Fire

Three months ago, on Labor Day, the couple packed up their tools early. Tia and Josh’s weekend project had been to build a garage — it was barely framed when gusting wind began tearing at tall firs and cedar behind the house.

They scooped up belongings from the yard and porches that could blow away and had a late dinner.

Appliances abruptly stopped humming. Lights cut out, plunging the house into darkness — the power was out.

“We were like ‘ugh, it’s going to be a great night,’” Tia said.

The Clokes invited friends from farther upriver to stay with them. Tia said they had stocked up on food and bedding to prepare for power outages. They doled out blankets and everyone went to bed.

Tia gave Josh a hard time for the volume of sound coming from his phone.

An app, fed with local emergency-band radio chatter, crackled with updates from fire crews as the couple lied beneath the covers.

She was worried about missing sleep over what sounded like a brush fire.

But the calls between trucks and firefighters came more frequently. More departments were involved. 

In their narrow valley along the Blue River, near its confluence with the McKenzie River, the sky is dark and clear enough at night that it’s usually filled with stars.

But now the sky was glowing red, filling with smoke and lit from below as they peered from their front door just before midnight.

“We knew something was not right,” Tia said.

Mason, Noah and Addison each took a blanket and were guided to the car. The oldest boy tried to return to his room.

“He was upset. He wanted to go back to bed in the house,” Tia said.

She stood in the yard, where smoke and wind whipped past her, and texted the clinic manager, asking whether she should take anything from the clinic.

No response.

Then she thought about her chairs — Adirondack-style patio furniture milled by a local woodworker from a locally-sourced log. Prized possessions.

She was surprised by her priorities later.

“It’s getting breezy at times,” she said. “I’d better put my patio cushions inside. I was thinking about packing up patio cushions and not packing a go-bag.”

Josh turned yard sprinklers on the house and wind, gusting at nearly 40 mph, slapped at his ears. An Oregon State trooper pulled a police car alongside the Clokes’ property, he said, and spoke into a loudspeaker. Josh said he couldn't hear the officer’s words over the gale, even though the car was just 100 feet away.

Caught in the wind, a fir swayed then came down with a crash on the house. The friends, standing at the end of the road that connects Blue River to its reservoir, could see fire already coming west in the crowns of the neighbor’s trees. Big conifers, torching fast.

Time to go, Tia said.

She packed three kids, three dogs, her husband and few possessions in a big black Ford SUV and the family joined the caravan of refugees streaming downhill along state Highway 126 — downriver and down, out of the mountains, to safety.

They stopped at a Holiday Inn in Springfield. The rumors started almost immediately, Tia said.

Facebook filled with reports, by turns, that towns from Vida to McKenzie Bridge were lost or had been saved. People asked about missing family. Posts warned of looters in left-behind homes and smash-and-grab theft from unattended cars.

“Then you hear about people breaking into cars and everything I have left is in this car and I can’t deal with that,” Tia said.

Photos appeared on Facebook after a couple of days that showed Blue River was essentially gone.

“We knew nothing,” Tia said. “We assumed that there was literally nothing left. We heard at this point that Blue River was a total loss.”

When she did finally receive information about her property, she was between the children’s clothing section and bathroom at Target. An acquaintance had been past the Clokes’ place and emailed Josh.

“He goes, ‘our house is still there.’ And I’m hysterically crying in Target,” Tia said. 

With hope that the house along Blue River is fine, the family settled from hotel living into the fifth-wheel.

A vague sense of the destruction of the fire began seeping in, and that the Clokes along with the rest of Blue River are refugees — many without homes or power or potable water.

“You’re almost in denial and treat it like you’re on vacation,” Tia said. “Until you realize you’re not and this really just happened.”

On Sept. 23, police began evacuating trailers and motorhomes from the park near Goshen. A brush fire burned a few acres but crews from outlying fire departments had the blaze under control within hours.

“Then I see a McKenzie fire truck and that about sent me over the edge,” she said.

It was the same department that had tried to fight the Holiday Farm fire, then evacuated houses along the river.

“I couldn’t do it again. I was in complete disbelief,” she said. “We just started over and all we could do was leave it there and hope it would be there.”

First aid

It's a month later, early October, and rain is falling hard on the McKenzie River Valley —  the largest rainfall since the fires. A few people are scrambling to tarp burned-out homes or gather what possessions they can find in the ashes of their houses.

The fire and coming winter weather has made hillsides vulnerable to landslides, and refugees wary of being cut off from grocery stores and gas stations. Property owners who regarded trees as valuable additions to their property now talk about “problem trees.” And since the state reopened 126 seven days earlier, people sorting through the wreckage of the town have watched vehicles pull in off the highway and passengers point and stare and make photos.

By mid-October, community-organized relief centers are sourcing donations from across two states and supplying people with food and clothes. At the converted McKenzie High School gym, as many as 120 people take a basket or two of essentials like canned goods and toilet paper each day.

People from down the street in Blue River and as far away as Bend volunteer to fold and stack clothes and arrange tables with household supplies. 

Mutual aid is a common response to disasters. 

But Nathan Ray knows that initial strength often gives way to frustration and exhaustion. A social worker from Marysville, Washington, Ray deployed with volunteers under the non-profit Green Cross Academy of Traumatology. Counselors with Green Cross provide trauma counseling — mental health first aid.

Ray said a sense of abandonment can seize communities as emergency aid dries up and media attention moves on from a disaster. People will feel strung-along as rebuilding stretches on well over a year, he said.

Living in cramped trailers over cold winters and given time to unpack and process trauma, moods sour.

Often, drug and domestic abuse tend to increase in the months after. 

“They have a long road in front of them,” Ray said. 

Trauma can affect as many as six in 10 people who are caught in a disaster. A study published 2009 in Social Science & Medicine, which interviewed survivors of catastrophic flooding in 1999 in Mexico and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the U.S. found that some people will show fewer symptoms of trauma in the following months to years. 

But a handful of people who fled the McKenzie River valley likely will show more symptoms as towns rebuild.

Cheyenne Chaltraw, who lives in Vida, said she fled fire almost continuously over a couple of days, evacuating with her husband and 2-year-old daughter from their home near the river to her parents’ house in the Camp Creek, near Springfield, then to Marcola, then finally to a hotel.

Chaltraw wrote on Facebook that her daughter’s pediatrician said the child appears to suffer from trauma.

“Not sleeping normal, not eating normal, real fussy (which I know can be normal with 2s) but it’s heartbreaking,” she wrote.

Fatigue

Meanwhile, Tia Cloke, a nurse practitioner and the community’s only medical provider, has resumed seeing patients. The clinic where she works is based, for now, out of a quilt store in Rainbow.

Many in the community are choosing to move on. They weren’t insured, or don’t want to spend their retirement years rebuilding. Some of those leaving the river valley stop in to see Tia to gather their records, refill prescriptions and say goodbye.

“They’re coming in for that one last visit. And that’s sad,” she said.

Many of those who are staying want to process what happened on Labor Day — talk through the suddenness of leaving home and coming back to find it’s gone.

“People woke up in the middle of the night, often with wind knocking trees down,” she said. “Then they come back to see their community burned down.”

In town, the fire took the clinic where she worked. And the library, post office and corner grocery store. Dozens of buildings were consumed in a few hours.

But to the couple of generations of residents who had lived in Blue River, they were landmarks that had built a sort of sense of permanence.

“It’s healing in a way, hearing them get it out and going through the same thing,” Tia said.

Those who are staying have found rentals and AirBnb lodgings through insurance. Emergency funding and permitting is helping some, like the Clokes, move into recreational vehicles.

But her oldest son has become reluctant to do his homework, she said. Trauma from the fire, on top of COVID-19 restrictions, have Mason feeling stuck inside.

“They don’t want to be on the computer. They just want to see people. They don’t want their sibling sitting next to them,” she said. “My son actually hid his computer.”

Addison and Noah will stay in Iowa until after Christmas, Tia said. She hopes that will give the twins a sense of stability while she and Josh start demolishing their house.

In mid-November, they finished building the garage. It’ll serve as a sort of house surrogate — Tia and Josh plan to put carpet and a couch and a TV in the space. They’ll hang Christmas lights in December, she said.

Noah stood against one wall and said he missed his baseball league after the season was canceled this year.

Not the sport, he clarified.

“I miss my friends,” Noah said.

The future

Noah tucks his knees to his chest and straightens them again, then calls his brother a “bot,” as in robot. As in clumsy at video games.

His brother, Mason, slouched into the couch at his right, jabs at a tablet and returns fire.

“You’re a bot,” Mason said.

It’s the last day of October and life in a fifth-wheel is starting to sink in. Their round of Among Us is not going well.

The boys normally would be out trick-or-treating. Mason was set to go as The Mandalorian. Noah would have been a storm trooper. Instead, they’re in shorts and T-shirts, convalescing in the living room of a fifth-wheel trailer nearly 50 miles from home.

Their neighborhood, where they would have shown off their Star Wars costumes and asked for candy, is gone — swept over by intensely hot, fast-moving flames in Oregon’s most destructive wildfire season.

The Cloke family has been vagrant since fire chased them out of the mountains early in the morning on Sept. 8. A weeks-long stay in hotel rooms followed, then the purchase of a 42-foot Forest River trailer.

Then illness.

The family came down with symptoms, then tested positive for the virus that causes COVID-19 — a week of choking, productive coughs that followed put the family behind on their goals for moving back out to Blue River.

Payments on the fifth-wheel will cost the family less than rent on a house, Tia said. Sure, a house would be bigger, but rental assistance covers the trailer for a few months — effectively subsidizing the recreational vehicle that will be their home for potentially half a year while they rebuild their house.

She hovers over a pair of Australian shepherd puppies. A skittering of claws on faux-wood flooring accompanies the dogs as they go one way around an about-3-foot island of countertop in the kitchenette. Laughing boys crowd past going another way. A pup lands in an open box of snack-sized potato chip bags, popping several. The other is dragging the sleeve from a werewolf costume of Noah’s twin sister, Addison.

There is no room left to maneuver as Tia hooks leashes to dogs and steps down a set of four clattering metal stairs.

“At least the air is fresh,” Tia said.

She first arrived at Eugene’s airport in 2017 to find the Willamette Valley in a smoky haze. Staff from Orchid Health took her on a tour of the town where she’d be replacing a nurse practitioner who was retiring after nearly 30 years. The American Red Cross had filled McKenzie High School with cots and supplies to shelter people evacuating from fires in the Cascades.

Even then, the tall evergreens and rocky bluffs and clear water of the McKenzie and Blue rivers appealed to Tia. She was coming from Keokuk, a town of about 10,000 on a bend in the Mississippi, in the southeast corner of Iowa. Prominence is measured in hundreds of feet and the air in the summer is heavy with humidity and scented of agriculture. 

“My front yard was a corn field,” Tia said.

She stayed the night at the clinic manager’s house. She said she heard splashing, and looked through a bedroom window at a herd of about 15 elk crossing the McKenzie.

“How often do you see that?”

She realizes out loud, not for the first time, that house is gone — ash and rubble.

In the weeks since the fire, she’s found herself relearning the river valley she’s driven through for years.

Trees gave up some of their mass, converted to energy by heat and oxygen as flames rushed up hillsides, and appeared to shrink. Deep greens of needled canopy gave way to reddish brown and black and sunlight falls with desert-like intensity on dirt and rock scrubbed clean of life by flame.

The retired nurse, whose job she took, had shown her hiking spots and Tia had started to learn the trails.

Stopped at regular intervals by utility work, Tia was surprised by the landscape.

“I don’t know where I am. I don’t recognize where I am,” she said.

The 2,256-square-foot home Tia and Josh had built along the river was about 15 months old, its address so newly minted it still confuses GPS directions. Flames swept under the structure, burning out floor joists and frying electrical wiring.

Sawyers brought down the buffer of tall trees between house and river, scorched black and awaiting a timber buyer. A trailer full of possessions — Tia’s porcelain dolls, Josh’s John Deere memorabilia — dissolved in the flames, leaving behind scattered heads and tractor logos.

But some of the furniture in the house appeared to survive smoke, heat and water damage. A 1965 aluminum-framed John Deere tractor, a working vintage machine, appeared to survive and had been sent to a shop. The Adirondack chairs, built by the husband of the retired nurse, had survived.

“I was really proud of those,” Tia said. “We got the house finished. We got the chairs out back and we were going to sit and enjoy.”

The first day of November was the Clokes’ first day living on their property in nearly two months. The fifth-wheel maneuvered into position on a concrete pad, Josh reflected on the scorched house and cut trees. The family will rebuild, he said.

“It’s just good to be back home.”