Scarred by Fires I Never Even Saw

Random Image from Our Report on the Fire Cleanup

Back in 2020 there were catastrophic fires in the hills all around San Francisco Bay. My company had a role in the cleanup from these fires, because many historic structures were destroyed – old ranch houses, a perfectly preserved logging camp from the 1910s, cabins built by the CCC in the 1930s, one of America's first Boy Scout camps, etc. We sent people to these sites to photograph the remains before heavy machinery was brought in to scrape the debris away, and on some sites to monitor the work to try to limit the impact to any historical stuff left behind. I never went to California on this, but I had a support role and reviewed all the documents we produced. This is on my mind because some questions about missing documentation just came back to me two weeks ago.

Ditto, Damage from the CZU Lightning Fire

Back in the 1970s, when I was a young teenager, I went through a phase of wanting to be an architect. I read all the books on architecture I could get from the public library, perused glossy magaines, and so on. At that time there was a lot of excitement about west coast pseudo-ecological design, from million-dollar redwood houses built in redwood groves (with hot tubs and conversation pits) to hippie shacks. Some of these builders made a point of not cutting down any trees but finding ways to nestle their houses among them.

Reading through the material coming back from the fire clean-up I saw dozens of reports of what happened to those houses: burned to nothing. One story that made me particularly sad was about a sort-of hippie town called Last Chance where about twenty like-minded people built cabins or A-frames in the redwoods and lived out their off-the-grid dreams. The place was incinerated, nothing left but the concrete pad on which their community center had sat. Three people were killed because they were too slow to flee.

So, anyway, the NY Times has a feature today about a beautiful little house built on the coast of Washington, where “the steep, six-acre lot is shaded by Douglas fir trees.” The owners say stuff like:

I think it’s amazing. It produces this sense of belonging and quietude by engaging with the site’s circumstances and ambient conditions. It’s a divine place.

And all I can think is, it's going to burn to ashes. If you're thinking that being on the coast of rainy Washington will protect it, sorry, no; western forests burn. All of them. It's just a matter of time.