wood. I barely got out alive, and my girlfriend at the time and I lost almost everything we owned. You never really get over it.

Living out here in the woods near Whitmore, it pays to have a healthy fear of wildfires. Everyone knows we’re overdue. I don’t have to be prodded to clear the brush 100 feet away from the house. I periodically check the roof-top sprinklers to ensure they spray the entire roof area.

All the same, I understand I’m one unlucky lightening strike away from immolation. One spark in these parched woods, one wayward firebrand, is all it will take to send my world up in smoke.

So early last week, when I learned via the internet that a flat tire on a trailer traveling on Highway 299 had sparked a fire near the Carr Powerhouse, I paid attention. As everybody in Shasta County knows now, the blaze quickly transformed into a monster, doubling in size two nights in a row to more than 80,000 acres.

I can see Anderson from my deck on clear days, but smoke from the fire completely obliterated the valley from view. It still does.

On Thursday afternoon, I saw reports the fire had jumped the Sacramento River near Keswick Dam, where my Dad used to work. Mom and Dad live in Hidden Hills, north of the Shasta Mall, and I rang them up.

“I just got an evacuation notice!” Dad answered.

“From who?” I asked.

“I don’t know. They just told us to get out now.”

I was speechless.

“I don’t know what to do,” Dad said, for the first time ever.

“Then come up here,” I said automatically. I was going to mention that maybe Whitmore wasn’t the safest place to ride out a wildfire, but he’d already hung up.

Mom and Dad and their three dogs, Sweetpea, Tigger and Munch, along with Kelly the Kitty, arrived in Whitmore about an hour later. Our house used to be their house, so it didn’t take long for everyone to feel at home. Mom was impressed with the way my girlfriend, Kelsey, has fixed up the place.

Mom and Dad brought their tablets, Kelsey and I have our own, and everybody proceeded to search for any and all news about the fire.

Here I’ll put in a plug for my local wireless internet service provider, Com-Pair, based in Anderson. One of their microwave towers was in the fire zone and the dense smoke in the valley occasionally interfered with our reception, but we were for the most part able to remain connected to the outside world—which happened to be in the process of burning to the ground.

As the horror unfolded, we discovered there was some disagreement about whether Hilltop Drive, which geographically includes the east Redding neighborhood my parents live in, had been evacuated. No evacuation was listed for Hilltop Drive or Hidden Hills. Dad was second-guessing himself a little, but the look on mom’s face told me it wasn’t his decision alone. We all went to bed and pretended to sleep.

In the morning, I saw a Cal-Fire map of the incident for the first time. Combined with photos showing a wall of flame bearing down on Sundial Bridge from the northwest, I figured if it had continued in the same direction and jumped the 1-5 freeway, the inferno could have easily taken out the entire Hidden Hills subdivision.

“You did the right thing leaving,” I told Mom and Dad.

Remarkably, there was no evacuation order in place for Hidden Hills, or Hilltop Drive for that matter, on Friday morning. Somehow—and this is the Carr Fire story that is yet to be told—fire crews prevented this monster from moving east through the city of Redding and across I-5 in the middle of the night. There might have been no stopping it.

The carnage would have been extensive. In my mind’s eye, I can still see it roaring through Palo Cedro and Millville and right on up the hill to Whitmore and Oak Run. Lots of fuel there. Plenty to burn.

Despite the fact the fire was still burning fiercely in Redding’s western subdivisions and the Whiskeytown National Recreation Area, my parents were anxious to return home. I told them they were welcome to stay until the fire was out, whenever that might be, but they loaded up the dogs and the cat and drove back down the hill.

A couple of hours later, we followed them into the smoke-filled valley, to see for ourselves where the fire was at. There was surprisingly little traffic, most of it traveling in the opposite direction. A line of water tenders passed by, crews returning from the field. We drove from Anderson to Shasta Lake and saw the roadblocks west of Highway 273 and Lake Boulevard. A slate gray curtain shrouded the hills behind the roadblocks.

Somewhere behind the curtain, the fire crews were making their stand to save the city of Redding. I had no inclination to join them. Fire scares the hell out of me. I’d only be in the way.

We stopped at all our usual haunts along the route, and everywhere we stopped, people had lost their homes. They quietly commiserated with friends. Everyone else was silent, eyes glued to fire news on TV. I lived in San Francisco when the Loma Preita earthquake struck in 1989, and the mood afterward was precisely the same. Shock. Numbness. Incredulity.

At my parent’s house a thin layer of ash covered the driveway and lawn, along with a scattering of the whole, blackened manzanita leaves that have been fluttering to the ground all over town.

From my parent’s deck, I watched a C-130 tanker plane fly over at about 1500 feet and disappear into the wall of smoke over west Redding, swallowed up by the monster’s plume. I presume the plane made it home safely, I didn’t see it come out the other side.

Just how far can a burning ember, a firebrand, fly during a major wildfire? That’s the question I googled when we got back home to Whitmore. After perusing a couple of technical studies, I’ve concluded the scientific answer is “kilometers.” Many of them.

When they land, whether it be on a rooftop, in a heavily wooded thicket or in a dry, weedy field, firebrands start spot fires that create more burning embers that continue spreading, especially if the wind is blowing.

Considering the wind regularly shrieks like a banshee through the towering pines that surround my home, this knowledge offered small comfort. Over the weekend, I kept one eye on the computer screen and one eye on the trees outside the windows, tracking the progress of the fire in Redding and praying that the wind didn’t pick up.

Strangely, the wind never picked up and the fire crews gradually gained control of the beast, beating it back beyond Redding’s western perimeter. It remains a dangerous fire, but when the spark came, it landed a heck of a lot closer to Mom and Dad’s house than mine.

The initial reports were conflicting.

First we heard a transient had started a fire at the Chuck E. Cheese’s on Hilltop Drive, on the east side of 1-5, not more than a quarter-mile away from their house. Hilltop was being evacuated.

Then we heard it was a spot fire on Peppertree Lane on the west side of the freeway that was under control. No evacuations had been ordered.

The phone rang.

“We’ve got to go again!” Dad said.

“Are you sure?” I asked. “The latest report said it’s out and nothing to worry about.”

“Mom doesn’t want to stay,” he said.

Smart lady.

“Then come on up,” I said.

So we repeated Friday night’s scene on Sunday night. The four of us, along with the three dogs and the cat, were stressed after four days of this monster breathing down our necks. The Carr Fire was churning west toward Trinity County and Lewiston and had fully engulfed Whiskeytown Lake. Lake County, where my folks used to live before moving back to Redding, was also ablaze 100 miles to the southwest.

They’re old hands at this, in a way, my parents. They went home early this morning, once they knew the coast was clear.

Twice they’ve survived enormous wildfires in Lake County without so much as a scratch, through shear luck mostly. The wind happened to be blowing in the right direction. We should all have such luck. In Shasta County and beyond today, it’s painfully obvious that some of us don’t.

Right now, as I’m writing this, I’m wondering if my luck will ever run out. Forget about fire season. The woods around here could go up in flames with one small spark any second, winter, spring, summer or fall. One stray firebrand. One errant lightening strike. One flat tire.

It hardly seems like living, but I’m trying to get used to it.

After all, there’s no place left to hide.

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