This isn’t a gloss over the tough parts Instagram I Survived Disaster version. My story is about grief, stasis, and solastalgia. It’s also about personal and community climate chaos PTSD as well as support and comfort from friends and strangers. Six months ago everything changed for the 50,000 people directly in Camp Fire’s path and for the 100,000+ people outside the fire perimeter. The disaster is still unfolding and I don’t know when/how it ends for me personally and for the fire-destroyed communities.
I’ve been trying to write this for months and still don’t feel ready. The obstacles are not a scarcity of Camp Fire aftermath and personal change information, but the magnitude of both. So much is happening. Yet now that I’m settled for awhile, on many days nothing happens because I’m treading water in the grief pool. I write this even though I’m not ready because being not ready is an integral component of the climate change disaster refugee life. But ready or not we survivors have to deal with recreating our lives. People in the wider community around the fire must adapt to the consequences of living disaster-adjacent, providing refuge, and coping with the near instantaneous addition of 50,000 traumatized survivors.
My Camp Fire experience is one personal story rooted in the world’s costliest disaster of 2018. I won’t describe other stories from communities affected, businesses, public services like roads, utilities, water, and everything involved in the actual clean-up of the fire zone — the complexities are massive. To make this manageable, I’m only telling my personal story today and will fill in with the larger disaster recovery story later. There’s no rush, this will go on for years. At the end, I link to news articles about the post-fire situation. I recently wrote an update about my current situation for my Go Fund Me page and won’t repeat those details here except to say I’ve a haven in Seattle that gives me time to figure out what happens next. Go read the update, but note that while I’m grateful for your generosity, I’m not seeking additional donations. Updating the GFM was a convenient way to share information.
The truth is, the further I am from Day One (8 November 2018), the more I feel bereft, sometimes scared. Another truth is that I’m comfortably settled and enjoying Seattle. Life right now is as easy as it could be, I’m safe and well cared for by friends. But I have no clear idea of how I’m going to manage the next phase. My therapist in Chico does phone consults and is helping me deal with the residual traumas. She says PTSD extends beyond the thousands who evacuated and lost everything to include people on the perimeter who took us into their homes and volunteered their help in other ways. For them, too, everything changed six months ago and the changes reverberate into the future.
On December 19, 2018 I visited my house. See the parrot cages in the lower right? The boxy item in center is the stove and the barely visible box to the right of that is the refrigerator.
My thoughts are galvanized by the reality that home doesn’t exist. Not just the house and its contents, that loss diminishes weekly. But I grieve for the loss of my home’s natural environment, my biome. All the special nature places of my home are gone: the serpentine outcrop habitat, conifer forest, swimming holes on the river, meadows, and wetlands. I miss the forest, the paths along the river, knowing the secret spots with the unique flora. They won’t come back in my lifetime, many may not come back for eons due to the climate crisis.
I always knew fire would happen (again) but never imagined anything like the scope of this disaster. It’s so unprecedented that the town’s name, Paradise, has been redefined — no town wants to be The Next Paradise. It’s convenient to use that one name to represent the entire burned area but doing so omits the thousands of people, homes, and nature in other portions of the fire zone: Concow, Magalia, Pulga, Big Bend, Cherokee, and Butte Creek Canyon. Google Earth now shows the area post-fire. Click here to see Pulga near the fire’s origin at a faulty PG&E transmission tower and then fly west over the burn scar.
My friend’s home in Concow. (Photo by Sherry Butler)
This is my second and most intense experience of solastalgia — a word I learned after a 2008 fire had burned through my land in Concow and much of the community. That fire was termed catastrophic, but the Camp Fire has also redefined catastrophic. Everything has changed; nothing looks normal.
Solastalgia: It's a mashup of the roots solacium (comfort) and algia (pain), which together aptly conjure the word nostalgia. In essence, it's pining for a lost environment. "Solastalgia," as [Glenn Albrecht] wrote in a scientific paper describing his theory, "is a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at home.'"
...Australians described their deep, wrenching sense of loss as they watch the landscape around them change. Familiar plants don't grow any more. Gardens won't take. Birds are gone. "They no longer feel like they know the place they've lived for decades," he says.
Albrecht believes that this is a new type of sadness. People are feeling displaced. They're suffering symptoms eerily similar to those of indigenous populations that are forcibly removed from their traditional homelands. But nobody is being relocated; they haven't moved anywhere. It's just that the familiar markers of their area, the physical and sensory signals that define home, are vanishing. Their environment is moving away from them, and they miss it terribly.
Solastalgia is one mental health distress outcome of the climate change crisis and in less than a day it struck an entire county in California. For 50,000 of us it began the instant we raced away to save our lives, hearing and seeing our world burn around us. For everyone else, it struck almost as quickly. They didn’t lose their homes, but within hours smoke filled the air. By the following day, they lived in a much bigger city with all the traffic, crime, medical demands, and other consequences of 50,000 disaster survivors seeking haven in a city (Chico) that already had a 2% housing vacancy. People are living in RVs in driveways, spare rooms in the homes of strangers and friends, tents, cars. Many people have lived in their cars for 6 months through torrential rains and now into the intense heat of summer.
Within a few months after the fire, I relocated (to Seattle), at least temporarily, as did thousands of others. The remaining cities (Oroville, Chico) near the fire zone don’t have enough housing to absorb everyone burned out. The Camp Fire diaspora has spread across the U.S. Other people returned to their standing homes in the burned area when their insurance (or lack of) forced them to find the cheapest way to live. Everything is toxic, air, soil, debris, even the water supply. Melted pipeline equipment released benzene that was sucked back up into Paradise’s entire water delivery system, a situation so anomalous that water experts from Purdue University came to study it. These experts advise the Army on how to restore water systems after disasters but what happened in Paradise redefined the possibilities. "There is no playbook for a wildfire that destroys a town and you have a depressurization of a system that creates contamination….”
I avoid seeing photos of the area before the fire — the habitats tied to my heart are gone and I don’t want to be reminded. I’m glad to be far away with no temptation to go look at the fire scar and what happened during the torrential winter rains. My daughter’s home burned, too, and within two weeks post-fire she bought the last affordable home in Chico. She still owns the property her home occupied in Paradise and has to visit now and then for FEMA clean-up related business. Last time she drove to Paradise, she tried to visit my home to see how far the clean up had progressed but couldn’t find the homesite. Features had been erased so thoroughly she couldn’t figure out where it should be although she could find the correct road and knows the area well.
The absence of familiar landmarks is another way disaster scrambles our thoughts. We are lost in our own homeland. She just received the official document from the county stating her property is cleaned up. Her former neighbor is buying the land from her (and that of the neighbor on the other side) and plans to rebuild his home on a full acre. She, too, is glad to never need to go back again. Seeing the debris and altered landscape makes our survival seem even more dramatic and risky than it did during the midnight darkness of 9am as we (individually) raced downslope.
My daughter’s home 12/18
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Same spot 04/19
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Last month, the disaster invaded my dream life, although I don’t have nightmares about my evacuation, the homes exploding near me as I drove away, the wall of flames along the escape route, the massive cloud hanging over Paradise ridge and into Chico. I have emotional nightmares: no plot no images, just sensations of distress, alarm, uncertainty. I wake up in the morning feeling anxious yet drained of purpose, aware I still have decisions to make and at least one more move. Not knowing where I will move, being unable to picture my near future is disconcerting. Sometimes my awareness of all the decisions I’ve yet to make paralyzes me.
Overwhelm always is ready to be summoned. It was waiting for me at the top of the escalator stairs in Macy’s. I was buying shoes because I only had those I wore when I walked out of home for the last time. As the escalator lifted me to Macy’s second floor I saw a huge open space filled with bed and bath linens, kitchenware, and other household miscellany. I jolted off the top step into horror, staggered by the realization that I’ll have to go through all that shopping when I move from this furnished AirBnB into my own home, wherever that is. Unexpected moments like this happen daily, triggered by mundane scenes far removed from the disaster.
What happens next? I know the general outlines (find a home and everything needed for basic living) but the details (where, when, how) elude me. Absolutely I will not live where wildfire risk is an issue. This eliminates all of the Cascades and Sierra Nevada ranges and the interior Coast ranges in southern OR and CA. I won’t live immediately below a dam, either.
I recently learned that a program to help people in a federal disaster re-home provides an FHA type loan for buying a home anywhere in the US with no down payment. I’m researching details on this. What types of homes are covered? Can I afford to buy? People I know who have gone through this process now pay less in monthly home costs (mortgage, insurance, interest) than rent would cost in the same area as their new homes. But everywhere I consider as a possible new home town is more expensive than Butte County. And Butte County is more expensive than it was before the fire, too. Chico is the fastest growing city in California with the greatest increase in real estate values in the US. My new home town wish list names as first choice somewhere near Chico but not Chico, such as Orland, Corning, Gridley (is it far enough from Oroville Dam?) to northern Sacramento. Next is Eugene/Albany Oregon area, and then perhaps Eureka/Arcata/Fortuna in northwestern California.
What all those areas lack is my community. The fire didn’t just separate me from my daughter and my homelands, it scattered my network of friends and activities. The projects I worked on because I care about women’s rights, conservation, and biodiversity preservation are far away now. I care about everything I’ve always cared about but don’t have the energy to act on anything except my personal life.
So it’s tough, there’s uncertainty, and distress but I’m also enjoying the urban life change of pace. Living near the sea in a moist climate offers new habitats to explore. The largest park in Seattle is a short drive across my neighborhood. Last week I drove to the park for a hike and then across a bridge into another part of the city to Trader Joe’s without using my phone’s GPS guidance. The Olympics and Cascades were “out” flaunting their snow-covered peaks. I felt at home and comfortable. I have a lovely refugee life and the freedom to redefine home — somewhere.
It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go,
we have begun our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
― Wendell Berry
some news stories representative of the fire and aftermath
Six months after the fire within two miles of my new home, I see this vista of the Olympic Mountains. (My home is in the low area, a few blocks outside this photo to the left.)
