The Glass Fire hit home. From my place in St Helena, there is no set of hills that does not show the burn. This set of photographs is from my daily walk, shortly after the fire. I’ll put up more later, as I edit them, from over the year, here and elsewhere, as the forests became accustomed to their loss.
During the October 2017 fires in Napa and Sonoma counties, we retreated to Bolinas, a place dear to us, where we met and lived during the 90's. Every sunrise that week was an occasion for hope –– that the winds would die down, that some rain could come, that if winds should flare up again as predicted, they would veer away from St Helena and we and our neighbors would be spared.
In the first image, Venus is visible. It seemed a good sign. Only afterward would we what we never could have imagined was possible. I felt, when I went up to the devastated area in Santa Rosa, on somehow sacred ground and was hesitant to photograph – to make images, beautiful images, of such unbelievable private loss. But the place had a language and I felt wanted to be seen. Orange trees with fruit still on them. Walkways to where there was only a threshold to ruin. Bones of trees, melted cars, snuggled together in driveways of houses collapsed into ash or the odd melted substances that had been walls.
Now that fire is over, and there have been more and will be more and I, for one, have changed. How, exactly, remains to be seen.
Here is some of what I saw this past weekend when driving up into Santa Rosa's Fountain Grove area, a development high in the hills where, when you ask someone in town if they had people who have lost their homes, they'll say, Oh, yes, a few board members did (they would have been in Fountain Grove) and a few of the staff (they would have been in Coffee Park, the working class neighborhood on the flat, across the freeway, where nobody thought the fire rampage would reach. One man I met said he thought the fire would never consumed Coffee Park had it not picked up so much fuel here, with all the big, close houses with the many fuel-filled cars snuggled in garages.
Another man I met pointed across the hill and said, "There's the San Andreas Fault. Runs right through here." Somehow the winds converge in the valley and the fire roars up from the valley and tears through the houses, as in the photograph above. Another man asked me as I was coming down the walk from one house if that had been mine. I said not. He said, gesturing to the place next door, "Oh, that was mine." He described looking out the window and seeing fire on the hills in the middle of the night, and not thinking too much about it. Then their son woke them later and said it was getting closer. They packed the file with the passports and birth certificates, grabbed a wedding picture, clothes for the kids and got out, thinking they were perhaps being over cautious. By the time they turned a corner, he said, "the whole valley was on fire." They fled for their lives. Luckily, he said, they are well insured, like most in this area, and unlike most down across the freeway. Still, many feel the loss.
One woman I saw the next day, picking through the rubble of her house just said, "It's devastating." A film student I met said she thought the place had a strange beauty. I did too. Almost as if the land was relieved of the weight of all those houses. Iris bulbs were coming up. Little pink succulents were blooming. An old man walked on the periphery of his land, watering plants.
