Rebirth

December 20, 2018

Yesterday I went hiking with friends at Sugarloaf Ridge State Park in Sonoma County. It’s a beautiful hilly park in the wine country, with views of ridge after ridge of the Coast Range mountains. On a clear day you can see San Francisco, various Bay Area mountain peaks, and local vineyards. But yesterday was a foggy day, and as we climbed the steep trail we found ourselves walking through a vast misty landscape of death and destruction.

What we witnessed was the consequence of the deadly Sonoma/Napa wildfires of October 2017. At least 4600 homes were destroyed in Santa Rosa alone, and thousands of acres were burnt to a crisp. Eighty percent of Sugarloaf was incinerated. Our trail made its way through hillsides of charred black carcasses of trees, vertical skeletons of bay, oak, madrone, and Douglas fir. What was once pastoral backcountry now looked, as one of my companions noted, as if it was the aftermath of a nuclear bomb.

But amid the depressing graveyard of trees, there were signs of renewal. New green shoots at the base of bay and oak corpses were reaching skyward. Trees and chaparral were being reborn.

Among my hiking buddies yesterday were two women who lost their Santa Rosa homes in the conflagration. Each of them escaped with their husbands at 2 am with 10 minutes of warning. In addition to those two individuals, I also know many other fellow hikers whose homes were destroyed by the wildfires. All of them were traumatized by their sudden, devastating loss, but they all seem to be moving on with their lives with varying degrees of acceptance and healing.

I’ve never had such a dramatic loss. I was deeply saddened by my father’s death, but it wasn’t unexpected. I’ve lost other family members and friends, but again, their loss wasn’t usually shocking. I imagine that my reaction to precipitous emotional desolation would be comparable to the reactions of my hiking friends to their psychic blows: shock, denial, grief, anger, depression. And eventually, a coming to terms with the vagaries of life and death.

After the sudden and violent death of her husband, my previous landlady had the following haiku on her refrigerator door until she herself died suddenly and violently:

Barn’s burnt down – now I can see the moon.

Disaster, followed by epiphany. Tragedy, then opportunity. After calamity, new growth. Firestorm, succeeded by green shoots from blackened trees. Death, and rebirth. Grief. And eventually, laughter.