REBUILDING THEIR LIVES
BONNY DOON >> Two weeks before the fire, Alberta and Peter Young celebrated their 66th wedding anniversary from the onebedroom house that Alberta built herself, with hammer and handsaw, the year they married.
They counted their blessings that warm summer evening and watched the sun sink into the Pacific from the wrap-around deck they widened over the years to fit Alberta’s wheelchair, then his.
For years, their two daughters had urged them to move off the top of Empire Grade in the Santa Cruz Mountains and closer to town. Peter, who still carries a trace of the British accent of his youth, turned 89 in October. Alberta is 86. Neither could bear the idea of leaving.
Until one of the blazes from this record year of wildfire forced them to go. The tiny redwood cottage with the big picture window was one of nearly 1,500 structures destroyed in August by the CZU Fire that swept through the Santa Cruz mountains and into the towns of Bonny Doon and Boulder Creek.
The only thing left standing was a 12-foot water tank.
“It’s heartbreaking,” said Alberta, choking up.
“It’s OK, hon, don’t cry,” Peter said. “It’s hard to talk about what you don’t have anymore.”
A few days after the fire, a man at Costco with his young son offered to give the couple money. But Peter told them to donate instead to Valley Churches United, a food pantry in nearby Ben Lomond that had helped Peter and Alberta in the lean years of their retirement and with gift cards and clothing in the disorienting days after the fire.
“I said, you have a great daddy, but you have to give it to the churches,” Peter said. “There’s somebody who needs it more than me.”