Early in the morning of October 8, 2017 with the help of ferocious winds, a fire that had begun on Tubbs Lane in Napa, blew its embers and flames into Santa Rosa, first to the neighborhood known as Fountaingrove, located on a semi-rural road on the north end of the city, where dozens of beautifully manicured homes sat upon large landscaped lots. One of those homeowners was Bob Cullinen.
Why is this man smiling?
With less than ten minutes to evacuate Bob and Tomi left their home with nothing more than the clothes on their backs. Tomi's three-day old Mercedes sat in the driveway, as they left only moments before the flames devoured their home and about seventy-five hundred others. The most devastating and deadly fires in California history spread throughout the town where Jadyne, Jennifer, and John were born, where I taught high school English for five years and ran a home-based photography business for twenty-six years.
Bob and I taught together at Cardinal Newman HS, which, like Bob's house, was in the path of the flames.
The administration building. NB. Visitors no longer need to check in at the Main Office.
Turning away from the school and looking north the row of middle-class suburban houses that fronted the administration building look like this:
And amid all the destruction and ash, there are puzzling little unexpected visions. While the Tubbs fire was busy destroying almost everything in its path, it paused just long enough to skip around these two mailboxes and the wooden post that held them up.
Just down the street from the high school was Cloverleaf Ranch, where one could learn to ride a horse, board your own horse, and just learn about horses. Melted corral fence. Click on each image below to scroll.
I took all these photographs in one-half hour along the half-mile stretch of Old Redwood Highway, a road I drove down Monday through Friday for five years. These images on this small stretch of road show only a minute number of the more than seven thousand buildings destroyed. More than forty people died, including a couple who lived behind Cardinal Newman and had just celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary. Like Boston after the marathon bombing, Houston and Florida after Harvey and Irma, Sonoma County is strong. Power is back on. Rebuilding has already begun.