Bill Lynch: The ghost of the fire monster

When the morning sun glows burnt orange as it rises from the Mayacamas,

the specter of the beast passes through our minds like a dark shadow.

We haven’t recovered from last fall’s terrible visit, yet already our neighbors in Lake and Mendocino counties are fighting it once again.

Even if the grim news was absent from our devices, the air and sky would tell us all we need to know.

Dottie and I were in attendance recently at La Luz Center’s annual fundraising dinner held this year at the King family’s K2 Ranch at the bottom of Trinity Road where it intersects Highway 12. In attendance were more than 300 of our Sonoma Valley neighbors and friends, including several who once lived in lovely homes within a few hundred feet of where we dined. Many of those homes are now gone, the earth around them charred, their stately trees bent and blackened skeletons.

The event, ably led by the irrepressible Marcelo Defreitas, Sonoma’s 2018 Alcalde, was dedicated to raising funds so that La Luz could carry on with the life-saving and restoring assistance it has given to fire victims since last October.

The ranch, which also suffered severe damage in the fire, was a most appropriate venue in which to remind us of not only what happened, but most certainly what will happen again.

Three of the most devastating wild fires in the history of our community began their rampages through the Valley virtually where we were standing.

The blaze of Sept. 17, 1923 came out of the canyon through which Nuns Canyon Road and Trinity Road rise and spread south and west, leveling a large portion our Valley of the Moon from Glen Ellen to the southern boundaries of Boyes Hot Springs.

My Grand Aunt Celeste Murphy was the editor of the Sonoma Index-Tribune then. The post-fire issue’s headline declared, “Fire Sweeps Valley - Boyes Spring Leveled by Flames, Sonoma Vista and Woodleaf Park Prey of Conflagration.”

Her story began, “Fire, fanned by one of the worst gales in the history of Northern California, got away from men burning out bees just over the Napa County line and by nightfall was sweeping down Nuns Canyon toward Sonoma Valley with terrifying rapidity. Ranchers of the Trinity District realized the danger and rallying all available fire fighters (who were the residents themselves) battled in the face of the windstorm to fight back the flames from their homes.”

Editor Murphy’s story went on to describe how the people living on Trinity Road and Nuns Canyon had to flee for their lives when they could not stand against the fast-moving blaze.

It raged for two days.

In rural communities like Sonoma Valley virtually all of the fire fighters were volunteers.

Fire trucks were in their earliest primitive stages.

Valley citizens did their best with buckets, wet gunnysacks, shovels and rakes. One guy who owned a fruit market threw watermelons at a blazing portion of his store and managed to extinguish the flames.

Olga Weghofer, Sonoma High School student and daughter of the local tailor, armed only with wet sacks, her long hair singed by flames, face black and grimy from smoke and soot, fought bravely to save her Fetters Springs family home. She was one among many other ordinary citizens who stood and battled the raging firestorm that threatened their businesses and homes with little more than their bare hands.

Four decades later, the beast returned.

On September 19, 1964, hellish winds clocked at nearly 70 mph, turned sparks from clashing power lines near Trinity Road into a monster fire that roared down the canyon following virtually the same path as the fire of 1923.

This time, professional fire fighters combined with hundreds of volunteers using modern fire trucks, bull dozers and air tankers, managed to control the blaze before it leveled the Springs a second time.

But not before 30 families lost their homes.

In both fires, the high winds that had ignited and carried the blazes on their destructive journeys died down after a couple of days.

Last October, we weren’t so lucky. The devil winds, some clocked in excess of 70 knots, spawned numerous outbreaks with the first roaring down a path virtually identical to the fires of ’23 and ’64. Many of our fellow Sonomans barely escaped with their lives, while all of their homes and all of their belongings were turned to ash.

In spite of more firefighters, improved equipment and massive air support, the blaze lasted longer and did far worse damage than the other two historic conflagrations combined.

This knowledge haunts me, as it does many Sonomans. The beast knows its way and needs only the dry, hot northeasterly winds of September and October to ravage us once more.

This time we must be more prepared to fight it.