August 26, 2011
Today marks the two year anniversary of the Station Fire, an event largely forgotten except by a handful of people who endured it, who weathered it, who were weathered by it, and whose lives were altered.
Things are slowly getting back to normal now in the forest, but for some, there will never be the old sense of normalcy. It isn’t just the way the forest looks. Most people who live here are used to that by now. It’s what happened to their lives, their families, their loved ones. It’s what they lost. It’s what changed, fundamentally and forever, in the way they live.
I made the choice fairly early on not to be a victim any more than I had to be. I looked around to find something meaningful in the experience. I embraced the fact that after the fire, I was truly free; I had a cat, dog, truck, and a bunch of possessions that were still intact but that somehow no longer seemed as important as they did pre-fire. I traveled around a little bit. I looked at my options. I had some. There were a number of people willing to give me a fresh start. God bless them. I chose to stay in the forest.
I chose to stay despite the fact that the forest was closed. There was no work. Even the roads were closed. There was no electricity at Haramokngna, where I returned to, and there was no running water for a spell. But we did secure generators, and I did, at last, get to use the wood stove, which I had been instructed not to use the first time I lived there.
I became expert with the wood stove. I could bring the house to an uncomfortably warm 78 degrees. I could keep the same fire going for five or six days.
And I forced myself to create again, to believe in myself again, to do something for which I had no training and no education; to document the recovery of the forest from the fire. I would take bold strides in announcing my intentions, only to find that my neighbors were probably the least impressed with the idea. Theirs was a struggle to get children to school, keep their jobs, and somehow maintain businesses who would not see forest visitors to any significant extent for almost a year and a half.
To say I had neither training nor education is a bit of a misnomer. I have been an environmentalist and photographer all of my life. I even thought I understood a little something about forest fires. I would come to appreciate how little I really do know as well as how much my photography would improve in two years and something in the neighborhood of 60 to 70 thousand images. I would make the liberating shift from 35mm to digital. And I would somehow survive without a job for two years.
The Forest Recovery Project is not about me. It’s not about any particular human being. It’s about how nature works. What I have found, however, is that as natural events go, whether or not the Station Fire was an arson fire, it altered human life.
In some ways I am a very different person than I was before the fire. In other ways I am more myself. It’s a hard thing to explain. I found myself, again, after the fire. In the long, lonely, cold winters. In the days spent silently knee-deep in Tujunga Creek, photographing insects and minute signs of life. In the loves found and lost again. In the hour long sixty mile drives to Starbucks. In the love and support of people, some of whom have never met me, who gifted me with the essentials I needed to make this project complete.
I fell in love and, in characteristic fashion, did so with someone who ended up not being in love with me. That it was intentional, my best defense against commitment, this time I say no…they were more than willing to be a part of my life when we met, and for whatever were my own faults or transgressions to make that change, I feel regret. For all the six or seven other men who would have liked to be the one I fell for, who fed and clothed me, spent glorious weekends on motorcycle trips through the mountains with me, showed me my own back yard and cared for the animals when I could not, my most sincere apologies…that any one of them could have been the man of my dreams and I could be writing this in complete contentment, I sometimes wonder if it could have been so.
Instead, I would continually push people back and try to stand up on my own two legs, but never for long without someone’s help. And in the most unusual twist of events, it was a series of decisions made by other people that would ultimately lead me to where I am today…decisions that I was certain at the time were going to be detrimental ones to my over-all plan. Decisions that I took personal and felt upset about, and then, chose to turn over…to let go and let God, a word I use interchangeably with Creator and Great Spirit, a word that to me encompasses both the energy driving the universe and my most petty, personal wishes and fervent prayers for peace and love and the people I want to share it with.
Where I am today is in the dining room of a house in the heart of the Angeles National Forest, which Redbird acquired a week ago today. Today, however, is the first day that I will be here and no where else. Today is the first day when everything that I and Redbird own is in one place, and once I unload the truck, all of it will be in one house.
Thanks to the fire I began to build a relationship with the Forest Service, not as a whining caretaker but as an independent contractor, albeit unpaid, carrying out documentary work which would prove to be visually impressive as well as scientifically valuable. I would be given limited access to areas of the forest where only the scientific community could legally go.
Eventually that relationship would lead to doors opening. In August of 2010 I gave my first public presentation for the Forest Recovery Project. Shortly after that, I began getting referrals from the USFS to do presentations for other entities. In January 2011 a link to the presentation on the Redbird website would appear on the official USFS website. In that same month a new project would begin, the Pinon Project, raising a target population of 2,000 pinon pines for the USFS. Pinon, being a traditional food source of native people throughout the western hemisphere, made perfect sense for Redbird to become involved with. In a joint effort between the USFS, Haramokngna American Indian Cultural Center, Los Angeles County Fire Department Forestry Division, Los Angeles County Department of Recreation, South Pasadena FireSafe Council, Boy Scout Troop 519 La Canada and a host of individual supporters, the project was ready to go in April 2011. When Haramokngna, the place where I had hoped to keep the seedlings, backed out of the project, I feared we would be unable to continue. The USFS came up with another location and, when after being lost for a hour trying to find it, I finally did, a strange thing happened. I wasn’t even really sure where I was, but I felt like I was home.
The property belonged to the USFS, but the buildings…a large, abandoned school house and single family residence, belonged to La Canada Unified School District. In one of the shortest meetings I have ever attended, the transfer of the property from the school district to Redbird was conceptualized and set in motion in less than ten minutes.
On May 28, the pinon seeds were planted, and today, three months later, the buildings on the property are in the possession of Redbird.
The Forest Recovery Project continues. I would have thought that today I would be out taking pictures, but so far I have been working on the house and feeling blessed beyond words as a USFS helicopter crew has pretty much adopted the badly neglected property and cuts, clears and chips years of overgrown brush and trees.
Could I be more blessed? I don’t know how. But the documentary effort will continue for one more year, and I will be writing a series of articles to accompany it, not about the personal journey, but about the reality of fire in the forest; and of course, I will continue to give live presentations of the Forest Recovery Project wherever and whenever I can.