Rekindling haunting memories

People wanted to go home -- all but Darlene Rose.

She was too scared.

“I don’t want to look at it,” she said. “I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to go back to a place where everything that is familiar, things that you saw for years, is gone. All the trees I used to ride my horses through -- they are dead. You will never see those pine trees. My grandkids will. Not me. It’s devastating.”

Rose, 46, began to cry. Her hands trembled. She climbed into her pickup to try to sleep early Friday at the Del Mar Fairgrounds and Race Track, where people from the San Diego County community of Ramona had gathered for safety. At peak danger, there were more than 2,000 evacuees at the facility from many parts of the county.

Now the fire danger was easing.

But Rose did not want to leave. Would she ever feel safe again? “People are anxious to get back in. I’m not.”

This was her second fire. The moment she sniffed smoke Sunday night, she flashed back to the 2003 Cedar fire. It had burned down the home where she was living and she had barely gotten out alive. This time, it was the Witch fire. Her husband, Bob Lamont, wouldn’t evacuate. So she and her sons hauled five of their horses to safety -- and tried to call him.

No answer.

“Did the fire get him? When you can’t get someone on the phone, it’s really scary. Are they dead or alive?

“You think with the first blaze: OK, this was a freak fire. You figure in your lifetime it will never happen again. And then it did. Now I’m wondering: When will it happen again? I know it will happen again.”

Rose is 4-foot-10 and weighs 108 pounds. But she does not scare easily. In 1997, her back was broken when a steer ran her down. In 2001, she fell and hurt her back again. Then a horse threw her. She dismisses the braces she wears on both arms for osteoarthritis

But the Cedar fire had terrorized her. She suffered nightmares: Sirens, smoke and visions of herself running through flames.

Finally, she willed away the bad dreams, but her deep-seated fear never left. “The hardest thing is the uncertainty. You don’t know where you’re going to be. You don’t know what could happen next. You could get a phone call: Your house is going up in flames.”

And now this fire, the Witch fire.

As flames burned on the ridges Sunday night, she hitched a horse trailer to her pickup. She loaded three horses into the trailer and two more into her sons’ trailer. Her husband followed -- but then decided to turn back.

“He turned around! I could have killed him.”

She and her boys went to a hotel. The area was evacuated, so they decamped to the home of a friend, then to the racetrack.

“It’s strange,” Rose said. “You don’t know where you are going to end up. You have no clue where you will end up.

“It’s hard to be attacked by something you have no control over. . . .”

Rose finally reached her husband. He was not hurt. Her house survived, but suffered smoke damage. Her beloved trees were ashes.

She started to cry again.

“If you wreck your car, you can get a new one. But this leaves a constant reminder of the trauma. . . . The trees that are gone.”

Her nightmares have come back.

“When I lay down and try to sleep, all I hear is sirens and firetrucks. When I am awake and it’s quiet, in my head that’s what I hear.”

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By Sonia Nazario

sonia.nazario@latimes.com