On August 16, 2020, A powerful storm grew above the Pacific Ocean, unleashing about 11,000 bolts of lightning along the Santa Cruz Mountains in Northern California. The lightning strikes ignited the brutal CZU Lightning Complex Fire (CZU fire), fueled by wind and dry weather, burning over 86,000 acres of coastal redwood forest and destroying at least 925 mountain homes.
Massive flames ripped through neighborhoods, transforming peoples’ homes and most precious possessions into ashen debris. Boulder Creek (pop. 5,182) is among the affected little towns that dot the mountains along the San Lorenzo River. It’s an idyllic spot – less than 15 miles from the beach, lush with towering redwood trees, and creeks spilling lazily down the mountains. If you blink, you might miss the quaint, colorful main street that hosts an eclectic fusion of personalities, with a kind smile hidden behind each facemask. Friendliness is highly contagious in Boulder Creek, and its residents are profoundly loyal to their neighbors and town.
These are among the many reasons that Ann Black chose to settle in Boulder Creek with her husband and two children, less than two years before the CZU fire took their house. They came to the mountains to escape the hustle and bustle of Silicon Valley. Ann is far more suited to the quiet comfort of a home where she can wake up in the morning to a babbling creek and smell fresh forest musk in the breeze. Deer and other wildlife shared the forest with her, acknowledging that she, too, is a forest creature.
Ann and her family were evacuated from their home, along with about 77,000 other Santa Cruz Mountain residents, two days after the flames started. They made it safely to a hotel in San Jose with their dog and two cats. The following day, Ann returned home alone, circumventing closed roads, to grab whatever keepsakes and essential items she could fit into her car, and then race the fire back out of the mountains.
As Ann rushed to gather photographs of her children, she heard explosions from the neighborhood above hers that dropped her heart like a hammer in her chest. As she looked up through the orange, apocalyptic sky, she realized the explosions were coming from the 500-gallon propane tanks, which serve as the primary heat source for Santa Cruz Mountain homes. The explosions sounded like bombs, terrifying her. In her haste to get out before the explosions moved closer, she left her precious photos sitting in a pile on her bed. Ann said a tearful goodbye to the house she didn’t know whether or not she’d ever see again.
Ann’s neighborhood, like many others throughout the mountains, looked like a war zone after the fire. The air was acrid with the stench of burnt chemicals. Burned-out, brown, metal hulls that had once been cars spotted the landscape, no tires or interiors left. Where houses once stood cheerful and welcoming were massive piles of ash, fiberglass, melted metal, and molten glass. Blackened stone chimneys stood tall and solitary in their victory. Low-hanging, mutilated power lines whose poles had burned whole draped over the ashen landscape. The towering redwood trees were blackened, their long, once-powerful branches withered, brown, and sad. There was precious little green among the once thick, lush forest that was so recently replete with sorrel, blackberry brambles, and green, healthy brush.
Ann and her family sifted through the ashes of their once home to reclaim any tangible evidence of their former life. At one point, a volunteer handed Ann a burned fork. She didn’t really want to save it, but she didn’t want to seem rude to the volunteer, so she took it. She held the fork, feeling sad over its uselessness, but then she realized how much sadder it would have been if she and her family had died along with their possessions. At that moment, she decided that since they didn’t die, they needed to live, embrace a new start, and say goodbye to what is gone.
One tiny corner of Ann’s property, by the driveway, seemed to find an escape hole from the fire, just big enough to save her birdbath, mailbox, and a small flower bed, flowers intact. They salvaged a burned-up tricycle and wheelbarrow, charred beyond use. Both pieces now rest as decorative memorials in the yard of their rental house. The birdbath greets them daily at their rental driveway as it waits patiently to return home with them someday.
Ann hosted a funeral for her house on the gray, rainy evening before crews came to her property with heavy equipment to “scrape” the land. They scraped away all the debris, removing any evidence that a house had once stood there, save a few orange flags marking the underground septic tank. It was important to Ann that she and her family pay their respects to the home that housed not just them, but their love, energy, and deepest truths, before it got scraped into the ether.
The funeral was a solemn and modest gathering of immediate family and close friends. It was a beautiful, heartrending tribute to their house and all it had contained. Ann wrote a poem to her home, thanking it for its service and apologizing for being unable to save it from the fire. Friends read fire-poems found online, and everyone spread colorful flowers from three store-bought bouquets all around what was once Ann’s home. The flowers were later scraped along with the house – sacrificial friends on a journey to oblivion. The funeral offered Ann a sense of closure and opened the door to hope and motivation to build a new home on their land.
In the six months since the funeral, Ann has deepened her connection to the land where her house once stood. She visits the site regularly, often with her dog, Pupster. She and Pupster go for walks along the old, familiar routes, even though they don’t look or smell the same. It’s good for them both to maintain a sense of routine. Along their walks, they enjoy the fresh, new growth bursting through the charred landscape, as springtime offers the promise of rebirth to all things. Earth shows its majesty as it unfolds outside itself, cleansed by fire, giving birth to new, emerging life.
Before the fire, Ann’s sanctuary was her creek-side hot tub, tucked privately between a couple of redwood trees. That’s where she could relax and feel as one with the forest and the creek. The hot tub is gone, but the peacefulness of that spot remains. She set up a temporary refuge there, where she can commune with the forest, learning its new and constantly changing form. She and the forest are evolving together, adapting to change along the reliable, babbling creek. She savors the sound of the peaceful water wending along its low, rocky path. The creek makes happy sounds, completely oblivious to the fire that ravaged the surrounding terrain.
Ann made a video for her fellow fire survivors, highlighting the new growth, familiar sounds, and smells of the forest returning to glory. Her hope is to encourage other fire survivors to come back home and rebuild. She wants to show them that what was once destroyed beyond recognition can become home again. Every time she returns to the same place, it becomes more familiar. She can see that even with the burn scar, the landscape is beautiful in its recovery.
Ann and her family lost so much to the fire that cannot be replaced, like handwritten letters from her grandparents and notes she and her friends passed in school. Ann had saved so many treasures from youth – toys, clothes, books, and dolls. She kept every birthday and holiday card, toy, or gift anyone had ever given her or her children. Sometimes, she felt overwhelmed by toys and stuffies that seemed to multiply like wet gremlins after midnight.
Ann is embracing the freedom of living with less. She feels lighter, in a sense, without a lifetime of possessions to store and rearrange again and again. Ann will always be sentimental, but she’s learning to let go of what she doesn’t need or use. She’s much quicker to tell her children to donate a toy they no longer play with rather than finding room for it in an already full closet or storage bin.
Ann is excited about the opportunity to build a new house with modern fixtures and appliances. She’s definitely getting a new hot tub built into a deck, which will be made from the reclaimed redwood that burned and fell on her property. Her new house will be built using mainly fire-resistant materials designed to better withstand another potential disaster. She feels confident they won’t see another fire on their land in their lifetimes. The fire cleaned the forest for years to come, making way for fresh growth and new possibilities.
Ann no longer feels overshadowed by despair, not that her despair doesn’t visit her from time to time. The burn scar will always exist in and around her, healing gradually, a little more each day. Scars never go away, and the really deep ones hurt so badly when you brush them the wrong way. That’s probably what it will always be like for Ann. She accepts this as part of her journey.
A turning point for Ann, from despair to hope, came with the gifts of her community. Strangers became friends at local giveaways for survivors. People had donated enough holiday ornaments, lights, and decorations to cushion the blow of losing treasured holiday keepsakes. An organization that makes and gathers quilts from all over the country donated enough beautiful, brand-new, homemade quilts that every fire survivor had their pick. The outpouring of support to fire survivors has reinforced the strength of the mountain community, where love and compassion are everlasting and robust.
For Ann, this is not just an end. It’s a new start. It felt like the end every morning in the hotel room, waking from a dreamless sleep into the nightmare that their house had burned down. The weight of her tears would crush her body. She’s grown so much since then; just as the forest is growing anew and tending to itself, mother nature licking clean its wounds. For Ann, every tear is a mother’s gentle kiss.
Ann said reflectively, “Every great story that you read or see has a tragedy. This is our tragedy, but you grow from it, and you heal from it, and you’re stronger from it. One of the ornaments that I got from that giveaway is the word ‘hope’ with a little red Cardinal on a clip. I have that in my car. And for some reason, that lone, red Cardinal – to me – represents hope. I still have it in there just to [remind me] there’s always hope, and that helps me a lot.”
