‘WHERE ELSE WILL I GO?’
California’s ‘climate migrants’ search for homes a year after Santa Cruz Mountains lightning fires destroyed 911 residences
DAVENPORT » John Reynolds is living on oceanfront property along scenic Highway 1 he could never dream of affording.
He wakes up every morning, checks the surf and takes in the wildflowers waving on the bluff between his folding chair and the Pacific. It’s stunning, but it’s not home.
A hand-painted sign in front of the roped-off tents and trailers makes it clear why: “CZU Wildfire lot, Displaced Residents Only.” The towns where some of their homes no longer stand — Bonny Doon, Swanton, Last Chance — are scrawled on the sign, too.
A year after the most destructive wildfire in the Santa Cruz Mountains in recorded history, scores of survivors are living in limbo. Reynolds is sleeping in a camper, fending off thieves and fixing up an old jail bus into a permanent home. A few miles
up the highway and into the hills, Rachel Spencer is living in a trailer and, in a desperate attempt at normality, is hosting book club meetings on her salvaged patio. Deeper in the forest, Thomas Wigginton, who slept under the stars for months because he couldn’t bear to leave his beloved property, fears he may never be allowed to rebuild.
“It’s so beautiful here,” Wigginton said. “Where else will I go?”
These are a growing breed of Californians — so-called “climate migrants” — driven out of their homes across the Golden State and throughout the West. Last year, more than a million people, including 600,000 Californians, were at least temporarily displaced by wildfires — more than twice as many as in 2019. The stunning surge signals what climate scientists and policy leaders say is a sign of things to come.
“They’re in some ways symbolic of the rest of us in trying to figure out how to manage the new reality of climate change,” said Ryan Coon
erty, a supervisor in Santa Cruz County where nearly
a thousand homes were destroyed last summer by the CZU Fire. “These are good people and important members of our community who experienced a terrible disaster and are trying to find the best way back, and unfortunately, a lot of us are going to be in that position going forward.”
A warming planet, oppressive droughts, a housing crisis that pushes more urbanites into the wildlands and a firefighting force that can’t keep up all point to more trouble ahead. Barely halfway through the traditional fire season, with the driest months still to come, California has experienced more than 6,000 wildfires already. About 100 miles north of Sacramento, the Dixie Fire — the second largest in state history — has burned more than 500,000 acres, destroyed more than 1,100 structures and forced about 33,000 people from their homes, Cal Fire spokesman Edwin Zuniga said.
Unlike the Dust Bowl exodus of the 1930s, where more than 3 million people fleeing drought and dust storms in the Plains States headed West, an overwhelming majority of California wildfire migrants are resettling close to home. In the Tubbs/Nuns Fire of 2017 that destroyed whole subdivisions in Santa Rosa, only 6% of fire survivors moved out of the county and 2% out of state, according to research conducted by the Urban Institute.
A second wave of migrations often follow, said Carlos Martín, who conducted the think tank’s climate and housing research before moving to the Brookings Institution this month. “Sometimes the economic effects of the original disasters play out,” he said. “Housing goes through the roof or there are no small businesses or resources left there. So people have to leave because they’re looking for a job.”
Finding a place to call home
Last August, when the CZU Fire reached his handmade cabin deep in a Bonny Doon gulch, Reynolds, 71, barely escaped with two surfboards and a kayak.
After bunking with a friend for a couple of weeks, the retired carpenter and commercial fisherman ended up on the seaside bluff across from the Whale City Bakery. With permission from the private landowner and compassion from locals, he and nearly two dozen fire survivors — most of them without fire insurance and some without permitted homes to begin with — settled in. On good days, the beat of the surf and the glow of the setting sun eased their daily dread.
The prospect of rebuilding is daunting “especially for someone who is older,” he said. “A lot of us built in the old days as we made money. A lot of us had sweat equity in our places. That’s not going to happen at 70.”
So he bought a retired prison bus for $2,000 to call home and already has removed the steel cages and rows of benches inside that had once ferried inmates around Santa Clara County. The rows of windows will give him a view
of the ancient redwoods on his property, if the trees survive. The fresh green fringe sprouting along the branches gives him hope, but he’s certain his prized madrone is gone for good.
Throughout the mountains, the rebuilding process has been so onerous and slow going that so far only 24 building permits have been approved. There’s more hope for next year, but so far, with more than 900 homes lost, only 288 permits have been started, according to Jason Hoppin, a Santa Cruz County spokesperson.
Those who want to rebuild are running into a quagmire. The county is easing some permitting requirements for electricity and insulation for the offthe-grid residents of Last Chance, home to the CZU Fire’s sole fatality.
But getting Cal Fire to sign off can be impossible for some of the residents who want to rebuild along narrow dirt roads that are too tight for fire trucks to navigate.
‘Traumas that just go over and over’
So where are California’s fire survivors settling? Nearly three years after the Camp Fire destroyed the town of Paradise and 11,600 homes, about 2,000 of the evacuees who fled to neighboring Chico still remain in unstable housing or have none at all. Tension over an encampment that included some of the fire victims helped flip the town council to a conservative majority.
For survivors, the annual spate of fires — and the foreboding smell of smoke — can not only prompt traumatic memories but also instill a sense of despair. If they go back, will they be burned out again?
“Trauma comes in two ways,” said Laura Cootsona, executive director at Jesus Center in Chico that helped some of the 52,000 displaced Camp Fire victims. “You have the big ‘T’ trauma if you escaped from a fire, but you also have the little ‘t’ traumas that just go over and over and over.”
And just as she asked those recovering from the fires in Santa Rosa and Sonoma for guidance, she now bears the heartbreaking privilege of giving advice to those on the front lines of blazes in Oregon and Santa Cruz.
From one fire to the next, the conundrum pitting compassion against safety remains the same.
“Do you want to permit an unsafe structure that may burn down? A place where a fire truck can’t get to if there is a fire?” asked Noel Bock, chairwoman of the Davenport/North Coast Association who has helped Reynolds and others in the seaside encampment with recovery updates.
“It’s a question between being permissive and compassionate versus health and safety,” Bock said. “It’s not an easy decision.”
‘Because you are still here’
Five of Bock’s best friends, all retirement age, lost their homes, including three women in her book club. Most have scattered across the county and beyond. One friend nabbed a rental in Davenport, another found a home in the far reaches of Northern California and another is living in a trailer on her ex-husband’s property.
“A year later people don’t have sewer, don’t have water, don’t have telephones, their roads are wrecked by the equipment clearing off the debris,” Bock said.
Like paying respects at a cemetery, they often return to their homesites, she said, and tend the remains of their gardens.
“Maybe some of your bulbs are coming back. Maybe it brings you joy instead of tears,” Bock said. “... Several friends working on their garden to feed their soul.”
The book club meetings, even on a burned-out property, have a similar effect.
On a recent summer evening long after the fog had burned off, Bock drove up to what was once Rachel Spencer’s home, just off Swanton Road where 90% of the homes were destroyed. On the vast patio, where Spencer just rebuilt her potting shed, she served wine from a local vineyard and tilted the giant umbrella to shade her guests from the setting sun as they discussed John Muir’s “My First Summer in the Sierra.”
Several hadn’t seen each other in person since the pandemic began.
The fire wiped out the historic landmarks of Gianone Hill, from an 1800s Victorian built by Joanne Piepmeyer’s great grandparents to the one-room schoolhouse below that she and her sister attended as children.
Because their homes survived, they have become reluctant sentries as they watched the cleanup efforts pass by.
“Truck after truck full of everybody’s homes,” Piepmeyer recalled. “It was like a funeral procession going by.”
She has found some solace, though, in something so many of the old-timers here have said: “Because you’re still here, we want to come back.”
Kay Todd, a fellow book club member, won’t be one of them. She knew the day she laid eyes on her fire-ravaged property.
“It’s done. There wasn’t a living tree,” she said.
Within months, she and her husband bought a house in Santa Cruz. Now, she said, “we’re learning how to be townies.”
Wigginton, 68, who spent months in his sleeping bag, can’t imagine moving to town. He bought his remote property on Last Chance Road when he was 26. Without a raft of permits, he can’t legally live there now. But nowhere else is home.
Down at the beachside encampment in Davenport, Reynolds has given up on rebuilding his cabin in Bonny Doon. The converted jail bus is the simplest and most affordable home he can fathom at this point. He’ll park it on his property, where he’ll watch the redwoods rebound, and leave the rebuilding to his 21-year-old son, Ethan.
“He’s got a shovel and a chainsaw and a place to live,” Reynolds said. “He’s starting out like I started out.”
But in a California more and more hospitable to fire than life in the forest, there are no guarantees where he will end up calling home.