After the Fire

Last December 4, the howling Santa Ana winds that visit Southern California every year came tearing through Ventura County, where I’ve lived most of my life. They knocked the power out early, so I got in bed around 9:30. Before the power died, a friend had posted about a small wildfire in a nearby city on Facebook and asked people to pray that it would remain small.

Sometime that night, the power came back on. When I woke up on December 5, I had dozens of text messages from friends checking on me, asking if I was okay and if I’d evacuated. I opened Facebook and scrolled through my news feed, my heart pounding as I read the words and saw the videos. The Thomas Fire had a name, and it had already been responsible for great devastation in its first twelve hours.

An entire mental health hospital: burned down. Two apartment complexes: burned down in moments. Beautiful botanical gardens that took years to cultivate: gone. My parents could see the fire from their house and were prepared to evacuate if necessary. By the end of the first day of the wildfire, fifty thousand acres had been burned—a little more than half an acre per second.

The wildfire grew. Wind spread the fire’s embers, sometimes as far as two miles in a single gust. All schools in the city were closed for three weeks because of toxic levels of ash in the air. Most people stayed in their homes, but when they left they wore medical-grade masks to protect their lungs. Several of my friends lost their homes to the fire; even more were evacuated.

The fire burned for forty days before it was fully contained. By the end, it had been the largest wildfire in California history with a total of 281,893 acres burned. A firefighter had lost his life. More than 1,200 structures had been destroyed or damaged. In the final days of the fire, heavy rains caused mudslides in the burn areas that resulted in twenty more deaths.

The loss has been unspeakable. This is the city where I grew from a little girl into a woman. This is a place where some of my best memories were made. Growing up here, I’d had some bad experiences, but mostly this community felt safe and sacred to me. Once the air cleared, the blackened hills were visible from almost any spot in the city. Those black hills were a constant reminder that something precious had been taken from us.

A few weeks later, I took my sister to a rehearsal for a play. We drove down a road that had been crucial in the evacuations. Everything north of the road was burned; everything south was safe. For weeks driving that road meant the smell of smoke and dead earth. We couldn’t escape the wildfire’s aftermath. But on that day? I gasped as I turned the corner and saw what the hills to the north looked like.

For several weeks we’d had a few days of rain at a time. It was never heavy, but it was consistent. Then the weather turned cool but sunny. When I turned onto that road I saw a green so bright it hurt my eyes. The black earth beneath the bright green brush was barely visible.

The growth didn’t erase the wildfire’s destruction, but it couldn’t have happened without it.

I’ve been thinking about the fire for months. Do you ever feel like your life has been ravaged by a metaphorical wildfire? I do. I had so much change and instability in my life growing up. Every time I started to develop some roots, it felt like a wildfire ripped through my life, leaving something black and dead in its wake.

In my research after the Thomas Fire, I discovered that while fire kills and destroys, sometimes it’s necessary for growth. Fire cleans the forest floor, getting rid of weeds and other debris that’s unhealthy for trees. It gets rid of plants that are unhealthy for an ecosystem and allows healthy plants to grow, which then allows space for animals to create new homes. Fire kills disease in a forest, and the burned variegation provides nutrients for the plants that will grow there later. Some trees, such as the jack pine, even need fire to help open their cones and release their seeds.

The green fields of grass that blinded me? Without fire, only old, dry brush would have remained. The jack pine? Without fire, the tree would grow and die, but it would never leave seeds behind. And me? Without fire scorching away the dead things in me, I would never grow any better or stronger or smarter.

God does not cause the fires in our lives, but he allows them. I was so young when I lived through many of the wildfires in my life, and I think about the woman I am now in relation to those events: how much they taught me, how much they took away things I valued at the time but weren’t healthy for me, and how what was left behind in the ashes allowed me to grow better and stronger. I didn’t understand it at the time, but God used those losses to give new life that could not have come without some things being taken away.

As difficult as watching fire ravage my city was, I know that it, too, will be better and stronger. God tells us there is a time for everything—”a time to plant and a time to uproot; a time to kill and a time to heal…He has made everything appropriate in its own time” (Ecclesiastes 3:2–3, 11 CSB). What he allows to burn is what he will rebuild in better ways, even as we endure the pain of loss.

Krista Wilbur, a Southern California native, now makes her home in Austin, Texas. She loves bright colors, dogs, reading, cross stitching, and making new friends. Her first book, Four Letter Words, is available on Amazon.

Photograph © Dominik Lange, used with permission