The 2017 Fire Saga in Sonoma:
The View from the Land Trust
By Jonah Raskin
Last October, after firefighters finally tamed the wild fires in northern California, Wendy Eliot—the Conservation Director of the Sonoma Land Trust (SLT)—told a standing-room-only crowd at the annual “Heart of the Land” gathering, “Fire is a part of our landscape. It has shaped our world.”
Indeed, while the fires were a disaster for many people, they were not a disaster for nature, though the SLT was reluctant to broadcast that information.
Bob Neale, who runs SLT’s stewardship program, understood the necessity of tact.
“So many people were made homeless that it would not have played well if we had displayed a banner that said, ‘Fire Is Good,’” he said.
Santa Rosa Mayor Chris Coursey may not have won many supporters when he observed, “there are a lot worse things that can happen than losing your house.” He added, “It’s not the end of world.”
The SLT, which was founded in 1976, protects nearly 50,000 acres in Sonoma County through ownership and easements. Along with half-a-dozen other environmental organizations and groups, it set the tone for conversations about conservation in the community at large.
Some SLT acres are in agriculture; others provide pasture for cows. Many are thickly wooded and provide habitat for plants and animals and protect vital watersheds.
SLT properties are vulnerable to fires due to several factors, including downed PG & E lines, and because homeowners often fail to create “defensible space,” a litany with all firefighters, including Cal Fire, the biggest fire fighting entity in the state, with a budget in the billions of dollars.
The wild urban interface (WUI) also poses real challenges, along with climate change, which, over the past six years, has brought both drought and flood to Sonoma and helped to create the ingredients for a perfect firestorm that only needed hot embers and fierce winds to begin.
Last October, Kyle Pinjuv, SLT’s Conservation Easement Program Manager, nearly lost his life when fire and smoke surrounded him on Nuns Canyon Road and that made it impossible to see clearly and to flee quickly. Trees knocked down by the winds, blocked the way to Highway 12.
“I had previous fire experience,” Pinjuv told me. “I remember summers when the Sierras burned. So that night, I was relatively calm and in survival mode.”
Pinjuv was able to cut across a pasture and make it to 12, then “a corridor of fire.” From there, he went to the town of Sonoma. Except for his dog, computer, camera, a few photos, and a backpack with a change of clothes, Pinjuv left most of his possessions in the house where he had been living and that burned to the ground.
“It didn’t seem that important to take much else,” he told me.
What he did take was a kind of epiphany that he has not forgotten and probably never will.
“I stood there, watched the flames and had the profound realization that my life and the life of Sonoma County would change profoundly,“ he told me. “I had no idea that any other place was on fire. All I could see was what was right around me.”
With its blackened trees and a landscape that looks like a giant went berserk, Nuns Canyon will take years to recover. So will other SLT lands that provide a microcosm of what happened across large swats of rural and wild Sonoma. In fact, thousands of SLT acres burned, hundreds of trees were blackened, and vast areas of chaparral were charred by fires that hopscotched, traveled horizontally as well as vertically, climbed tree trunks and scorched upper leaves, branches and canopies.
A small portion of SLT land leased to a vineyard and planted with grapes was scorched, though on the whole Sonoma County vineyards provided a bulwark against fire because they were green and damp and provided little fuel. Some marijuana crops in Sonoma Valley and the Mayacamas went up in smoke.
A herd of cows grazing on SLT land at Sears Point were evacuated. Miles of SLT fences burned, though when fires reached the dirt roads that run through the property at Glen Oaks they stopped in their tracks; there was nothing to burn.
Half-a-dozen SLT buildings were destroyed, including a horse barn at Glen Oaks Ranch, the showcase SLT property on Highway 12, near the intersection with Arnold Drive that has a wealth of human and natural history behind it and where environmental historian Arthur Dawson has entertained crowds with stories about fire and water, those two ubiquitous California memes.
John McCaull, SLT’s land acquisition manager, escaped in the proverbial nick of time on the morning of October 8 from the cottage at Glen Oaks Ranch where he was fast asleep and where the smoke was so thick it set off alarms.
“At two a.m., a monstrous wall of flames came toward me,” McCaull explained as we stood outside the cottage, the air still redolent of smoke. “Before I knew it, I was encircled by fire. I got out fast and went to San Francisco.”
McCaull showed me the destroyed pump house for the well and added, “The fires were one of the strangest and most traumatic experiences in my whole life. I was never in a war or in a big historical event. The fires are my epic!”
Deer, foxes, rabbits, mountain lions, and ground squirrels survived the October fires on SLT tracts, either by burrowing underground (soil provided insulation against heat) or by running away fast.
Rodents plugged their holes to keep out smoke and conserve oxygen. Birds took wing and fled to sanctuaries like the Laguna de Santa Rosa.
Tony Nelson, SLT’s Sonoma Valley Project manager, walked the lands soon after the fires cooled down and saw no signs that either birds or four-legged creatures had perished.
“Animals have been living with fire forever,” he told me. “They would have seen the glow and smelled forests and fields burning and then headed South and West. The fires came from the North and the East.”
On the whole, wild life seems to have fared better than human life. Glen Ellen psychotherapist, Jim Shere whose office is in walking distance of Glen Oaks Ranch, saw and heard pain and suffering on the faces and in the voices of his neighbors.
“People are experiencing deep grief,” he told me. “Many don’t know or realize what they’ve lost, while others are continually reminded of what’s gone. People have been cauterized. A whole pocket of life has been lost.”
Months after the suppression of the fires, with landscapes green again after autumn and winter rains, Wendy Eliot was more convinced than ever before that the Sonoma Land Trust would have a key role to play with the prevention of future fires, in co-operation with Cal Fire, Sonoma County Regional Parks, the Audubon Canyon Ranch at Bouverie and Jack London State Historic Park.
“We need to look at landscapes not as static, but rather as places that get turned over by fire,” she told me. “We have to buy and protect large parcels, one at a time, and create a mosaic in which there are healthy watersheds, habitat for animals, scenic places where people can live and where there’s room for fire to burn in ways that make for resilient systems.”
Land purchases will be costly, as will the clearing of chaparral, though both will be significantly less costly than the billion-dollar price tag of putting out “catastrophic” fires.
“I’ve learned that purchasing land is just the first step in a conservation program,” Eliot told me. “After the initial purchases we have to maintain and restore eco-systems and sometimes we have to leave nature alone.”
At the start of the New Year, oaks, madrone and manzanita were in bloom and green grasses covered once desolate fields. Meadows that had been turned into wastelands by the fires, looked and behaved as though they were rejuvenated.
SLT’s executive director, Dave Koehler, knew that a lot had been lot in the fires. Before coming to Sonoma in April 2015, he served for twenty-five years as the director of the San Joaquin River Parkway and Conservation Trust.
At 62, Koehler’s fire-fighting days are probably over, though he’s well aware that California fires are now bigger, more frequent and more challenging than they were in his youth.
“We have to take what we’ve learned about the recent fires, reexamine our fire history, understand our own footprint and manage lands to reduce catastrophic fire,” he told me.
Koehler and his crew were stronger and more resilient than they had been just last September. The Sonoma Land Trust had survived a baptism of fire the likes of which it hopefully would never have to experience again.
Jonah Raskin is the author of Field Days: A Year of Farming, Eating and Drinking Wine in California.