Surviving the Calif. fire

I remember as a child sitting on the back porch at Grandma’s house, watching smoke billow above the rim of Butte Creek Canyon, wondering just when we should evacuate.

This was before reverse 9-1-1 calls, before an emergency broadcast system, before Twitter and Facebook. Before computers even. We didn’t even have a television because there was no reception in the canyon anyway. So you had to be self-sufficient and decide for yourself when it was time to escape.

The canyon dodged many bullets over the years.

There was no dodging this week’s bullet.

Firefighters were spread thin on a fast-moving fire. They weren’t firefighters at first, not in that descriptive sense of the job title. They were rescuers, just trying to get people out alive. There were precious few resources left for the canyon by the time the fire swept in.

On Saturday, two days after the blaze swept through, the canyon was still smoldering. Power lines were on the roadway. Power poles burned until they fell. Trees were still on fire. Old homes that I knew from my childhood were gone. Some were miraculously spared for no apparent reason.

I drove through with Bay Area News Group photographer Karl Mondon to get photos and video for our ongoing coverage. I only cried three times. I thought I did pretty well.

Where the Honey Run Covered Bridge stood for 132 years, there was a heap of metal siding and burned wood forming a dam in the creek. Mondon and I were all alone, until Rep. Doug LaMalfa appeared out of the smoke. LaMalfa just looked at the bridge and shook his head.

There is no other reaction.

We saw just one canyon resident. He was standing in his driveway. No residents have been allowed back in, so I knew he had been there the entire time. I asked him why he stayed.

“Like everybody else up here, I’m underinsured,” he said. When his insurance company reduced coverage years ago because of the fire danger, he consulted with Cal Fire and created what firefighters call “defensible space.”

He removed fire-hazard trees hanging near the house, grew lawn, eliminated dry brush and bought a generator to run the sprinklers for when the eventual fires came. And Thursday it came, a storm that he said was shooting hot embers sideways in the air.

All around him were burned homes as the man told the harrowing story. Behind him was his green lawn, his dogs yipping at the two strangers on the property — and a house, untouched by fire.

The homes still standing mostly had that defensible space. The ones that burned were often tucked back into shady oaks that provided respite from the canyon’s summer heat but fuel for a November fire.

Not many people have lawns in the rural country setting, but several who do were wise enough to park vehicles or RVs in the middle of the lawn before they evacuated. Those vehicles were fine.

In many other places, there were reminders of the random nature of the fire. Near the old mining community of Diamondville, a beautiful classic car and a pickup were parked in dry grass. Somehow the dry grass didn’t catch fire. The vehicles were fine. Two hundred yards away was a home burned to the foundation.

We drove to Grandma’s house, the place where I grew up. It stood untouched. Then we went to my brother’s home. The fire burned his guest cottage, a trailer and a lawnmower all to nothing. The lawn and ivy were scorched as the fire traveled up to his back porch — and then for some reason, stopped. The house was still standing.

My brother died 12 years ago. His partner still lives there. I don’t know why the fire stopped right there at the back door. I’d like to think my brother had something to do with it.