We partied like it was 1998 because it was 1998

So much strength, so much fragility

Since the fire, I have been holding the image in my heart and mind of the first place I called home here in Santa Rosa, California as a young woman in my 20s. Some nights, I would gaze at the sky beyond the towering evergreen redwood trees that enshrouded Coffey Park and envision my future and all that was possible moving forward. Ultimately, I would invest three years in a relationship with the property owner that would end with a broken engagement, a ring left on the table and me finding another place to reside in this suburban town that is also known as “The City Designed for Living.”

In the late 1990s while I lived there, Coffey Park was my personal retreat the way its sidewalks were lined with mature liquidambar, cherry and plum trees. The home I shared with my late ex-fiancé was my refuge, and like all the other houses on this street, it was a single-story ranchette of mid-1970s vintage with flourishing landscapes untrammeled by homeowner regulations.

Never in two million years could I have imagined electrical poles knocked down in a windstorm of near-unprecedented strength causing a raging inferno to violently whirl all the way from Napa’s upvalley of Calistoga to the Sonoma County seat of Santa Rosa. Unbelievably, the flames hopped over the US 101 freeway and burned through restaurants and a strip mall flanked by a K-Mart to take hold of and destroy a place I once mostly considered a sanctuary during my two years there.

From the sound of the news reports on October 10, 2017, the morning after the vicious firestorm that forced so many residents to evacuate and tragically claimed some neighbors’ lives, I knew there was no way, no how, that Reid’s old house which he sold in 2004 for quadruple what he paid for it in 1995 could be left standing. Still I could not resist satisfying my morbid curiosity and confirming my suspicion, as I drove past news van cameras and nearly damaged my tires running over the debris in the road. Reid’s house and street were centrally located in the thick of all that highly flammable vegetation that now varies from mildly singed to completely defoliated twigs to be supplanted during the current reconstruction process that unfolds to this day.

There was never any reason to drive on that street unless you lived there or were visiting someone who did. The same will obviously be true of that street in the new, future version of Coffey Park once it is rebuilt brand-new albeit with typical shifting neighborhood dynamics of residents coming and going until 20 years on, when there will likely be a mix of original homeowners and occupants of houses resold once or more.

When I first joined Facebook in 2009, I learned that Reid sold his house and moved to the outskirts of Las Vegas five years before. I would also learn, sadly, that he had just died at 46 of an unknown cause. Now, not only was he gone from this earthly plane but so was his former home in Santa Rosa where I was once planning to marry him and perhaps conceive, gestate, give birth to and raise a child or two with him, putting them through the public school system and maybe even running for a seat on the school board.

Indeed, Coffey Park in its former glory offered me many alternate realities that are by turns fun and frightening to contemplate. Here is a cautionary though imaginary tale I feel is worth a mention given all of the new wildfires burning through other parts of California, including Thousand Oaks where I was born and Westlake Village where I was raised:

My worst fear, had the Tubbs Fire occurred when I lived in Coffey Park, is what if it happened on a night when Reid had drunk enough Budweiser hours earlier to pass out and I couldn’t get him up and out of there with me?

I’m just saying that the man liked his beer, a fact well-known by his friends and family.

It’s humbling to imagine having to dash out of that burning house covered with only a bed sheet and no choice but to rely on the kindness of strangers and their donated clothing, as so many other people have had to do.

I’m seeing and feeling so much strength, yet so much fragility, in all of this. I’ve been noticing how we no sooner process life-transforming events affecting us or people we know…no sooner do we take shelter and pick up the pieces than something similar happens again to hijack our attention. Another fire. Or another mass shooting. Lately it feels to me as if these afflictions have a way of piling on while we’re still reeling, trying to make sense of and heal from a negative experience and hopefully prevent such adversities from ever setting us back again…to the extent that this is possible.

We do our best and when we know better, we do better.