California fire evacuees cling to sense of community, shared grief

CALISTOGA, Calif. Here at the Napa County Fairgrounds, nearly 1,000 people who fled for their lives from the Valley fire now sleep on cots in tents. They line up to use portable toilets, wear other people’s clothes, and on Tuesday, many took their first showers in days.

Here under hazy skies, with cooler weather and light rain helping firefighters get a handle on the destructive blaze, the displaced residents of Middletown and Hidden Valley, Cobb Mountain and Anderson Springs are re-creating their communities right in the middle of an evacuation center.

Even many who could stay at hotels or move in with relatives are choosing to remain.

“Anywhere else, you’d feel total despair,” said Ann Prehn, 67, who lost her home in hard-hit Anderson Springs. “Here we are in the same boat, trying to figure what we can do if we stick together.”

Firefighters spent Tuesday digging a perimeter line around the 67,200-acre fire, which is now 30 percent contained. But the devastation left behind, from melted homes to dangling transformers and toppling trees, was still too perilous for most to return. On Tuesday, with special escort from the Lake County Sheriff’s Department, some residents were allowed for the first time to quickly check on animals they left behind, from cats to cattle.

But others wouldn’t go even if they could.

“What am I going to go back to, a hot pile of ashes?” asked Sharon Woita, 59, who lost her home in Middletown over the weekend. “I’m not ready to go back.”

Instead, on the fairgrounds midway lined with Porta-Potties and insurance booths and in the exhibit halls converted to dormitories, they shared their anger, frustration and grief over a fire that destroyed nearly 600 homes and killed at least one of their neighbors, with others still unaccounted for.

Jovial Just was quick to express all those emotions. On Saturday afternoon, the Anderson Springs man tried to return to assist his neighbor, 72-year-old Barbara McWilliams, but said he was stopped by a highway patrolman blocking the base of the road.

“I was telling him, I gotta go save my neighbor. It will take 10 minutes, I’ll be right back,” Just said from his tent Tuesday, wiping away tears. “He threatened to arrest me when I said I’d go anyway. It was an inexcusable death.”

He hiked back in on Sunday and found not only his own home burned, but hers, too. Fire officials found her remains. McWilliams is the only confirmed fatality from the Valley fire.

A former San Jose Mercury News reporter, Leonard Neft, 69, has been missing for days from his fire-ravaged Anderson Springs neighborhood, family, friends and former colleagues said Tuesday.

Neft’s wife, Adela, was the last to speak with her husband Saturday evening, as she begged him by phone to flee. Neft told his wife he had received an automated call to evacuate, but he kept insisting the evacuation order was not mandatory and that he didn’t sense an imminent threat.

“He told me: ‘I don’t smell smoke; I don’t see any smoke; I don’t see any ashes,’ ” recalled Adela Neft, 56. “But I kept telling him, ‘You need to go anyway!’ ”

The worst of the blaze seemed to be over by Tuesday, as fire officials focused their investigation into the cause of the fire on a home in Cobb Mountain. Residents evacuated from the Riviera community near Clear Lake were allowed back to their untouched homes. For the most part, cooler temperatures and occasional sprinkles helped calm the fire, with more rain forecast for Wednesday a stark contrast to the heat-wave temperatures and 40 mph winds that stoked the fire over the weekend.

The fire-ravaged Napa and Lake county communities are considered the poor neighbors to charmingly posh Calistoga, 17 miles to the south, known for its mud baths, wineries and haute cuisine. Aside from the workers at the Twin Pines casino and the historic Hardin Hot Springs that burned to the ground, many evacuees are artists and hippies and retirees living on Social Security. Many lost everything they owned.

“Everybody is calling this the City of Angels,” Cookie Clark, 53, a lifelong resident of Middletown said of Calistoga. “We’re blessed to have good neighbors like this.”

The American Red Cross and local service groups are doing all they can to make the evacuees feel comfortable in some ways, as only Calistoga can. Chefs from the luxury Indian Springs resort, Brannan’s Grill and Barolo Italian Kitchen are cooking scrumptious meals and massage therapists and acupuncturists have set up tents.

“People are as hard as rocks and tight as drums,” sad Carolyn Manzi, a massage therapist from “Magical Massage” in Glen Ellen.

“Our job is to make it better for them,” said Elly Galindo, treasurer of the local high school Wildcat Athletic Boosters who is coordinating one of the volunteer efforts.

But sometimes, it’s difficult to watch the pain she sees in their eyes.

“I think they are amazingly resilient,” Galindo said, tearing up. “A lady was crying. She was trying to stop. She said ‘just give me a moment.’ ”

For some, it’s all just too much.

“Today, I’m crashing,” said Mary Brandeau, 61, a technical writer who works from her Hidden Valley home, which was spared. “I just can’t do it anymore. I can’t wear the same clothes day after day after day.”

The worst thing, she said, is the “enforced idleness. It’s excruciating. It’s like after an accident when you have to stay in bed and wait to heal.”

Without much official information being delivered to the fairgrounds, rumors are swirling. One word about a new hot spot in the fire and people who still don’t know whether their home is standing are reduced to tears. How long will the last of this pop-up community be here? A week, two? Who knows?

So, as the children cling to stuffed animals handed out by the Red Cross, the adults cling to each other.

“We’re at the point we don’t want to be split up,” Martha Boehm, 53, said of her neighbors who live on Knowles Road in Middletown and now bunk next to each other in the dormitory. “Someone offered me their house, but I said, ‘No, I have to stay with my group and hold them together ...,’ ”

The children seem to be faring the best. The field once reserved for fair rides and cotton candy is now a perfect spot for playing tag.

But it’s especially difficult on the elderly. Winifred B. Pugh is 85. She’s in a wheelchair and sleeps on a cot each night with her oxygen machine. Her home in Middletown on the corner of Main and Jefferson, which has been in her family for 100 years, burned to the ground, just moments after she left it.

“I was going to stay with the house, but the fire department said they were going to pick up my wheelchair and everything,” she said, sitting in front of the piles of free clothing. “I was upset.”

But people are friendly at the fairgrounds, she said, and taking good care of her. And something surprising has happened a neighbor whom she hadn’t talked to for years after a spat she can’t even remember reached out to her, asking if there was anything she could do for her.

“You can run into your worst enemy,” she said, “and they’re your best friend.”

Woita is sure her town will rebuild and their group will help each other every step of the way. But even after four days at the fairgrounds, she’s still can’t think of leaving.

“I want to be here.”

(Staff writer Karen de Sa contributed to this report.)

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