Lament for my hometown

One quiet summer day in June of 1981, home from my first year of college, I sat in my bedroom writing a letter to a friend. In a moment of idleness, I glanced out the window and saw smoke. I stared for a moment, then shrugged and returned to my letter. There was always smoke in the summer.

Ten minutes later, having finished my letter, I looked out the window again – and dropped the pen in alarm. In that short amount of time, the smoke had mushroomed into an enormous cloud, and actual flames were visible, albeit far away.

My mother was napping, so I ran and woke her up. She was annoyed at the disturbance until she looked out my bedroom window. "Oh my gosh!" she yelled. "Call your father home from work! Get the photographs! Gather up all the chickens!"

This was Napa County's Atlas Peak Fire of 1981. It burned 23,000 acres and got within a terrifying whisker's breath of decimating my parents' home. The fires turned "Napa County's tinder eastern foothills into a holocaust of incinerated luxury and middle income homes, blackened timber, and charred livestock, game, and pets."

When the flames were finally extinguished and the ashes cooled, I looked out my bedroom window at the distant hillside that had previously been twinkling with friendly house lights and saw – nothing. It was utter blackness. Every home had been burned, for miles and miles.

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And now the scene is repeating itself, only this time on a scale unimagined 36 years ago.

My parents moved to Napa in 1972 when I was 10 years old, before the region had achieved its current status of snob capital of the world. My folks bought an acre of land on the eastern side of the valley a few miles up Monticello Road, built a house and raised their family. After 40 years in that home, they retired to Southern California in 2012.

And now their old home, the house I grew up in, is likely gone. I don't know for sure because the region is still in utter chaos.

In article after article covering the fires, familiar place-names leap out at me, reminding me of years past. I was in Napa when Wild Horse Valley Ranch was still a ranch. I was there when the corner of Trancas and Soscol was still an orchard instead of a shopping complex. I was there when the Wal-Mart on Lincoln was the Alpha Beta grocery store. I was there when the main library was still in the stone Goodman Building on First Street. I graduated from a new high school, Vintage High, which had only been established five years by the time I enrolled. When I was a kid, Napa was a sleepy little town of about 50,000, a nice place to grow up.

Now it's much more populated. And it's burning, ringed by massive conflagrations leaping across vast swathes of five counties, incinerating Santa Rosa, threatening Calistoga, even approaching Fairfield. A lethal combination of high winds, dry conditions and middle-of-the-night no-warning explosions meant many people lost everything, including their lives. Countless thousands of pets, livestock and wildlife have died as well. The fires are now officially the deadliest in the state's history.

The current Atlas Peak fire is torching the east side of the valley, my old stomping grounds. My brother sent me a photo of what's left of a family friend's house (below), a pile of ashes and rubble where a cherished home once stood and where our friends escaped with their dogs and the clothes on their backs.

This sad scene is being repeated thousands of times, except sometimes the occupants weren't able to make it out. So far 31 deaths are confirmed, and the toll will undoubtedly grow. Hundreds of people are missing. Some may simply be unable to connect with loved ones due to loss of phone service; but many of those missing may be dead, nothing more than "ash and bones," in the eerie words of Sonoma County Sheriff Rob Giordano. In one particularly poignant case, a couple married 75 years perished together. In another, a 14-year-old boy died in the driveway of his home, his parents badly burned, and his 17-year-old sister so badly hurt she had both her legs amputated.

It's important to remember that despite the reputation for wealth in these counties – especially Napa – most of the population is just ordinary working folks: people who work in the vineyards, the retail stores, the service industry and endless other jobs that have now been reduced or eliminated thanks to destroyed businesses. Thousands have lost their homes. Tens of thousands have lost their jobs. It is devastation on par with that of any hurricane.

Resources are stretched unbelievably thin. Firefighters are sometimes working up to 40 hours at a stretch with no break. (God bless and protect each and every one of them.) Medical personnel are working overtime, treating the injured and burned. Shelters are overflowing, and the shelters themselves sometimes have to be moved as the flames approach. Whole towns are being emptied, forcibly evacuated.

At the moment, no official statement has been made concerning the cause of the fire. Lightning has been ruled out. Officials are looking closely at the possibility of downed power lines, but due to the almost simultaneous, explosive nature of the pre-dawn breakouts, the unspoken, whispered speculation on everyone's lips is "arson." If this is the case, I heartily damn the arsonist to everlasting hell for the death and destruction he caused.

I have no point with this column. I have no witty conclusion to draw, no life-lessons to impart, no clever socio-political observations to make.

Instead, this is a lament for Napa. It's a lament for Santa Rosa, for Calistoga and for all the other places of my childhood that have been devastated by these fires. It's a lament for all those who have lost so much – their homes, businesses, pets, livestock, and lives. It's a prayer for the overstretched firemen, law enforcement officers, first responders, aid workers, medical personnel and everyone else pulling together to work through this crisis. It's a prayer for those injured or killed. It's a plea to be generous with fundraising efforts.

And it's a reminder that life can be terrifyingly uncertain, and we must place our trust in God.