Running In The Night
We were among thousands who fled their homes on October 8, 2017, a Sunday, at midnight, as powerful winds and wildfires suddenly swept down from the hills into Napa, Sonoma, and Mendocino communities.
Author’s note: This is an edited excerpt from my book, Firestorm.
We were all running in the night. Scattered five counties wide. Under a million stars. Maelstrom winds whipped smoke and uncertainty. Calls to 911 only cast further doubt as thousands slowly realized a storm was coming into their lives. There would be no emergency alert. A conscious decision made that put all of us in Death’s path, to stumble blindly, toward our fate.
Some of us ran early and purposefully. Alerted by digital warnings that few of us subscribed to. We had trailers to load animals, trucks to place our larger things. Our bags were already packed, staying ahead of the storm. We helped others when we could, before the evacuation. We networked with neighbors, relatives, friends, and strangers. We were prepared to run, but we were only a few.
We were all running in the night. Some of us ran before smoke and ash. We were in the hill country. Fires leapt Mark West Creek just after midnight as thousands slept soundly in the valley and neighborhoods below, mostly unaware, what was building in the darkness of the hills as the firestorm mounted the ridge and transformed into a virtual avalanche of fire.
We raced to alert friends, neighbors. We called. We texted. We ran for the cars and trucks and SUVs. We safeguarded dogs. Horses and cats. Goats and sheep. Our moments would later seem an eternity. Time to grab only a few items from our homes. We ran, we escaped under the advancing ash as the winds whipped up the inferno, a descending blaze. We would soon realize that we were among the fortunate of what was about to explode.
We were all running in the night. Some of us ran under sparks and cinders. Embers, dancing in the autumn winds. One visitor from another town was wondrous, “Could it be fireflies in the night?” … then quickly grasped a stark realization of doom sweeping down with massive winds. A firestorm, advancing from the hills above. Cascading into vineyards, setting fields and forests a blaze. Furies of sparks igniting the darkness.
Storm winds caused trees to buckle, power lines to sway. A deep and ominous roar as homes erupted into flames, while that serpent orange glow advanced. Massively. Swallowing all in its path. Igniting and taking down manzanitas and bays, the Buck Eyes and Douglas Firs. But the big oaks stood resolute, knowing the Phoenix burned into their past, deep in their roots. They were consumed fifty years before, but had risen from the ash.
We were all running in the night. At 1:00am, we jumped into cars. Jumped into swimming pools. Retreated to wine cellars as a last stand while the storm launched fireballs and the front advanced. In our panic to escape we drove through fences, jumped curbs, broke down gates. One hundred thousand of us ran in a chaotic, desperate exodus.
We ran out of our doors between the flames. Unaware that disaster had descended upon our doorsteps, unannounced, until the final moment in the night, when neighbors, strangers, firemen, police, pounded at our doors. We ran into the firestorm. Sheriff’s officers blinded, drove through smoke and flames, running home to home. Beating on doors. Calling out on loudspeakers, for people who still remained, “Leave your homes! You have to go now!”
Mark West. Coffee Park. Fountain Grove. Rincon Ridge. Larkfield. Riebli Valley. Redwood Road. All would be consumed that night as tornados of flame spun aloft and ripped down the hills, obliterating everything in its path, spiraling across a six-lane freeway, huge sections of the Hilton Hotel’s roof, lifted, twisted high overhead, carried by tumultuous winds, descending into the most unsuspecting of place, consuming stores, restaurants, apartments, and homes in the night. The winds and heat, lifting cars off the ground, sending burning timbers into a thermal upheaval, floating in the sky for a mile, moving west, descending into Coffey Park, setting 1300 homes afire!
And still! no emergency alert after four hours of bedlam. We all could have had a better chance if they’d just had the courage, the conviction, the where-with-all, to press that button, to let us know, that hell was descending from above.
We were all running in the night. One man opened his front door in Coffey Park to see a thousand homes ablaze. He thought Pyongyang had launched a bomb. Another stepped outside his home in pajamas. Armageddon winds slammed the door leaving his children locked inside. Hospitals were being evacuated as the storm swept into the valley. As far as we could see, the city was burning in the night
How could we ever imagine wildfire chasing us from these homes. These neighborhoods. Fires that had started five hours before, but the emergency alert lay deathly silent. Some of us still slept. Only to be awakened by neighbors and volunteers and strangers who pounded on doors. We ran in a moment’s notice, no thought to save any item. Some wore just night clothes, some ran barefoot in the streets with nothing but skin and cloth. Some were on fire as we ran from the flame, separated from our families. We ran naked along Mark West Highway, along burning streets, picked up by strangers, wearing just our boxers and night robes, as the fleeing of traffic snarled to a crawl on jammed, country roads.
We were all running in the night. Some of us were trapped inside the flames. We were the 44 souls who would never escape. We would survive only in the memories of our loved ones and our neighbors. We were a family of four running along a forgotten valley road in Mendocino, trying to outrun the firestorm but our feet were not fast enough.
We were trapped inside our garages in Redwood Valley and Fountain Grove. We were elderly for the most part, hobbling with our canes, as our wife struggled to get away. We were 100 years old, caught in the flames, remembering battles of China, in another life, that we’d survived. But not this time. Our cars careened off the road. We were trapped. Our wheelchairs couldn’t roll. We went to sleep earlier than the rest, we were over 80 years old, as the fires erupted and unfolded where we stood, where we ran.
In the end, we were all running in the night.
Gone
Two weeks after the fires, hot zones contained, roads to our home opened. We rolled through sheriff and police lines, national Guard posts, and county health stations. We were given Tyvek suits, booties, goggles, water bottles, for the trek back to our home. Fourteen days of media, satellite images, photographs of neighbor’s burned properties, prepared us. Hardened us for what lay ahead.
But nothing prepares you for the scale of destruction. The miles and miles of burndown in the wake of a Firestorm.
Old Redwood Highway.
We made the turn East, flanked on both sides by the remains of Larkfield-Wikiup, Mark West and Sky Farm. Hundreds of homes flattened. Scorched earth, debris fields, charcoaled trees, some down, some broken.
Just about every home in sight … gone
Power lines down, collapsed, as far as you can see. Just ash piles, debris heaps, hundreds of car bodies blackened, abandoned, gutted and already rusting
Towering brick chimneys still standing, lone sentinels left in a war zone, fracturing the horizon, against blue sky. Four miles of this as we wound our way back home into Reibli Valley.
Every home a landmark of memory on that drive. Now gone.
Well-known places now looked unfamiliar. Places hidden by trees and foliage now revealed. Two homes survived. Pristine islands in the storm. Everything and every home around them, gone.
Even the home between the two homes. Gone.
We entered our road. I felt the same chills like at midnight, two weeks ago, standing before the Firestorm.
The first four homes on our road, gone.
The next two homes across the creek. Gone as well
We stopped at our driveway and walked up our lane to the steel gate, still locked in place from our exit. The gate motor, burned.
Our dog, Jasper, stayed in the car and sniffed the air. He used to jump from the car and run to the front door. Now he was wary and overcome by pungent scents, the sharp odor of destruction.
We walked past our locked steel gate, the burned down fences, taking a side path. Some trees survived, others looked dead, opaque, silhouettes of the past.
Came to the John Deere skeleton in the driveway. Blown apart in the blast. Strange, no pain or remorse flaming out from our hearts. We coldly surveyed the scene, no sense of past or future. Minds blank in disbelief.
Standing on the front steps of a once majestic home that was now absolutely, gone.
jhg - 2017
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