Unprecedented Abandon | 01

Part 1 : The Fire

Create with unprecedented abandon. These were the opening words to my newsletter in January of 2017. After many difficult years, the signs seemed to say I was getting back on the horse. Things were happening. Excitement building. New announcements. Just one week later, I was shattered. 

My communication has been sporadic these past five years. It has literally been one thing after another. Just when I thought I had surrendered to reality and found my way forward, the truth sent me spiraling down another path. 

One week later that January, my nerves flared up so bad, I was unable to walk for months. My back was in extreme pain constantly. I had to give up on going back to college. Only by receiving intense acupuncture treatments every single week was I able to get relief. And yet still, I continued to imagine a way forward once I had recovered. The mental and emotional experience was practically indescribable. 

By the fall of 2017, I was doing much better. I was walking again, though limited in distance, and so I was optimistic about going forward in whatever way that would be. 

“Don’t panic,” my husband said. It was around 7am but it seemed dark. I got up and went out to the porch and looked up at the hill. The sky was a deep red, smoke everywhere and in the near distance what sounded like explosions. Much to my husband's surprise, I didn’t panic at all. I knew exactly what was happening. Fire. 

I’d been through many living in the chaparral of Matilija Canyon in the Los Padres National Forest in Southern California. My home had burned in the great fire of ‘85. “Propane tanks,” I thought. That is what is exploding. 

We lived in a very tiny house and garden we had built in a historic little neighborhood in Santa Rosa, CA to weather this period of my disability. Years of extreme drought had rendered this usually lush and green area a tinder box ripe for decimation. We had noted for years that Northern Californians had never heard of fire clearance which is mandatory and taken entirely as granted in the fire prone territories we were accustomed to down south. 

So, when the Tubb’s fire began, no one expected it to rage so completely out of control so very quickly. The devastation was unlike anything I had ever seen. The inferno jumped the 101 and burned right through the city destroying over 5000 homes in the dark hours of earliest AM. With almost no warning to evacuate, many did not survive. 

The National Guard arrived; we were front page worldwide news. The city was in emergency mode for nearly two months. Evacuees were housed in temporary shelters at the fairgrounds. In that one 24 hour period, everything had changed. I knew immediately that our time there was numbered. Though our house was spared, just one block from the mandatory evacuation line, it was obvious the economic fallout and loss of housing was going to impact the rental market and as usual, everyone was going to expect us to foot the bill. And that is exactly what happened. 

We began our plan of action as soon as the smoke had cleared. Though the community slogan “The love in the air is thicker than smoke” was posted everywhere and massive fundraising and community support had been mobilized, it was clear to me that would not last and many would not be served. Since then rents and home prices have skyrocketed along with the homeless, I prefer “houseless”, population which was already critical prior to the firestorm. 

Before the emergency moratorium on rent increases expired, our land lady increased our rent substantially on top of an already substantial rent increase on a home that had not received any much needed maintenance in years. We started our search for a new place to live. It was not an easy one. We examined all of California and into the Pacific Northwest. In my state of disability, I wasn’t sure I would be able to move and was trying to stay as close as possible. 

None of the areas we looked at were much improvement financially and didn’t inspire as a place to create a home and a life. After a year and a half of planning, I threw in the towel. None of it was working. So suddenly, one day, I just said, “how about we move to Santa Fe?” I had wanted to move there since I first visited thirty years ago, but hadn’t given it much thought in a long time. My mother, unbeknownst to me, had thought about it a lot. She loved the idea. And so, one year later, after an enormous amount of planning and execution, we left for Santa Fe. 

It was March 15th, 2020. The day California began to shut down and enter quarantine for Coronavirus. The Covid years had just begun.