It was the same dream, over and over.
Jack Pond would be racing through his burning house, frantically stuffing belongings into a pillowcase. But he couldn’t fit them all, and he had to take some out and leave them behind to make room for others. And he had to hurry. There was little time.
“Just the anxiety would build during the dream until I would just shoot up out of bed,” Pond recalls. Relieved that it was only a dream, he’d drift back to sleep, only to reenter the same nightmare.
The dream haunted Pond, 76, in the immediate aftermath of the Tubbs Fire, which sent him and his family fleeing into the night, just ahead of the flames.
The blaze, the most destructive of the North Bay infernos that made up the October 2017 firestorm, destroyed Pond’s Hidden Valley Estates home, and with it, a lifetime of irreplaceable treasures he collected while working abroad, as well as precious heirlooms that had belonged to his mother, a jeweler.
But beyond the losses, the blaze also left permanent emotional scars and grief.
And after fleeing without so much as his dentures and crossing toward what he thought was safety west of the freeway with his daughter, son and granddaughter, only to find flames blowing across Hopper Road, he continues to experience a renewed sense of loss even five years later.
More than 5,300 Sonoma County families and homeowners like Pond lost houses and nearly everything they owned that night. Twenty-four people lost their lives in the county, and 16 others died in Napa and Mendocino counties.
But it hardly matters who you were the night of Oct. 8, 2017. Almost no one was unscathed. If you didn’t lose a home, you likely knew someone who did.
Nearly all the half-dozen major, named fires started that night across the North Bay were sparked by electrical lines and fueled by gale-force winds that at times exceeded 70 mph in some areas. Other fires moved with equal speed and ferocity, but the Tubbs Fire, which cut a nearly 12-mile swath of destruction from Calistoga to Santa Rosa, became infamous for its ferocity and historic toll.
More than half a million people throughout Sonoma and neighboring counties awoke that night to the smell of smoke and the scream of sirens, the boom of exploding propane tanks and transformers, and the utter chaos of communities on the run — driven through curtains of flames in desperate flight from a sudden, terrifying threat beneath a glowing red sky.
That was the before.
And now, forever, there is the after — a world in which massive wildfires can travel miles overnight and ravage everything in their path like an unhinged beast, destroying and upending whole communities, reminding anyone who may yet harbor doubts that we humans are not in control.
A deeper grief and trauma
It’s a truth that has been visited upon the region more than once in the years since then, forcing us to come to grips with a new reality. It’s made us feel anxious, vulnerable, more prone to react to changes in the air around us.
For some, like Pond, it is the smell of smoke that sends a chill through their spines.
For others, a rising wind conjures dread, especially when it blows hot across the drought-parched landscape.
Still others react to the slapping blades of a helicopter overhead or the shriek of sirens or alarms filling the air in response to someone’s personal crisis.
“We’ve all, I’m sure, picked up our own (emotional) baggage,” said Santa Rosa Mayor Chris Rogers, who noted that on the hottest day in the city’s recorded history last month — 115 degrees — it was the breeze kicking up in the afternoon, gusting through downtown, swaying trees and rustling leaves, that set his teeth on edge.
“I’ve come to find I just hate the wind,” he said.
Many describe a kind of collective post traumatic stress disorder — compounded by the challenges of recovery and the ever-present knowledge that we are, for much of the year, but a single errant spark from possibly reliving the nightmare.
For those who lost loved ones, homes, businesses and pets in the fires, there has been a deeper grief and trauma, layered with the logistics, financial obstacles and critical decisions that come too swiftly in the aftermath — and all of it weighed down by fear of future disasters.
Even those who lost nothing have suffered.
“It can be traumatizing to witness all of it, right?” said psychologist Alisa Liguori Stratton, who spent several years as part of the Wildfire Mental Health Collaborative, an initiative launched after the fires to address the county’s long-term recovery needs.
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