Shards of the Past

We slept on the land for the first time since the fires and I dreamt of cats. Ginger cats, black cats, grey striped cats, even one that at first I thought was a Siamese but turned out to be a light grey color with eyes as blue as the sea. None of them were my cat, and as my dreams melted from one into the other, I rejected each of them, one by one, for they weren’t him—they weren’t my Sebastian. It seemed so real that at one point, I thought I heard a cat mewling outside of the camper, but as I listened to the quiet night, the pale moonlight streaming through the cantilever windows, all I heard was the snoring bulldog at my feet.

Before the fire, as covid was becoming the new normal, we decided to commission a custom made, woody teardrop trailer. It was to be finished on August 16th, but as that fateful weekend approached, the carpenter said he was running late and that we needed to wait a week before we could pick her up. It’s a good thing he was behind schedule, for the house and everything else on the land burned on August 19th. Had she been there, she would have burned as well, without us ever sleeping in her. Instead, we have our traveling bedroom, called Cutie, and she now resides in the place where Big Trees Cabin Airbnb once greeted guests from all over the world.

It’s strange to return to a place you once knew so intimately but now hardly recognize. It’s like meeting up with the great love of your youth, the one who got away, after decades of living apart. You sit across the table from him in the restaurant, searching his once familiar face, wondering how you could have known someone so well only to forget them. Then he looks you in the eyes and as he speaks, the sound of his voice recalls the passion you once shared. Some love never really goes away.

I feel that away on my land now, grateful that we’ve put a rebuild of the home on hold. I need time to get to know this place again. I met a builder up there a few weeks ago, a local man who was one of the “Renegades” who stayed behind to fight the fires and saved houses. Now, he’s rebuilding the houses he couldn’t save, healing the community through his craft. I imagine what an opportunity this is for him—how crucial a person like him is when eco-disaster is becoming the norm. As we spoke, he mentioned that a rebuild is different because we know our land since we’ve already lived on it, and can put buildings in the places that make the most sense. As I gazed around the unfamiliar landscape, squinting at the sun, I shrugged. This is not the case for me. What was once a magical, green, lush forest is now a wasteland, exposed to the harsh sun, already hot in March, without an ounce of shade for almost two acres. I do not know this place. Not yet.

It starts with the soil, so this first weekend “home” I built a compost pile. I also moved wood chips that PG&E had left in huge piles, from the top of the yard where they’d slaughtered our trees down to our campsite, to help keep down the dust. As I worked, I couldn’t believe the amount of shards I found all over the yard, even in places where no buildings had once stood. Dangerous diamonds, glittering in the sun like mangled shark’s teeth sprouting from the earth. I began to cart a five-gallon bucket with me as I did my chores, and filled it not once, but three times in the course of twenty-four hours. I think I’ll get a fanny pack to wear while I work up there. I know I will never be able to get all the broken bits out of the soils, but I can at least pick up the ones the size of my palm that threaten to mangle my dogs’ paws.

The debris of our lives is complicated. At first, just after the fire, we sifted through hoping to find things that survived. In our case, there was very little left—a random marble or tiny statue of the Buddha, a shard with the Virgin Mother’s face, the silver-plated forks, knives, and spoons, a few Christmas ornaments and even the tree-topper—but most of what we found then, even if it was still whole, was charred and burnt. Now what I find are shards of the past, hundreds of puzzle pieces, and I can’t help but try and figure out what it once was. Tile from the bathroom? The handle of a baking pan? A piece of Sam’s pottery? I found a part of my granite kitchen counter in the place where my son used to sleep and a tiny, plastic child’s fork up in the garden. I never had children that young when we lived there, so it must have been dropped by one of the littles that came before us. As I picked up the purple fork, I imagined two adorable girls, picnicking in the garden while their father planted the rosemary bush I loved so much. I tuck the fork into my back pocket and sigh. All that’s left of Rosemary is a root I managed to scrape out of the ground.

I spent a lot of time where my house once stood since this is where I plan on planting the pollinator garden. I realize that as soon as I cover it in manure, clover, and other crops good at building the nitrogen in the soil, nature will have her way and the shards of the past will be hidden as the humus of life grows on top of the place we once slept. This is the cycle and nature of things, yet I can’t plant until I have water and in the meantime, my dogs are running like crazy all over this flat stretch of land.

I pick and pick and pick for hours. Just as my bucket is ready to be dumped for the second time, I find a pair of scissors, blades burned into one, the handles missing. I know them—a once fabulous pair of leopard-print-handled, Gingher sewing shears I’d inherited when my friend Laura passed in 2018. Turning them in my hand, my heart begins to ache—Laura had taken her life because she was drowning in financial turmoil, a single mom in Santa Cruz trying to hold onto her house and keep her son from living on the streets. I’d called her the canary in the coalmine back then, and I think about how the housing crisis here has only gotten worse since she left. The way homes are selling for over asking price while the shanty town on highway 1 spills over into the railroad tracks. I think of her son and how little I’ve been able to help him since the fire. I know he understands I’m trying to figure out my own life and now I understand both he and Laura a little better. I’m not in danger of homelessness, but I am without a home in a market where the wealthy’s second or third houses sit empty while the streets are lined with sleeping bags and battered RVs.

It’s clear now why I was guided to be still, to wait, to live on the land without committing all my capital to the house itself. I recommend that anyone who is in this position take some time to camp on your land before signing with a builder, especially if it was changed as drastically as mine. I spent the day seeking shade and finding none until four in the afternoon, and it’s only March. I need to see what it’s like this summer and what fire season will bring. How do the winds blow now that there aren’t trees to block them? What will the standing dead on my neighbor’s land do when they fall? Where will they fall? Do I really want to park a million dollars in a state that has been so poorly managed, its electrical grid is now considered a public safety threat, while roads that were washed away in the rainstorms of 2017 are still unrepaired? What is this place that can charge up to 13% in income tax but fail to protect us during the lightning storms, instead cutting the budget for its fire programs while watching the lands grow drier and drier?

None of this is the land’s fault. I don’t want to hang a for sale sign on her and run off to greener pastures. I want to create a garden where there once was a forest. Home ownership is unappealing right now, but land stewardship is a thrill. Yes, it can grow back on it’s own, but an apiary needs human hands. Bees love their beekeepers as much as we love them. Many of us like to think of humanity as a parasite and I admit our economic system certainly suggests that. I’d like to argue though that as children of the earth, our species exists for a reason and that while many environmentalists like to claim the Earth can live without us, we all know that any time a species goes extinct, there are consequences. Humans are no different. We were created by the Earth, like all the other lifeforms on the planet, and rather than be ashamed of my existence, I prefer to ask, why did she create humans? Is it to be the hands of the Earth? To protect and manage the forests? To help move plants and seeds the way the birds do? To bring beauty to one another’s lives? We can live lighter, that is true, and somewhere along the line, we took ourselves out of the web of life. If there’s one thing the wildfire has taught me, it’s that my life is directly tied to the rest of life.

I don’t put Laura’s sewing shears in my back pocket, but I do bring them home and put them with the rest of the debris we’ve decided to keep. She’d often tell me that my house didn’t match me, that I was something different than a cabin in the woods. She was like that, saying things that you didn’t always like to hear. Perhaps though, she was right? Maybe I’m not a cabin in the woods type of girl. At the moment, I’m a teardrop trailer type of girl. Like a gypsy in a caravan. For some reason, this thought thrills me. I imagine Laura would approve.