Endurance Riding

There are so many stories of heroes from the day the Camp Fire roared through our small mountain communities, decimating almost all of Paradise and its neighboring towns. The Camp Fire was terrifying, moving a football field a second, fueled by winds faster than my horses can gallop. It mercilessly destroyed memory-filled homes, family-owned businesses, historic buildings, and beauty that had surrounded our town, in the form of tall pines, twisting manzanitas, and the shrubs and bushes finding shade beneath giant oaks.

Some described it as hell on earth. It was an inferno. The heat and darkness trying to entrap people as they escaped. Nearly 90 people died in this fire, and although that number is devastating, I think it is a miracle that more people didn’t perish. There are so many survivors. THOUSANDS of survivors.

THOUSANDS of survivors because of the people in our community.

THOUSANDS of survivors because of the employees at Feather River Hospital who evacuated all of our patients in record time. Every single patient. Every single one, and just because our employees were “doing their jobs.”

THOUSANDS of survivors because of bus drivers, teachers, and other educators who got children to safety.

THOUSANDS of survivors because of first responders, firemen, and police officers. First responders, firemen, and police officers who directed traffic, created escape routes when it seemed there were none, cloaked evacuees in fire blankets, actively fought back flames, found places for people to shelter, and drove people to safety.

THOUSANDS of survivors because of neighbors checking in on one another and lending a helping hand.

These were ordinary people, ordinary people who became extraordinary heroes in the midst of such devastation and tragedy.

I would like to tell you about my personal heroes on the day of November 8th, 2018. My heroes were also just ordinary people. Ordinary people, but they were not adults. My heroes were in the form of three teenage kids. Just three ordinary teenage kids.

I was fast asleep on the morning of November 8th with my 11-month-old son, who I had nursed back to sleep around 6 am. I had just come off 3 shifts in a row at Feather River Hospital, where I work as a registered nurse. I am usually up around 7 am, feeding horses while my baby sits in his stroller or is strapped to me in a baby carrier, but this particular morning I was determined to sleep in because I had worked overtime on Wednesday, getting to bed around midnight, just hours before the fire started early Thursday morning. I was snuggled in bed with my baby fast asleep in the room down the hall, home alone because my husband leaves for work around 4 am.

Jakob, my 16-year-old son, had left to drop off his 13-year-old brother at school and then pick up 14-year-old Paisley, a horsemanship student of mine who hitches a ride to Paradise High School with Jakob. When Jakob and his brother Declan got to Declan’s school, they were told the school was closing due to a fire in the canyon. Jakob drove over to Paisley’s house to let her know that he was heading back home to wake me up. Paisley, without hesitation, jumped in Jakob’s truck, telling him that she was going to help with the horses. She knew about the fire, it was moving fast, and her father was already getting things in order to evacuate her house. Paisley could have easily stayed at her own home. I am sure there were things she had wanted to pack up — a favorite pair of shoes, maybe, or a bag of clothes, or some favorite treasured items. Instead, she left with the clothes on her back, jumped in Jakob’s truck and headed to our horse farm with my sons.

It was minutes after 8 am when Jakob burst into my room, yelling, “Mom, get up! We have to evacuate horses… now!” I was dazed and confused, having been rudely awoken out of REM sleep. I decided to assess the situation myself, wondering if this teenage son of mine was being a little overdramatic, as teenagers often are. But the moment I opened up the drapes, I was stunned. Across the street in the canyon, Sawmill Peak was burning. A huge plume of dark smoke was already high above the tree tops, ascending upwards and getting lost in the clouds. I could not see flames, but the reflection of them left this terrifyingly beautiful glow in the parts of the sky where color could still be seen.

I remember saying, “Oh my god, yea, we do need to evacuate horses.” I rushed to throw on a pair of jeans and grabbed my truck keys to begin hitching one of the horse trailers. There was a second trailer in the driveway owned by a boarder, and by the time I was outside, Paisley was already making calls to get a truck to haul that second trailer out.

As I was hitching the horse trailer, Paisley and Jakob were grabbing horses. We had 7 horses and only enough horse trailers to get 5 out, but I had a friend coming with another trailer.

I remember trying to remain calm as I backed up the horse trailer, concentrating hard to try to get the truck lined up to the hitch on the first try. Declan usually guides me as I back up the truck, but this morning he was helping Florence, the tenet who occupies our guest house, to grab her essentials, as well as the dogs. He had shown up on her doorstep saying, “I’ve got my wallet and my poetry. Do you need any help?”

Flo had boxes of her brother’s photos in her home. Her brother, 25-year-old Christian Spelt, had passed away suddenly back in May and Flo had an enormous amount of his photos, memories the family had sent to Flo as she put together a memorial album in an attempt to honor the life of her only sibling. Declan grabbed every single box with every single one of those treasured memories and got them loaded up in Flo’s car before returning to help us with the horses.

When the baby woke up, I had to attend to him, comforting him as he cried, toting him around in one arm, while throwing diapers and some baby clothes into a bag with my other arm. It was only moments really, but it seemed like hours that I was wandering aimlessly around the house wondering what to grab and wondering if I had time to sit down and nurse the baby.

When my husband arrived home from work, he took the baby and the kids and I began loading horses. It was almost 9 am and all horses, except for 2 were loaded up. I remember seeing Paisley and Jakob standing at the end of the driveway, holding Dippi and ZaZa, patiently waiting. We could hear the roar of the fire across the street. Every BOOM sounded like a clap of thunder, when in actuality, it was a tree, burning and crashing to the ground.

Gary looked at me and said, “Your friend isn’t going to make it. We have to leave.” Panicked, I said, “I can’t leave the horses.”

BOOM! Another tree burned and crashed to the ground, shaking the earth as it hit.

We have to leave.

I can’t leave the horses.

You have to leave the horses. You have to leave the horses, Jaya.

I wasn’t sure if it was my husband speaking to me or the voice in my own head.

I yelled at Declan to fill a water trough and pull a bale of hay out of the shed. I instructed him to leave the hay right in the middle of the center paddock, the paddock which had the least amount of trees. I grabbed a green livestock marker and wrote my phone number on both sides of each horse.

I took Dippi from Jakob, and Paisley and I quietly walked her and ZaZa to the center paddock. We took off their halters, set them on the fence, and left the gates unlatched behind us as we walked toward the vehicles. Both of us were crying, silent in our tears, hating what we had to do, but knowing we had no other choice.

Paisley’s dad showed up then, saying the entire street behind us was on fire. He had driven through flames to get to us. We all loaded up and caravanned out of there with five vehicles, driving up in elevation, away from the fire that was consuming the lower town of Paradise.

We chose to take a narrow dirt road which would lead us up and around, dumping us into Chico at the bottom of the hill. As we were driving down this winding gravel road, it looked as if we were going to drive right into the fire. Cars had veered over the canyon road, stuck against trees. I momentarily thought I should stop and see if anyone was hurt, but then realized it was more dangerous to block traffic on this tiny back country road. I had both hands on the steering wheel, trying not to let my trailer tires drop off the edge.

When the road widened, a firetruck came blaring past us. The driver said to keep moving, the fire was growing, and they were going to close the road as soon as we passed through. I yelled that I had left two horses behind as the rig drove onwards. I continued on, feeling sick to my stomach. I was filled with such intense guilt that it started to consume me. It left me speechless, left me hopeless, covering me with a numbness that is difficult to describe.

I drove past the Historic Honey Run Covered Bridge, remembering when I waded in the water below its wooden planks the summer I was pregnant with Asher. I did not know it was the last time I’d see that covered bridge. It went up in flames not long after I passed it.

After turning on the Skyway, we were gridlocked in Chico. As we sat in traffic, the tears began again, only to get worse the further we got from home. We hit multiple road blocks on the way to Durham. Gary’s car ran out of gas. We abandoned it in an orchard. Jakob lost us in the traffic and decided to travel alone to Oroville to the only home he knew of there — the home of Dianna Chapek, our hoof trimmer and his mentor.

We finally did make it to our friends’ home in Durham, but just as we had gotten settled, a sheriff knocked on the door, telling us the fire had jumped the freeway and we needed to evacuate. So, we loaded up horses again, and fled further north.

The next couple of days were a blur. I didn’t sleep, I barely spoke, I rarely ate. In the first 36 hours, we had been in three different homes. We had been separated from our oldest son, as Jakob stayed with Dianna in Oroville to help her with all the displaced horses who had found shelter there. We learned our home had been destroyed, along with the homes of many of our friends. Our entire neighborhood was gone. The hospital I worked for was damaged, leaving me suddenly unemployed. The schools of our children were indefinitely closing their Paradise campuses.

And Dippi and ZaZa were still missing…

On Sunday, November 11th, I was finally reunited with Dippi and ZaZa. They had made it safely to the Gridley Fairgrounds, thanks to North Valley Animal Disaster Group. They had both suffered burns in the fire, but they were alive, and with some intensive veterinary care, they would hopefully both recover.

I embraced my mares, stroking their necks and breathing in their ash-filled manes. The campfire smell, that heavy, dusky, smoky smell would linger in their coats for days. The fine ash hidden in their undercoats would take even longer to fully brush out.

A few days after getting Dippi and ZaZa settled in their new temporary home, I decided to clean out my horse trailer and see what was hidden in the tack room compartment. On the morning of the fire, it had been near empty, but the day I opened it up after the fire, it was a gigantic, chaotic, beautiful mess. There were saddles upon saddles. Bridles, reins, bits, pads, girths, hoof boots, heaped in piles, stuck in corners, thrown on top of each other. I wanted to just stand there and cry and stare at this glorious sight. All the years of my hard earned money spent on tack to fit hard-to-fit horses, tack I needed to ride, to compete, to continue operating my business, some irreplaceable sentimental pieces, such as the bitless bridle Asali finished Tevis in. It was all there. There were even a few items stuffed in the trailer that I didn’t really need, items that were just that extra piece of tack, which will now be passed along to friends who were not as lucky as I, friends who lost all their treasured tack in this devastating fire.

When I asked Paisley why she thought to grab so much — almost every damn thing — from my tack room as we were evacuating, she said simply, “Because if we couldn’t drive the horses out of the fire, I thought we’d ride them out.”

Declan snapped this photo of the ominous sky as we were driving through Honey Run on our way to Chico.

Although we lost the barn & tack room (you can see the feed bins standing in the ashes), our riding arena remains intact!

A burned jump standard in the middle of our training field.

The remembrance garden we had planted a few years ago, which bordered our home, to commemorate the horses we had lost. The hearts were placed for Forest, Lady, Ember, and Beauty just weeks before the fire broke out.

Paisley enjoying a moment with Sham the day after the fire began, under a smoke filled sky. Sham was one of five horses we safely evacuated from Lightfoot Horse Farm.

The selfie I snapped the moment I was reunited with Dippi. Dippi is currently still being treated at UC Davis Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital for complications she developed as a result of the injuries she sustained in the Camp Fire. (Update 1/15/19: Sadly, Dippi did not recover from her injuries. Her story is posted here: In Memory of Dippi)

Paisley and Jakob with CeCe several weeks after the Camp Fire. CeCe is enjoying 8 acres of pasture at her foster home.

Declan with ZaZa at our temporary home in Santa Rosa. ZaZa was treated for hoof burns after the fire.

Our sign, though charred, still marks the entrance to our property.

The great madrone tree remains, untouched by the fire.

Tags: camp fire, horses, paradise, wildfire

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