Life goes on amid ashes, heartache
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The county’s latest annual homeless count, taken in February, hasn’t been released, but those who did the counting are sure it will be up substantially. All 1,200 beds at the county’s homeless shelters are full.
Homeless camps beneath Highway 101 overpasses mushroomed into huge sprawls shortly after the fires. When police cleared them out in November, campers migrated to southern Santa Rosa, where the existing small settlements swelled from about 60 people to more than 250 in tents, cars and RVs. This is where Isaak was living.
“It’s cold, wet and it’s hard being here,” Faber said shortly before moving into the shelter. He stays with Isaak and his three other children while his girlfriend works at a bakery.
“The house we rented in Coffey Park was a great deal and had enough room for my family. And we got it for $500 a month,” Faber said. “But I can’t find anything like that now, and we don’t bring in that much money.”
Jennielynn Holmes, director of shelter and housing for Catholic Charities, the foremost homeless-aid organization in Sonoma County, helped lead an effort this winter and spring to find roofs for Faber and about 110 others now living in the encampments behind a Dollar Tree store. A one-stop navigation center — referrals only, no shelter beds — managed to steer nearly 30 people inside by early April, and to work up individual shelter or housing plans for another 45. But hundreds, and possibly thousands, of homeless people displaced by the fires remain in streets and fields throughout the North Bay.
“A lot of us never thought it would be a fire that would cause this much damage, throw so many people outside,” Holmes said. “I always thought it would be an earthquake. It’s just been heartbreaking. We had a housing crisis on Oct. 7 (the day before the fires). And now it’s worse.
“It’s going to be a three- to five-year recovery period for the most vulnerable people.”
Stress can overwhelm
The temporary digs with no certain future, the aggravation of learning how to rebuild a house, the nightmares of flames — they’re all things people have to adjust to. It’s not going easily.
For Karen Erickson, the past six months have been a slow spiral. She lost her Fountaingrove home. She lost her neighbors, many of whom have decided not to rebuild.
“It’s really hard because there are so many things to do,” Erickson said. “You feel the stress, and like there’s this time crunch. You have to deal with the cleanup, where you are going to live, whether you are going to be kicked out or not. It’s a real challenge. I talk to my friends and neighbors, and they’re struggling more than they were at the beginning.”
Dr. Ellen Barnett has been hearing it from her patients. The family practitioner, 72, runs a small medical clinic in Santa Rosa. Her waiting room is nearly always full, and most of the people she treats are traumatized. They have anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder, or are struggling with survivor’s guilt. So Barnett writes counseling referrals — more than she ever has before.
It’s a mental health crisis that is sweeping the county. Grief and trauma have had a domino effect, hitting just as the signs reading, “Love is Stronger than Smoke,” and “Sonoma County Strong,” have started to disappear. Many thought they would be moving on with their lives by now. They’re not.
“Every single person in this county was literally, and is continuing to be, traumatized by the fires,” Barnett said. “In some ways, it’s almost easier for some of us — not all of us, but some of us — who lost our homes. We know what we experienced. We have a list of things to do.
“My experience, as a physician, is that it is very difficult for people that didn’t lose their homes to acknowledge they were traumatized. They feel so guilty, that they shouldn’t feel sad, because so many people lost more.”
The Tubbs Fire destroyed Barnett’s home near the Safari West wildlife preserve in the hills north of Santa Rosa. She and her husband, Dr. Bob Dozer, 68, had lived there since 1984. They were both on-call back then — he in Napa County, she in Sonoma County — and it was halfway between the two hospitals. The couple raised three children there, carving tick marks for each year’s growth on the coat closet door.
The night of the fire, they smelled smoke and evacuated to a friend’s home in nearby Larkfield-Wikiup. Later, when the flames threatened that community, too, they drove to their Santa Rosa clinic and slept on the exam tables and in massage chairs. The next morning, they started working, helping to rewrite lost prescriptions.
“I don’t think anybody knows what the full impact of this disaster is on our community yet,” Barnett said. “What is actually going on here in Sonoma County? And what are we in denial about? What are we missing? Those are the bigger questions for me. They’re the hardest questions.”
Those left behind
When emergency crews dug in and finally stopped the advance of the Tubbs Fire at her front yard on Randon Way in Coffey Park, 61-year-old Lisa Mast thanked her great fortune. What a blessing it was to be spared the flames, friends told her.
But there’s a cost to that blessing. Mast and her neighbors on the intact side of the fire line have learned that well in the past six months.
The smoke and ash coated the inside of their homes, and that has required cleanups that can cost $100,000 or more. Dust from the cleared lots across the street is continually blown into the air, and the tiny particulates and potential allergens can be irritating to sensitive respiratory systems. Until recently, cleanup equipment clanked and scraped from morning till night. That’s now slowly being replaced by the din of heavy construction machinery.
Anyone who chooses to stay in the neighborhood, like Mast and her next-door neighbor Anna Brooner, is in for at least 10 more years of ear-banging tractor noise and billows of dust from construction crews.
“We have felt so forgotten, because all the attention has just been going to people who had total losses,” Mast said. “Those total losses are terrible, and you feel bad for everyone — you feel guilty about even asking to be considered alongside them.”
This overlooked anguish has been so acute that another Coffey Park resident, Lani Jalliff, started the support group Standing Homes for everyone in the same straits.
“Friends say, ‘You must feel so good, now that burned houses are all cleared, isn’t that great?’ ” Jalliff said at the first meeting in February, which drew 26 people. Everyone laughed. Ruefully.
Mast is a cancer survivor and has to be extra-vigilant about her immune system. So until late March she was living in a rental unit in Windsor while her two-story house got scrubbed ceiling to floor. It was a huge job — and it still is, with some of that cleaning still going on in corners of the kitchen and her office room. It’s emotionally consuming and takes away time from her work selling medical insurance.
What happens in such a project is this: Industrial air cleaners chug most days in the rooms, month after month. The carpets have to be re-
placed. The venting systems have to be scoured of airborne toxins.
Just before she moved back in, the overwhelming nature of it all got to Mast as she talked to her sister on the phone, and she broke down crying.
“It’s amazing how long this all takes,” said Mast. “Sometimes it feels like it’s never ending.”
“This was such a great neighborhood to live in,” said Brooner, 58, whose family helped build Coffey Park in 1988 and has lived in it since then. “People walked their dogs, we visited each other, we watched each other’s kids grow up here.”
She stared across the street at the blackened fields that used to hold houses, friends and favorite walking routes. “So much of it is gone now,” she said. “It’s awful. I feel so bad for people who lost loved ones, friend, mementos. I want it all back.”
Signs of life
Slowly, slowly, the county is moving forward. The landscape is unfamiliar, and the victories have been few, but there is hope.
In Coffey Park, residents carved jack-o-lanterns for Halloween and set twinkling fir trees and menorahs in burned-out lots for Christmas. This month has brought Easter egg hunts and the first unfurling of green leaves on burned trees.
In Santa Rosa’s City Hall, block captains from each of the decimated areas gather to compare notes on insurance paperwork, designs, progress.
In the Sonoma County Children’s Museum, special nights have been held for the children who fled their homes, some in the arms of their pajama-clad parents.
Where Supervisor Gorin’s destroyed home stood, daffodils and narcissus are rising.