Idyllic escape from everything but fire
Quarantine getaway, Lake Berryessa now shares the devastation
Marcia Ritz and Jerry Rehmke were the rare business owners who actually saw their sales double amid the COVID19 lockdowns. Lake Berryessa was booming with activity — the lush green hills, turquoise lake and remote feel all added up to the perfect quarantine getaway for those cooped up in the city or suburbs.
“Normally in the summer when I have to shop for the store I would just go Tuesday and Wednesday in one car,” said Ritz, who owns Spanish Flat Country Store and Deli on the southwest side
of the lake. “But this year I was shopping Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, and we needed two cars.”
The cars were so full with merchandise that “you couldn’t see out the back window!” added Rehmke, her husband.
Now, who knows what is going to happen.
All but the eastern portion of Lake Berryessa was ravaged by fire last week, turning the lovely greenery into black and ashy swaths of land. Gone are many of the flowers and trees that made Ritz, 77, fall in love with the idyllic waterfront town as a teenager. She still remembers the first time she laid eyes on it: 59 years ago on Memorial Day weekend.
“It was beautiful,” she said standing outside her general store. “It was really beautiful.”
The official damage to the area surrounding Lake Berryessa is still unclear, but Sandy Storck, chief of the Capell Valley Fire Station, said she knows of quite a few neighborhoods that are pretty much gone. The timing couldn’t have been worse, she said.
“People were just finding this as a fun area during COVID,” she said. “But now everything is burned.”
As hundreds of fires burn through the state, other Northern California quarantine havens have been threatened — from the gorgeous vineyards in Dry Creek Valley to the summer paradise of Guerneville, where droves of tourists had been swimming, fishing and paddling on the Russian River. In Lake Berryessa, the fire tore through some docks at Markley Cove Marina, a popular spot on the lake where people would lug picnic baskets on their boats for a day out on the water.
One of the decimated neighborhoods in the lakefront town was the Spanish Flat Mobile Villa, which is right across from Ritz’s store. It’s where she lived, too, and kept all of her original artwork that she meticulously and beautifully painted with pastel, graphite and colored pencils over the years. While the general store was largely unscathed, the mobile home village was mostly flattened, torched and mangled. The few recognizable things in the rubble were satellite dishes, a BBQ, a charred stove, and what was once probably a stack of books and a lunchbox.
Firefighter Brandon North’s family also lived in the mobile park. He was driving back to the Capell Valley station last week when the fire hit, and stopped by the mobile park to see if his parents’ home was OK. He was devastated by what he came upon: Towering flames and familiar faces running from them. But even as his parents’ mobile home burned to the ground, he jumped into action as a firefighter and started evacuating their neighborhood.
“The way the fire was burning there, it wouldn’t matter how many engines were out there,” he said. “It was just too hot right there.”
It was a sad irony for him — someone who has been fighting fires for about two years — to have to evacuate his own neighborhood and then watch his own home burn. His fiancee’s parents also lost their home in the fire that night. Chief Storck set up a GoFundMe for the couple, who are both volunteer firefighters, to help them and their families recover.
“I’ve been to big fires before out of county,” North said, inside the volunteer fire station. “But it’s a little different when it’s in your front yard.”
For him, the days since the lightning strikes that caused hundreds of fires to erupt across California have really started to blend together. It was his eighth — or maybe ninth — day in a row on the front line, and he was exhausted. Firefighters have been stretched thin over the past week, as they battle some of the largest blazes in the state’s history.
“It hasn’t slowed our department down,” Storck said. “They just continue to do what they were doing.”
A man named Miles, who declined to provide his last name, said he bought a mobile home in Spanish Flats just six days before the fire hit. It was a beautiful spot, affordable and close to his contract job. He also felt safe knowing that it was just a few miles from the fire station, and that wildfires haven’t really hit Lake Berreyssa in the past few years.
When he came back to the neighborhood Monday, he was infuriated to see it leveled to the ground.
“I always thought Spanish Flats was safe because of its proximity to the station, but no one showed up to the gunfight, it seems,” he said, leaning against his truck.
But Ritz, who watched the inferno billow into the sky for several hours from a pontoon, said she doesn’t know what else the first responders could have done to save the beloved town that so many had just seem to discover.
“I think they did what they could,” she said. “A lot of people would say they should have done more, but they are stretched so thin. There are fires everywhere.”
“The way the fire was burning there, it wouldn’t matter how many engines were out there. It was just too hot right there.”
Firefighter Brandon North