Some places you just don’t want to go back to. One such place for me until recently was the Coffey Park neighborhood of Santa Rosa. North Santa Rosa was destroyed by a raging wildfire last October. The fire jumped from the hillsides of the upscale Fountain Grove neighborhood over the 101 freeway to the more working class homes of Coffey Park in a flash. People ran for their lives in the early morning hours before dawn.
I awoke that day about fifteen miles north of the devastation and noticed the strong smell of wood smoke in the night air. My drive to work is an easy 20 miler through Santa Rosa to a medical clinic on the south side of town. It became obvious after a half hour or so that something very unusual was happening that day and I wasn’t going to be able to make it to work. I didn’t make it to work all week as it turned out. In the weeks that followed I learned of the losses of lives and property in our area. Six employees of our clinic lost their homes. My own house was threatened by uncontained fires less than ten miles away.
After the fires were extinguished and the ashes settled I was able to go to work again and every time I drove through north Santa Rosa the charred landscape was a painful reminder of what had happened. I didn’t want to think about it much less view the damaged ares up close.
It was only a month or so ago that I returned to the Coffey Park area. My bicycle club has a shed there where we store equipment there where we also have picnic events. Enough of the area had been rebuilt by then that we could have our annual fall bike ride and picnic. So I had to drive through Coffey Park with my bicycle in the back of the car. That was an experience. The neighborhood looked like a bomb had gone off. Here and there wooden frameworks were going up for new houses but for the most part it was still a wasteland. A few intact houses stood among the ruins having miraculously survived the firestorm.
Fire is a big threat to just about anybody here in California. My bluegrass friends Pat and Debbie Ickes lost their beautiful home in Upper Lake this year, I hear of fire danger and smoke problems from many of my music friends in various areas of the state all thorough the summer. And it seems like the fire danger extends beyond summer now, as witnessed by the Sonoma County fires last year.
We hand some nice rain here this year to start off October. People are rebuilding and trying to prepare for the next emergency. Time to get to know your neighbors, support your local fire fighters and play some music together to cope with the nervousness of living in fire country.
