Music by Mark Cooney.
For Zita Biehle, the fire came too fast.
“I remember having my kids in the car and driving down the street at the bottom of my street was just a wall of flames,” She said. “The traffic was stopped and on my right you could see literally flame barreling down the hill and the fire was coming towards us real fast and we had nowhere to go.”
The evacuation orders had been just minutes before, and Zita had packed all her kids into the van along with Billy, their dog, and whatever they could grab. They were en route to Shasta College in downtown Redding, which was an evacuation center. All six stayed there for a night, before they packed up the van again and drove one and a half hours north to Fall River Mills.
The hospital she works for (she’s a paramedic) offered the family a temporary home there. Zita accepted.
“I remember driving up here and looking around and looking around my van and it’s my kids and I, everything we have in the world, everything I have in the world at that point, fit in the van, with room to spare,” she said.
A little over a month later, Zita began renting a different house in Fall River Mills. It’s a small one-story, with three rooms for the six of them (plus Billy) to share.
Zita is a single mother of six going through a divorce. Five of the six children live at home, ranging from ages 2 to 17. Riain is 17, Óisín is 15, Aoife is 13, Caoimhe is 10 and Quinn is 2. Though the house was insured, Zita doesn’t have the access to the money since it’s tied up in the courts.
Desperately in need of support, she turned to GoFundMe. She was able to raise $17,000, the funds going towards immediate needs and rental fees.
The kids began school just weeks after the Carr Fire. It was difficult to adjust not only to their total loss of home, but to the complete shift in environment. Redding is a city of 90,000 people. Fall River Mills has just 573.
“I don’t think necessarily any of us were ever like fully recover cause I, it’s just like a part of us is kind of just like gone now,” Aoife, 13, said. “In school, I’ll be thinking: oh yes, I only have like two more hours and I can go home. And like the picture, the home I imagine is my Redding house and I can imagine walking in and just like looking around. But then I realize, oh yeah, I don’t live there anymore. I live up here and I don’t have that.”
For Riain, 17, the change was too much. He was about to start his senior year in Redding, and decided instead to homeschool through Shasta Charter Academy. He misses the social life he had in Redding, and feels isolation setting in here. This arrangement meant he’s also in charge of taking care of his two-year-old brother Quinn. As he wrapped up high school, he decided to enroll in Shasta College in Redding. He’ll have to commute two hours by bus to get there.
“It’s not like I can’t leave, but it’s a thing of I shouldn’t,” Riain said. “I know I could easily just say, mom, find a babysitter, kids. I know you’re capable. I know you got this. I could just walk out. I could just say, all right, good luck guys. Have at it, bye, but it’s that thing of, I know mom would have to stretch even more money to get a babysitter, you know? I know the kids what have a hard time.”
The emotional weight of the fire still bears on Zita. For her, it’s the small things that can get to her, like missing a comforting old sweater she no longer has, or reaching for a garlic press she keeps forgetting to replace.
“Some days are good and some days are, they’re just hard,” Zita said. “But you’ve just got to figure it out, and move forward. And some days you’re going to cry and that’s just part of the process. Other days you’re absolutely okay, we just got to figure it out. But when you’re a mom, you’ve got to figure it out for you and you’ve got to figure it out for your kids as well.”
Zita just purchased a new home in Fall River Mills. The family isn’t planning on returning to Redding: it would cost too much to rebuild, and it just wouldn’t be the same.
“Everything that was familiar to them is gone,” Zita said. “School’s not going to be the same. Everything’s going to be different. Just because we could back to Redding does not mean life as we know it suddenly comes back. I wish I could wave a magic wand and make that happen. That’s not possible.”