Santa Cruz journalists collect oral histories from fire victims
SANTA CRUZ >> With the devastation wrought this summer across Santa Cruz County by the CZU August Lightning Complex fire still fresh, longtime Sentinel photojournalist Shmuel Thaler and radio producer Nikki Silva have turned their talents toward helping their community process and document the disaster.
The two are teaming up with the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History for their project, dubbed “Lost & Found: The CZU Lightning Complex Fire Project.” The effort asks those who have lost a home or business in the fires to step forward for the sake of history — and perhaps some personal healing. Asking participants to bring with them personal and meaningful objects rescued from the ruins, the project will collect oral history interviews and photographs to be cataloged as part of the county’s archival history and may become a traveling exhibit.
For Boulder Creek’s Mary Beth Curley, who recently brought her husband to the museum in a sort of trialrun of the project, the hourlong session “feels like being an archaeologist in your own life,” she told Thaler at the time.
Alan Chase, of Bonny Doon, said the draw for him, along with his daughter and wife, was an opportunity for long-lasting catharsis. The family told of three rescued family menorahs and of finding pedals from a cherished inherited piano.
“From my perspective, I don’t think we did it because we had any perspective that there was something unique about our experience relative to other people who lost houses. But, it certainly is something that we’re willing to share and it helps to share,” Chase said. “And I think it does give people who didn’t suffer that loss personally or people down the road who experience a similar loss themselves, it gives them a sense that there
is a next day and there is a time beyond that experience. It’s something that we’ll carry with us for the rest of our lives.”
Meaningful mementos
Would- be community storytellers are being asked to bring a personal object, even one that may have been damaged or had little significance before the fire, but is now “somehow imbued with all this spirit and agency and meaning,” Silva said.
‘ We all kind of, I think, after disasters or after any kind of hardship, need to tell the story to make sense of it and it’s hard to do,” Silva said. “And I think it’s hard for people to ask about it, but suddenly, if you have some thing to talk about, all of those questions do come out and people do begin to talk about exactly what happened and how they processed it and how they’re going through it.”
Leading up to the effort, Thaler traveled deep behind firelines to witness as firefighters struggled to tame the blaze sweeping through the region, and again when community members returned home to pick up the pieces. He is photographing the objects in a lightbox, starkly absent of outside context so the items “can stand on their own,” he said.
“These are things that really mean something to the people who they belong to,” Thaler said. “They are important and they have value.”
Silva, one half of NPR’s Peabody Award-winning public radio team, “The Kitchen Sisters,” can effortlessly reel off valuable contributions of historians of Santa Cruz past, capturing how past generations locally have made it through difficult times and showing future generations a way forward. Explaining the value of regular citizens’ contributions to the project, Silva said that every person’s perspective adds to the greater whole.
“History’s made up of dates and facts but mostly, the most compelling things are the details,” Silva said. “Those are the things that really speak to people.”
Silva, who previously worked as a history curator at the museum, herself
gathered more than 100 oral histories in the immediate aftermath of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, recently repurposed as source material for a new UC Santa Cruz ten- part documentary podcast on the earthquake, “Stories from the Epicenter.”
Collaborator Marla Novo, the Museum of Art and History’s director of exhibitions and programs, was familiar with Thaler from his work and his upcoming partnership with the museum’s “In These Uncertain Times” exhibition and Silva from her previous work with the museum.
While on a Zoom conference call with Thaler, Silva and a museum staffer, Novo said she was struck by Thaler’s description of photographing families who returned to their home to find any salvageable possessions within the ruins. The families, she said, used what looked like large wooden and wire grain sifters to find mementos that are “altered, but they still mean something.”
“I just had a picture of that in my mind, thinking that that’s what Shmuel and
Nikki are doing, they’re allowing those ashes to fall through and maybe those stories to fall through,” Novo said. “It’s very painful, but yet a transformative moment in time where we can learn and reflect and heal. Those ashes falling through is what this project is all about. They’re catching, they’re collecting and they’re archiving these stories.”
Contact reporter Jessica A. York at 831-706-3264.