Landmark, Inner Spirit Still Intact

I had been looking for a fire on this winter solstice night, around which to join a circle of friends in songs and stories to celebrate the return of lengthening days beneath the blazingly full moon.

But the furious crimson glow in the sky ahead was way more fire than I had in mind.

For the next 16 hours, I would watch in wonder as the flames menaced and then overran the Ojai Foundation, a spiritual retreat where my wife and I have shared some important moments and discovered many kindred spirits. I would wield shovel, rake and hose in a puny attempt to protect this special place from the indiscriminate appetite of the wildfire. And when the evacuation order finally came, I would lead a caravan of weary, frightened souls down the surreal smoke-choked Dennison Grade to unroll their sleeping bags on my living room floor.

First word of what would come to be called the Ranch fire arrived about 9 p.m. by phone from the Happy Valley School, just west of the foundation’s educational retreat center north of California 150 between Ojai and Santa Paula.

“I smell smoke,” said Sharon Gonzales from the school. “Go look and see what’s happening.”

Foundation staffers hurried to the top of the hill and could see flames to the east, several canyons away, beyond the neighborhood called the Summit. Smoke billowed and plumed beneath the extraordinarily bright moon, and gusting winds were already pushing the inferno directly toward us.

About the same time, abandoning my solstice party idea, I raced uphill to the Ojai Foundation and found co-director Gigi Coyle gathering the staff and the dozen or so work-retreat residents in the kitchen building for a nose count and strategy session.

“We need to be ready to leave in a hurry, if the time comes,” she said. “So put your things in a car and then come help get ready.”

Wet down the ground around the main buildings--most of them circular Mongolian yurts that serve as office, meeting rooms and lodgings. Rake the oak leaves away from the scattered domes and yurts that house the individuals and couples who come here to spend a little quiet time with nature and their own thoughts. Turn on the sprinklers in the gardens near the kitchen and staff house. Do whatever we can to protect the many sculptures, shrines and mementos created by the thousands of people who have visited here over the last 20 years.

Caroline Willer, 28, a German woman near the end of an eight-week work retreat, focused her energy on saving the foundation’s oldest landmark, a massive 500-year-old oak known as the Teaching Tree. Beneath its vast canopy countless groups--ranging from troubled couples to corporate team builders to inner-city youths to purely spiritual seekers--have learned the council method of communication. Like everything here, from small painted stones to monumental works of architecture in stone, adobe and wood, the Teaching Tree symbolizes tradition, connection with older and larger wisdom. Willer trained her hose on the branches and soaked every leaf she could reach.

As midnight came and went, the young crew filled buckets with sand and placed them near likely crisis points. When fire swept through this valley 14 years ago, foundation board member Lola Rae Long spent the whole night smothering flare-ups with sand from buckets like these--and saved the place.

At the top of 40 leased acres everyone at the foundation reverently refers to as The Land, we gathered one by one to shiver in the vicious wind and watch the ominous creep of flames along progressively closer ridges. For a long while, the fire seemed to be skirting our hill. Then one red tentacle, another and another, stretched across the ridge and here it came.

“The sheriff’s office has advised us to leave,” Coyle announced. “They say they won’t force us to leave, but they won’t give us another warning, either. Staffers can decide for themselves, but it’s time for the guests to leave The Land.”

*

An emergency shelter awaited at Nordhoff High School, but I invited everyone to my house in Ojai, thinking it would be less jarring for people who had been soaking up nature and solitude for weeks--especially two women just completing a “vision quest,” going 24 hours or more without food or sleep with the intent of gaining deeper understanding.

And so, after completing our watering and helping to load computers and data files into cars, eight of us headed for town about 2 a.m.

At 7, when I emerged to start the coffee pot, the living room was full of tears.

“The fire came right over the ridge and destroyed everything,” announced a foundation regular who had left later than the rest of us.

My spirit sagged as I thought of all the memories we had shared there, all the love and creativity that had gone into this motley collection of structures and artworks, all the money and hard work that were even now being invested to build a proper conference center and more comfortable facilities as the foundation starts its third decade with ambitious plans.

All gone. In a few hours. Heartbreaking. Impossible.

But soon, we began to get clues that things weren’t quite so grim.

“I called the foundation and the answering machine was working.” That machine is in the office yurt, so that structure must have survived. Soon, a call came in from Lola Rae Long. “Where are you?” we asked. “I’m standing in the kitchen.” Another building intact!

Now here to our door came Jesse Jessup and his wife, Amber McIntyre, resident managers who had stayed on The Land to the bitter end, with frightening but encouraging reports.

“We had to run for it about 4:30 this morning,” McIntyre said. “It was raining fire. There were walls of flame coming right up to the road.”

“We were literally beaten right down the road with embers falling,” Jessup said. “You could feel the heat right through the car windows.”

*

And the damage? Several of the small residences at the upper end of The Land, including those where my wife and I first became enchanted with this place, were incinerated. The trail-laced mountainside of chaparral and wildflowers leading to an overlook spot called the Power Point is a scorched moonscape. But, miraculously, most of the main buildings and gardens survived intact.

As soon as police allowed, we returned to find Coyle, co-director Marlow Hotchkiss and others battling hot spots with shovels and hoses. In the thick of things was Lola Rae Long, repeating her heroic efforts of 14 years ago.

“I went home to my house across the valley on Sulphur Mountain, and watched all night,” she said. “At first light I came back over. Dennis Rice and his crew from Happy Valley School were already up here, and they stopped the fire line right at the ridge.”

As we fanned out with shovels to beat out the remaining hot spots, Caroline Willer ran to look at the Teaching Tree. Despite a few burned spots, it stood tall and proud, boughs lifted to the still-smoky sky, ready for the next 500 years.

Doug Adrianson is editor of The Times Ventura County Edition editorial pages.