San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Fate deals couple second cruel blow
Their homes were destroyed in both Tubbs and Camp fires
PARADISE, Butte County — Susan Matoes told her son to hurry and grab their cat, Charm, and get to the car. She could see the nearby trees burning in Paradise’s morning sky already dark from the smoke. Moving through the house she grabbed the essentials: her ventilator, medicine, changes of clothes. Her husband, Frank, did the same. Outside, a wall of fire closed in on the roadway that led out of town.
Susan couldn’t help but think: I can’t believe this is happening again.
The Matoes escaped Paradise on Nov. 8, outrunning the Camp Fire flames, the deadliest in state history. The worry, the panic, the race to safety — it was frighteningly, unimaginably familiar.
For the second time, their home was burned to the ground.
In October 2017, the Matoes were living in Santa Rosa when the massive Tubbs Fire, the sec-
ond-most destructive in state history, turned their home to ash. The grueling process of evacuating and rebuilding with little warning doesn’t get easier with time. But for a family that has endured two devastating wildfires in less than two years, the Matoeses have learned to accept the uncontrollable and find ways to rebuild a life, even when there’s seemingly nothing left.
And so in Paradise, they’re doing it again.
“Some people might feel like, ‘Why did God let this happen to me?’ But I don’t feel that way,” Susan said. “I just feel like this world is not perfect and bad things happen to good people, and it doesn’t have anything to do with what you have and haven’t done.”
This year alone, California wildfires have displaced tens of thousands of people. But with such blazes becoming more common and sparking well past traditional fire season, the threat of facing a major fire is no longer a once-ina-lifetime occurrence for many.
“You think, ‘Oh, I’m going to be OK, because it couldn’t be happening again,” Susan said. “With both fires, I thought it would stop before it got to us. Both times I didn’t think it would come that far.”
Record heat, little rain, low humidity and dry vegetation have contributed to California’s unprecedented fire behavior over the past two years, starting with the deadly Wine Country wildfires. The trend continued this year with a series of deadly and destructive blazes: from the Carr Fire in Redding, which burned close to 230,000 acres last July and killed three firefighters, to most recently the Camp Fire in Paradise, Magalia and Concow. That inferno burned 153,336 acres, destroyed 13,972 homes and killed at least 86 people.
The Tubbs Fire that the Matoes family fled last year incinerated nearly 6,000 structures, including the threebedroom, two-bathroom home they’d lived in for 19 years.
Instead of rebuilding in Santa Rosa, Susan and Frank decided to sell their lot. They took a payout from State Farm Insurance and moved north to Paradise to be closer to their 2-year-old granddaughter. When their Santa Rosa home burned, they needed a project. Their Paradise home was that project.
After making an offer on Thanksgiving last year, a month after the Tubbs Fire, they had the keys by New Year’s Eve. They would spend the next seven months working on it, replacing the carpeting with laminate and the tile countertops with granite.
It was their dream home, blue with a red door. It was where they were supposed to spend the rest of their lives — working in the garden, baking cookies and spending time with family. Susan, 61, painted one of the walls in their bedroom burgundy. The dining room, family room and kitchen were all one big space, so Frank, 68, could watch TV while he cooked. They had transformed one of the house’s long, narrow rooms into a game room with a pingpong table where Frank would challenge all comers.
The Matoes knew they were leaving one fire zone to move to another. They had heard about the frequent spot fires that plagued the town, where homes were built within thickets of large trees and dry, grassy mountains.
“They’ve had fires that come up to Paradise,” Frank said. “But Paradise never burned down.”
Two days after Frank finished putting in 10 cubic yards of wood chips and Susan had planted rhododendrons in the front yard, the Camp Fire broke out. Now, the wood chips are charred. The green lawn mower in the backyard melted on one side. The house has turned to ash.
“I still feel like I’m numb,” said Susan, looking at the wreckage one recent day. “Am I going to wake up and find this is all a dream?”
Her familiarity with evacuating made her head less fuzzy during the family’s race from this fire. But she can’t help but look back and think of things she could have done differently. It’s hindsight unique to a survivor of multiple wildfires.
Maybe if she hadn’t been arguing with her son about whether to evacuate, she would have remembered to pack the oil painting her friend made of her two Boston terriers. Or the plaque she received after her retirement as a second-grade teacher in Santa Rosa. At least this time she remembered to take her cell phone and laptop.
Frank had already organized their important documents into files, so it was easy to grab them. It was a lesson from the last time, when all their papers burned in the Tubbs Fire. They’d meant to make a list of what to grab should a fire ever happen again. But in the short five months in their Paradise home, they hadn’t gotten around to it.
Since the blaze, their 23year-old son, Brett, spends most of his time on the computer “zoned out,” Susan said. A bass player, he has lost all of his instruments twice, and refuses to let his parents buy him more.
“He’s lost some of his enthusiasm,” Susan said. “He says he doesn’t want to move back to Paradise. He wants to stay down in Chico.”
Frank and Susan met as teachers in Middletown, in Lake County. The school district was so small that the elementary, middle and high schools were all on one campus.
“I never thought I would fall in love with somebody shorter than me, but I did,” Susan giggled.
The fires aren’t the first life-changing events they have faced together. When Frank was diagnosed with kidney failure in 2008, Susan came to the rescue. She was a match and donated a kidney to him.
Five weeks after an inferno destroyed their home for the second time, Frank and Susan went back to survey the damage. It was too overwhelming to sift through the rubble, so they just took in the scene.
Afterward, “I went home, went to bed and slept for 12 hours,” Susan said. “Part of the grieving might be just lack of energy. I felt like I was walking in a haze until I went to bed.”
Standing in the backyard of where her Paradise home once stood, Susan stared at trees marked with green paint. It meant they’d eventually have to be removed. Somehow, a few tomatoes, carrots and one of the red peppers that Frank had planted in the troughs in their backyard had been left untouched by the flames.
The pigpen in the backyard that the previous homeowners had refused to remove was still standing. So were the concrete birdbath and rabbit figurines in the yard. They had survived the Tubbs Fire, too.
Susan looked for her neighbors’ homes. The only one left standing belonged to a firefighter. A green hose lay strewn across the front yard.
“It really helps to believe in a higher power and that you’re not alone in this whole thing, and that in the long run things will be better than before,” she said.