I didn’t know it at the time but my climate journey started in 2007:
My Introduction: the Malibu Fire
A few short months after moving to California from rural Illinois, I remember waking up on a warm November morning to the pitch black, the darkest moment right before dawn. Our RA, Nnenna was waking my twin sister calmly but firmly: “there’s a fire, we need to evacuate.” Not fully fathoming the situation, Kaitie and I exited our dorm + as we turned onto the street we could see fire blazing on the hillside above us. Crouch-running and still in pajamas with nothing in hand, we followed the streams to the TC, Pepperdine’s main campus heart and the heat of the moment hit.
Fueled by the Santa Ana winds, the Woolsey Fire proceeded to devastate the Malibu and remote Santa Monica Mountains communities over the next week. Three people lost their lives, 1600 structures destroyed, almost 100k acres burned and over $6 billion in damages. Gratefully for Pepperdine’s built-in fire mitigation measures, the entire campus was spared and us students were able to shelter in place for the duration of the fire.
I remember seeing our neighbors fleeing to the coastline for their lives and helicopters scooping water from campus ponds and sprinkling it along the ridgelines for days straight. Iconic hillside homes, central to Malibu town square, were gone overnight, and the community was shattered. I remember the ghost town effect post-disaster, filled with FEMA and shell-shocked survivors. It was my first glimpse into widespread collective trauma, the power of a strong tight-knit community + how climate change would come to shape our futures.
This experience shaped my future too, guiding me into writing my senior paper on the “Effects of Tourism on Disappearing Destinations: A Case Study of the Greenland Ice Sheet, the Amazon Rainforest + the Great Barrier Reef”. As a travel nut, the tourism industry would continue to define my early career, but climate change came to make an even bigger mark in the long run, solidifying my budding climate collapse awareness within a decade and half.
The Big Shift: CZU Lightning Complex Fire
Thirteen years later, my husband and I settled in paradise. I had traveled thousands of miles globally as a student and travel agent then across America as an adventure travel guide and finally explored the corporate world in San Francisco and Silicon Valley during the golden years of tech. After this long search, we finally found our serenity space in a remote mountain town in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Boulder Creek is technically in the Bay Area: an hour from San Jose or SFO but a world away otherwise, nestled into a little patch of temperate rainforest connected to Big Basin Redwoods, California’s oldest state park, with a small full-time residency of 5,000. Life is slow paced and nature-oriented + community is alive, but that’s been tested quite a lot in the last five years. After years of research on shifting weather patterns, water tables and climate preparedness, I was fooled into believing that we had finally found a safe haven.
Unfortunately shortly after we nestled in the rural town, the CZU Lightning Fire Complex broke out and engulfed our community seemingly overnight. Everything changed that day; I shared a poem I wrote during displacement last year to capture the emotion, naivety and horror of that moment in time. Big Basin’s story is even more powerful. It was and still is devastating to this day.
I remember the gravity of getting that evacuation order, how the daily fire and sheriff report became everything for weeks while we were displaced + the horror of checking the fire zone map for the first time to see if your home was still there. The fire reached within two miles of our home, and it devastated our small community. The CZU fire killed one person, destroyed 1,000 structures, 86k acres and incinerated the majority of a few cherished parks, including Big Basin Redwoods.
As a pseudo park gift store for the first three years post-fire, I’ve discussed this park and the fire with thousands of folks and the stories are so touching. Most often I hear the depression of the old timers who still aren’t able to bring themselves up there. Many probably never will return, unable to cope with its current state, but their memories of the park’s glory days still sparkle. The diversity of lives this park impacted and the love of nature it instilled is immense, and despite the open wounds, the park has a strong future yet to come.
Our community will never be the same though. Less than 12% of those who lost their homes have been able to rebuild four years later, and the area is noticeably less vibrant as a result. For a firsthand account of losing your home to wildfire, I highly suggest checking out Camp Fire Survivor Stories. In closing my storefront earlier this year, I shared about how naive I was after the fire, expecting the area to bounce right back. Unfortunately building post-disaster is a long, arduous process + it’ll take decades to start to see any semblance of the past.
Also post-fire there’s so much sky. That’s a common thread I hear across most recent fire zones: in thickly forested places of yesterday, growing tomatoes is suddenly possible. Unfortunately most of the other changes aren’t so positive. Forests act like swamp coolers so with less tree cover comes lots more heat. Ever since the fire, summer temperatures are 10-20° hotter on any given day. Aside from being uncomfortable at 115° in a place where few folks have A/C, this extra heat stress puts all the remaining ecosystems at major risk + increases future fire danger, creating a perpetuating cycle.
Full Doomer: ‘23 Windstorm
We suffered with our community through that CZU Complex in Aug ‘20 and I’ve also seen a quick strike of death firsthand in an auto accident and held our dog in my arms while she passed, but the Windstorm of March ‘23 was my scariest personal experience yet. They called it a bomb cyclone, with two coastal storm fronts converging above us into 70 mph winds. Redwoods are fierce trees, built to sustain strong gusts, but I watched a massive sequoia crash right before my eyes. I can still hear the booming sound of the heartwood cracking in the back of my mind; I’ve been haunted ever since..
In the eye of the storm I set out for a walk believing the storm to be over. After less than a quarter of my intended distance, the storm returned and the cracks began all around me; time to turn around. I passed my neighbor Kate, who remarked how beautiful the storm was, and I returned a quick: “best get inside to safety, godspeed!” My walk turned into a run for the rest of the quarter mile home as redwoods started folding, falling, snapping and shedding profusely in every direction around me. I rushed under a neighborhood oak tree whose entirety fell to the ground little but fifteen minutes later.
Once in the safety of my home, I called my husband in full terror panic mode, unsure where to hide or what to do. As I stood in my office window planning with him from afar, I watched one of my favorite neighborhood's majestic 200+ ft redwoods halve, with the top crashing straight towards me, crushing three houses and ending two yards short of ours. I crumpled to the ground, crushed inside; I couldn’t believe it was gone just like that - centuries of growth that countless people have admired, meeting such a destructive demise.
After the sobbing subsided, I moved into a corner of the house that felt most safe from tree fall potential and the next five hours was a blur. By the grace of god, Spencer made it home (after driving under multiple fallen trees and over a couple of downed power lines) and we began to prepare for the week ahead together. The next day, our neighbors banded together to clean the oak tree from the road and had a street bonfire that evening. Of 23 homes in our neighborhood, five were destroyed but luckily everyone was okay, aside from one kitty.
It would be five days before the multiple smashed power poles were replaced and two more before power was back on. Luckily after many weeks without power over the past five years, Santa Cruz Mountains folks are uniquely adjusted to life off-grid when required. So we adapted and learned to make do.
Lessons in Climate Survival
One thing becomes clearer after every storm: during + in the wake of disaster, your local community is everything. Do you trust your neighbors? Is there a chance your town might run out of supplies? How long can the food in the fridge last without power? How many exit routes do you have? These questions were far from my mind when I first moved to California for university in 2007, but the past 14 years have hardened me.
Disaster at my doorstep for the third time allowed me to engage with the climate conversation wholly and to understand and prepare for what’s heading our direction. I know it’s easy to believe it’ll never happen to you (that was me!), but it’s past time to start planning in case it does. While I used to have a “find a safe place” mindset, debating with relatives which parts of the country will fare best, I’ve learned the hard way that there’s no predicting what’s heading our way. We’ve pushed the climate past the brink of “safe spaces” and into the world of adaptation.
Building for the changes society faces is a monstrous undertaking, and we just happen to be on the front lines. I can almost guarantee that climate will somehow affect you one day too, likely sooner than you’re ready for. Increased heat, loss of community/history and financial/emotional/psychological stress are just a few of the side effects of surviving climate disaster. There’s so much more at stake so I welcome you to join this inevitable evolution whenever you’re ready to make the leap.
Based on my disaster experience, here are my top 3 tips to prepare for whatever your climate journey may bring:
- Enjoy every day: As we’ve experienced, “safe havens” are no longer really predictable or reliable. Regardless it’s amazing to be alive right now at this colossal moment so savor it. We can prepare for 40 different collapse scenarios and somehow #41 would hit us so might as well soak in the one true universal fact: you’re alive right now - appreciate that! The only thing I really know for certain any more is that we’ll all die so let’s make the most of this one wild precious life.
- Learn as much as possible: Once you move from denial to radical acceptance, you’ll face a pretty steep learning curve. It’s amazing how much ancestral knowledge we’ve lost in the last two centuries from hunting and gathering to plant identification to building and making every day shelter and goods. There are lots of hands on skill sets that will foster a brighter future and now’s a perfect time to pick up some skillz.
- Find and foster community: Vote + invest locally. As we’ve seen, when your world breaks down, your immediate surroundings are what will matter most. How hardy are your utilities? Does your grid have renewable sources (important as backup in disaster)? How efficient/resourced are your emergency services? How durable is your transportation network? Is your local watershed protected and clean? What's the permitting process like in your county? I’ve started attending local council meetings, RTC discussions and other locally important events. There are so many avenues for local engagement once you start to search. If you haven’t found where you belong yet, check out my other lessons from Main Street for a little more guidance on finding your way.
Cheers to facing the future with serenity!