Music by Mark Cooney.
When Rick Thompson called his mom, he was fighting the Carr Fire. He told her to pack up anything living and go, because the fire was coming their way.
He was right. Though he fought the fire on his own property in French Gulch, they lost the ranch.
“I wasn’t fighting the fire just to save my home,” Thompson said. He added, “The way I saw it was I don’t want anybody, any fellow firefighters, hurting themselves just to save my property… I don’t think that I fought any harder or any less hard for my property.”
But Laura Sanford, his mom, was able to get all but two dogs and all eight of family members who lived on the ranch to a motel on Shasta Lake, where two of the family members worked.
“How do we exist?” Sanford said. “I don’t think my mind, at least mine in the beginning, didn’t even go to the point of how are we going to rebuild, it was how am I going to live right now?”
They ended up staying in the motel for two and a half months. In October, the family — seven people and eight dogs — bought three trailers and moved them onto their burnt property. They live in crammed quarters, essentially camping out in RVs for months after the fire as they struggle to rebuild.
“For me, the hardest part about coming back to the property and trying to restart our lives is that everybody copes in their own way,” Thompson said. “And not all emotions mix well with each other. Somebody who gets angry can’t really cope with somebody that gets sad. And so we have a lot of clashing emotions. What I can say is that we’re still a family, no matter how frustrating it can get, we still have each other to get through this.”
Thompson was on other fires on and off. Though he likes being able to help others, he says firefighting is his emotional release, though he regrets not being able to spend more time at home as the family reckons with the loss.
“It helps me forget about my loss, and there’s definitely times when I’m fighting fire that I see other people that have much worse than we do,” Thompson said. “So I count my blessings.”
The family hopes to rebuild the house and revitalize the property, where the trees are burnt to a crisp. But it’s taking longer than expected. Sanford, who’s in charge of the documents and process, has run into trouble with the county. She said they wouldn’t get her a consistent answer on what was needed to even start the rebuilding process. Another snag in the process is that the family no longer has the plans for the home — the house was built over 30 years ago. So they’re starting the process from scratch. The longer it takes, the harder it is to recover.
“In my dream, we rebuild pretty quickly and we’re all settling back in, and we can put the Carr Fire trauma behind us,” Sanford said. “As long as we’re still in trailers and still looking at emptiness, we’re in the middle of it.”
Almost a year after the fire, the family is still trying to get the process started. They continue to live on the trailers — though they’ve moved it higher up on the property. And Thompson is preparing for another heavy fire season.