Julie Wuest counted the seconds. “Four-one-thousand, five-one-thousand, six . . .” Measuring the time between the flashes that illuminated the sky and the low rumble of thunder, she knew, could help calculate the distance between her and the next lightning bolt—the kind of trick learned in childhood, a rare parcel of folk wisdom that withstands the scrutiny of physics. She was practically still a kid when she first fell in love with the San Lorenzo Valley, in the nineteen-seventies, riding in the empty bed of a friend’s El Camino on her twenty-first birthday, the car corkscrewing down Highway 9 toward Santa Cruz as the redwoods scrolled by. Four decades later, Wuest, now a software consultant, lived among those towering ancient trees, just off that same highway, where she sat alone in her house around three o’clock in the morning, on Sunday, August 16, 2020, and listened to the thunder.
“One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three . . .,” she counted. Soon there was no time between the flash and the bang. The lightning snapped seemingly right above her house, the blasts so loud that Wuest could feel them in her bones. From down on the coast to way up in the mountains, people saw, heard, and then felt it—the most spectacular lightning storm anyone in Santa Cruz County could remember. Some stared, as if in a trance. Others raised their phones and recorded the electrostatic cabaret: incessant purple bolts splintering the sky for hours.
Across the valley from Wuest, Megan Lonsdale had woken to what felt like a freight train swooshing past her house on Sweetwater Lane, a sound she soon recognized as a powerful gust of wind. The purple lights strobed outside the window, stirring her young son and teen-age daughter, who joined her to watch the show until nearly dawn. Thirteen miles away, down on the coast, Paul and Jacklyn Sacco slept in the rented beach house they were sharing with family that weekend—until the thunder clapped them awake. “It was very dramatic,” Paul, a retired high-school counsellor, told me. “We saw the lightning, and I marvelled at it—and did not give one single thought about the consequences.”
By the time the sun came up that morning, the sky had cleared. The air turned hot and muggy, but, aside from sporadic power outages, there was no indication of a life-changing event under way. Hallie Greene, the director of the Boulder Creek Recreation and Park District, remembers an unusual excitement in the office on Monday morning, as colleagues shared stories about the thunder. “Thinking back now,” she said a month later, “none of us really recognized that those were the last few days of this semi-normal life we were all living.”
More than eleven thousand lightning strikes buffeted central and Northern California over thirty-six hours, leading to one of the biggest wildfire seasons in recorded state history. Of the twenty largest California wildfires since 1932, half a dozen started in August or September of 2020. Santa Cruz County, the surf and mountain community seventy miles south of San Francisco—home to a mix of new tech money, artists, farmers, retirees, and back-to-the-land off-gridders—experienced one of worst infernos of the summer, the C.Z.U. Lightning Complex fire. Named after Cal Fire’s three-letter call sign for its San Mateo–Santa Cruz unit, C.Z.U. wasn’t the largest in terms of square miles, but it was among the most destructive in terms of property. Of the more than seven thousand five hundred structures damaged or destroyed by California wildfires so far this year, C.Z.U. burned a fifth of them.
Climate change undoubtedly played a role, scientists affirm. The fires this summer resulted from a confluence of factors, including a severe drought that California began experiencing in 2012 and this year’s unprecedented heat waves, in August and early September, Lenya Quinn-Davidson, a University of California wildfire expert, said, adding that, together, these factors produced “a condition in California where our fuels are basically drier than they’ve ever been. . . . Then we get this slightly unprecedented lightning storm” with thousands of strikes “within thirty-six hours.”
Jon Keeley, a U.S. Geological Survey researcher whose area of expertise includes central California, points to more than a century of forest mismanagement as a factor in nearly all the fires that have made headlines over the past few years. Before the modern era, “these landscapes historically had fires at relatively frequent intervals, which burned off a lot of the fuels that normally accumulate every year: the leaves and branches and the understory,” Keeley told me. “Beginning in the early nineteen hundreds, state and federal agencies started a policy of putting out fires. As a result, we have vast areas that have missed many natural fire cycles.”
Santa Cruz County, unfortunately, illustrates the point perfectly. Keeley showed me a map that included the now well-known path of C.Z.U., color-coded to depict past fires in the area. A vast swath was uncolored, indicating no documented conflagrations. “I would just estimate, looking at it, maybe ninety per cent of that landscape has never had a fire” in recorded history, Keeley said. “That’s a huge amount of fuel.”
Summer had been on hold in Santa Cruz, just like everywhere else in the country—at least summer as anyone recognized it. Because of the pandemic, the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, a storied amusement park in operation since 1907, shuttered its rides and arcades. Several parks remained closed. Large beach gatherings were banned. So Megan Lonsdale, her husband, Patrick, and their two kids had poured their hopes into a late-summer camping trip near Lake Tahoe.
Two days after the lightning storm that woke Lonsdale, the family embarked on the two-hundred-and-sixty-mile drive. As they made their way east, then north, up into the Sierras, Megan quietly worried about their home. There had been reports of wildfires, though none close to Sweetwater Lane. Still, the house was like an extension of the family. She and Patrick, a carpenter, renovated and remodelled the home, which they moved into in the early two-thousands. Their kids, Lily and Finn, were born in the master bedroom. The thought of losing it was unfathomable. She put the fear out of her mind as best she could, careful not to spoil the family’s one escape from the pandemic and its restrictions.
That night, at the campsite, checking her phone, Megan learned that flames had erupted in Boulder Creek, not far from Sweetwater Lane. “I spent what was supposed to be a nice relaxing evening glued to my phone, checking messages, checking Facebook, and getting increasingly concerned,” she later recalled. Around midnight, she read that officials had declared an evacuation order for her neighborhood. At daybreak, the family was back on the road. Five hours later, they pulled up to the house. It still stood, untouched by the fire. Ash swirled in the air. The sky glowed a terrible red-orange. The family rushed in to grab what they could—not photos or keepsakes but clothes and other items to get them through a few days until the evacuation order ended. “We never dreamed that we weren’t coming back,” Megan later said.
After forty minutes, she and the kids jumped back into one of the family cars, bound for a hotel in a San Jose suburb, twenty-five miles away. Patrick stayed behind. He climbed atop the house with a hose to soak the roof. Before he climbed back down to join his family, he spotted a burn mark, likely the result of a spark carried by the wind. Fire was coming for Sweetwater Lane.
At the hotel, Megan stayed glued to her phone, checking social media, fielding texts from neighbors who had sneaked back up into the canyon. She, Patrick, and the kids spent the next few days in emotional whiplash. “We did a couple cycles of being convinced our house was gone,” Megan recalls, “because we heard reports like ‘As I was leaving, I heard propane tanks exploding on Sweetwater.’ ” How could their home, not far from the explosions, survive something like that? “I remember collapsing onto the bed of the hotel, sobbing with my kids.”
On Friday morning, August 21st, came a break. It was Lily’s fourteenth birthday, and Megan had slipped out of the hotel room to buy doughnuts as a surprise. While out, she got a call. Someone had seen the house, still standing. She rushed back to the hotel room, doughnuts in hand, to deliver the good news. The family’s hopes were renewed. Patrick, determined as ever, returned to Sweetwater Lane, energized. “He was [back] up there trying to put out little spot fires. Things would flare, he would call 911, then fire support would come. Then they’d leave. Things would flare again. He’d call again.”
Patrick rested on Saturday, back at the room, but made a plan for Sunday morning, setting his alarm for 4 a.m. He would get up, return to the house, and spend the day fighting the flames. When the rest of the family awoke, he was already gone. They didn’t expect him back until late afternoon. So Megan was surprised when Patrick returned at 8:30 a.m. That’s too soon, she thought, seeing him through the hotel window. Then she studied his face, the look in his eyes. And she knew.
Megan and Patrick Lonsdale’s home was one of a thousand four hundred and ninety structures taken by the C.Z.U. Some sixty-five thousand people were evacuated. Just one person died, a seventy-three-year-old Vietnam vet. Thousands of survivors were displaced. As with the Lonsdales, the news for many came sporadically and with rapidly changing conclusions.
Julie Wuest had moved to the San Lorenzo Valley almost thirty years after that El Camino ride down Highway 9 that inspired her. In 2004, she bought a house that she was determined to fill with beauty—the art and other artifacts she collected through her world travels—until it was “like living on the inside of a jewelry box.” On Thursday, August 20th, four days after counting the seconds between the lightning and thunder, Wuest tried to return to her home but found the road blocked. She asked someone she knew at the checkpoint: “Is my house on fire? Or has it burned?” He told her it was still there. Later in the afternoon, he sent a photo, showing a home directly in front of hers intact. Eight hours after that she got a call from a neighbor. “Julie, our neighborhood’s gone.”
Paul and Jacklyn Sacco, the couple at the beach rental during the lightning storm, built their home, tucked in a copse of redwood trees, with their own hands more than forty years ago—they taught themselves cement laying, carpentry, and construction from books. After the fire, they waited three weeks to return, and werewere awestruck by the sight. Being there “let us know what gone means,” Paul told me. “It’s like you don’t know what gone is until you see it. It was amazing to me. . . . The wood just goes to ash. An inch’s worth of ash. The metals melt, most of them. The appliances just get charred and wrecked. The stove.”
Sam Clarkson, an avid surfer and ceramics instructor at Cabrillo College, lived atop a mountain in the community of Bonny Doon with his wife and two kids. When the evacuation order came, Clarkson, out of town and with little time left, asked his son to grab a surfboard. His son managed to stuff eight into the car. When Clarkson returned after the fire and dug through the rubble, he reunited with another important part of his life: shards of pottery.
Hallie Greene, the local parks and recreation director, felt oddly elated. She stood looking at the ashes of her former home and didn’t cry. “It’s almost like a spiritual experience to let go of your things,” she said. But Megan Lonsdale couldn’t bring herself to look. Not at first. She waited more than a month before she returned to Sweetwater Lane. She knew it would wreck her. “On a daily basis, I am speared through my heart thinking of things that I wish I had grabbed,” she told me. “And my kids, too. That’s the hardest thing for me, is seeing my kids have those moments. And just knowing that I can’t offer them any comfort.”
Beyond the hundreds of destroyed homes and public buildings, the thirty-seven-day C.Z.U. fire—which burned eighty-six thousand acres—ravaged the area’s infrastructure. The Santa Cruz County septic system, one of the densest of any region west of the Mississippi, has suffered significant damage. The loss of so much mountainous vegetation means that mudslides are likely for the buildings and roads still left.
Until this summer, Santa Cruz was relatively unscathed by the fires that have plagued California and the West in the past few years. That changed with C.Z.U. “Santa Cruz County has been home to earthquakes and floods, and now we’ve got these god-awful wildfires, like so many other regions in the state,” Bruce McPherson, a former California secretary of state and a fourth-generation Santa Cruz native, who’s now a county supervisor, said. “We’re almost afraid to wake up tomorrow to see what it’s going to bring.”
Nearly all the people I spoke to were stuck in limbo between their former lives and whatever eventually comes up from the ashes. When I last spoke to Julie Wuest, she was about to rent an R.V. to park on her property, to better assess the situation and help her neighbors. Megan and Patrick Lonsdale and their two kids recently moved into a town-house rental; they’re still deciding whether or not to rebuild.
Fire season is far from over. In the past few years, the worst fires have started in October and November, Lenya Quinn-Davidson, the University of California wildfire expert, pointed out: “We get those Santa Ana winds in Southern California. We get the diablo winds in the Bay Area.” Some of the most damaging fires in California history, she reminded me, have happened in the fall. “We still have that whole time period ahead of us.”
