A sign of healing amid blazes’ scars
Santa Rosa home rises, becoming tourist draw
There’s a new tourist attraction at the end of Santa Rosa’s Kerry Lane. It’s the rising skeleton of a house.
It was only a month or so after last year’s deadly wildfire tore through the Coffey Park neighborhood when construction crews arrived at the site. Ever since there’s been daily hammering, drilling and other sounds that go with a house being built from the ground up. In the patchwork of barren subdivision blocks, there are no neighbors to complain about the noise.
Dan Bradford’s new home is the first to go up in Coffey Park since his old one and 3,000 others in Santa Rosa were leveled by the Tubbs Fire early
Oct. 9. Now drivers slow at the curb, leaning out the window to take photos on their phones. Neighbors want to know the name of his contractor. His house is a sign of hope.
The 61-year-old says he is lucky — or as lucky as someone can be in a situation like this.
The flames didn’t damage his old house’s foundation, so he wasn’t starting from scratch. He used a private contractor for the work, while nearly everyone else in Coffey Park relied on the more affordable U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which usually cleared the old foundations along with the ruined lot. With an intact foundation, crews were able to build on his former home’s footprint. It was that simple, he said.
For the first time since his wife died in 2016, he’s making decisions on his own. Some are easy, like moving the kitchen from the front of the house to the back and using cherry wood for the cabinets. Others, not so much: Who knew there were so many shades of white paint? He finally decided on ashen white — it wasn’t intentional, but he sees the irony.
So much was lost in the Tubbs Fire. Bradford escaped with his two dogs, Abby and Blaze. The flames took everything else: 15 fly-fishing rods, hunting rifles, family photos, and the ashes of his late wife, Vicki, which were stored in a certain precious Chardonnay bottle in a closet.
It was the same type of wine they drank the night they first met. They had both stopped on a highway pull-out near Salmon Creek, west of Santa Rosa, to watch the sunset. She was divorced and had two daughters. So did he.
They bought a bottle of Chardonnay to share, then drove to the Tides Wharf Restaurant and Bar in Bodega Bay. Afterward, he almost couldn’t reach her. She was so caught up in their conversation that she forgot her cell phone at the restaurant.
That was 14 years before Vicki Larsen was diagnosed with multiple myeloma; she died in April 2016, in their home in Windsor. Bradford stored some of her ashes in the wine bottle.
He stayed on for several months in their home, but the memories haunted him. He couldn’t shake the image of Vicki in her hospice bed, their family ringed around her in the living room.
“Losing her was difficult,” Bradford said. “There was a presence of her in the old house. I felt it. I needed to go.”
He decided to buy a new home. He picked Coffey Park because it was less sterile than other subdivisions in Santa Rosa. Children rode bikes in the cul-de-sacs, and mature trees shaded the sidewalks. Neighbors delivered Saran-wrapped plates of cookies to each other during the holidays.
Bradford’s offer for the house on Kerry Lane wasn’t the highest, but the owner liked that he was an Army veteran working in the medical field, as a respiratory therapist at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital. He accepted the bid.
Bradford had lived in the three-bedroom, two-bathroom house for about a year when the Tubbs Fire took it. Bradford had no time to grab anything — he barely woke up in time to put leashes on the dogs and run — and had to leave the Chardonnay bottle with Vicki’s ashes behind. It was lost.
Now he is beginning again, brick by brick.
Vicki would know which shade of white paint to pick and where to put the electrical outlets. She always knew what she wanted. When Bradford proposed, a year before Vicki died, she didn’t like the ruby ring he had chosen. She returned it and went to Costco. She picked out an emerald. But it also wasn’t quite right. She returned, it, too, and decided on a sapphire. That was Vicki.
But Vicki is not coming back, so Bradford focuses on his home and the crews that are building it. Sometimes he brings them burritos or pizza, or a cooler of chilled beer.
The house is finally beginning to feel like his. The yard will be bigger, for Abby and Blaze. The garage will have shelving and safes for his hunting gear. The favorite recliner bought at Cabela’s will be reordered. But this time, not in camouflage. Bradford’s 23-year-old daughter, who lives in Sacramento, recommended a chocolate brown instead.
“It’ll match the leather couch now,” Bradford said. “Vicki used to laugh at it. She called it ‘the beast.’ There’s a lot of sadness and joy there.”
Bradford’s home is going up so quickly that not even the city can keep up. Right now there’s no running water. The Fire Department has to expand the neighborhood’s water mains to accommodate new fire sprinkler systems required in every home.
So far Santa Rosa has issued five building permits for Coffey Park. Another three have been approved for Hidden Valley and Fountaingrove, which were also devastated in the fire. Rebuilding has been a slow process, and many Coffey Park homes remain to be cleared. They look much like they did in October, littered with debris or flooded like in-ground swimming pools after winter rains.
Bradford doesn’t know which of his neighbors are coming back. For now the neighborhood feels like the country, quiet and dark.
The electricity was just installed, and Bradford is hoping to move in in May. Soon he’ll start planning a housewarming party for the people who used to live on Kerry Lane, and may again. He wants to show them there’s hope, that they can rebuild on a timeline.
He’ll get to that after he finishes reading every book he can find about Mount Everest. He wants to trek to its base camp sometime in 2019.
“The original plan is in May of next year for the hike,” he said. “If everything goes right with the house, that is doable. I think my experience with the fire and my wife passing have taught me to just live life. There’s so much out there.
“Oh, wow,” he said, pausing. “Here comes another carful of people coming to look at the house.”