I tried to tell my fellow land tenders that keeping most of the dead material where it was, and just pulling material away from the bases of the trees would be much better. I tried to make a case for an alternate treatment, in which we would do a broadcast burn in the forest in the winter to reduce the buildup of this dead material and recycle the nutrients back into the forest ecosystem. I tried to describe to them how it was inevitable that fire would come to this forest — most likely as a wildfire, if we were not going to burn it intentionally — and that when it did, all the material they were busy piling inside the bases of the trees would burn with such heat and intensity that it would kill these ancient trees, destroying the redwood forest we were ostensibly there to tend.

But nobody would listen to me. They just kept going along, doing what they had been told, setting the stage for the annihilation of these incredibly beautiful trees.

In waking life, I am grateful to have earned the respect of many people who will listen to me when I share my ideas for how to tend the land, and who actively seek my guidance. But my fear of causing damage to beloved trees through misguided stewardship is ever-present.

After the 2020 Glass Fire burned 98% of the 414 acres that are known as Monan’s Rill (the community in the Mayacamas Mountains of Sonoma County that is my home), I began a journey to learn how to live with fire. I documented the first few years of that journey through a blog on Patreon.

A key piece of the beginning of that journey was discovering, when we were able to return to the land, that the only significant area of the Rill that did not burn in the wildfire was the 6-acre prescribed burn unit that Rill members and neighbors had burned with the support of Fire Forward, the Good Fire Alliance, and many other resources the previous year, in June 2019.

This photo, which I took 3 weeks after the Glass Fire, captures the stark contrast between the prescribed burn unit on the right, and the neighbor’s property on the left, which had received no stewardship in many years.

When I saw how the prescribed burn had protected the land from damage in the wildfire, I knew — despite my fear of fire and aversion to smoke — that I needed to learn how to put fire on the ground. Four years and over a hundred burn days later, I became a California State-Certified Prescribed-Fire Burn Boss.

Our collective vision for post-wildfire stewardship of Monan’s Rill involves rotationally returning good fire to all of the land, at ecologically appropriate return intervals. Since the wildfire we have conducted broadcast burns on 48 of the 414 acres, and pile burning on many more.

Now, we are working towards implementing our largest broadcast burn to date: a 67-acre forested unit on the north side of the land. The preparation of the perimeter of the unit has been ongoing for several years. With funding from the Emergency Forest Restoration Program, we were able to hire crews from Resilience Works and North Bay Jobs with Justice to complete thinning and pile burning along the roads and trails that encircle the unit and will serve as control lines.

Unfortunately, we ran out of time and funding in the grant before the entire perimeter could be completed, but Rick continued chipping away at the remainder on his own, every other day, 3 hours at a time. In March of this year, Rick declared that the preparation of the unit perimeter was almost complete, and there were just some piles left to burn at the west end of the Upper Meadow. We decided to burn them during our monthly 4th Sunday Waffles and Workday.

It was a warm day, at the end of a week of unseasonable heat. A group headed up to start ignitions before the waffle breakfast, but I stayed back to cook waffles and welcome volunteers who were coming to the Rill for the first time. After breakfast we caravanned up to the Upper Meadow. Before we got to the group we passed several of the piles that had been lit earlier in the morning, and I could feel the radiant heat through the open window of the car I was riding in, as a volunteer next to me in the backseat peppered me with questions about good fire.

Then we came upon the group, and I struggled to make sense of what I saw. A half dozen large piles were burning with 15-foot flames which pushed towards the canopies of living black oak trees that were already fully leafed out for the spring. As I got out of the car and walked closer, I saw that some of the bases of these trees were on fire. I ran to grab a fire hose and started spraying water on the trees, but I knew it was probably too late. Black oaks, especially in the springtime, are very sensitive to heat. This was going to be too much for them to handle.

I asked the group to halt any more ignitions, and Rick and I walked around to look at the remaining piles and develop a strategy for how to deal with them. We decided that the best course of action was to move the sticks we could into much smaller piles, located much farther away from the black oak trees, and burn the remaining piles on a cool, rainy day, when the water falling from the sky would protect the tree canopies from the flames.

Then I needed a break, and walked down the hill into the interior of the future burn unit with my friend Erika. With tears in my eyes, I expressed my sadness about the black oaks that had likely been top killed that day. And then I looked around me at the state of the forest. I was pleasantly surprised to see there were many more living, mature black oak and madrone trees in this area than I had realized. I had thought that almost all of them were killed in the Glass Fire. But then I took stock of the fact that every single one of these living trees was surrounded by heavy woody material from blown-down, wildfire-killed trees. Ceanothus and other shrubs which germinated after the fire had also grown up vigorously around the trees.

I knew that if we were to broadcast burn the unit as is, we would almost certainly cause a lot of damage to the native hardwoods whose health we are trying to nurture with our stewardship. Mentally calculating how much work it would take to clear around each of these trees, with no more grant funding and just a handful of Rillers who have the physical capability to do this type of arduous physical work, my sadness about the half-dozen trees at the top of the hill bloomed into despair and overwhelm. How could we ever manage to give this land the care it needed?

Erika gently suggested that there are actually a lot of people out there who would like to help, and that we just needed to organize a way to get them to the Rill. At the time, it seemed impossible to me. I found a million reasons why it wouldn’t work, and told her I wasn’t ready for problem-solving, I just needed to be sad. But the seed of an idea was planted.

Two months later, a group of four Rillers and two volunteers went to tend that same area where I stood with Erika during our June Waffles and Workday. Although we were a small group, we made significant progress in clearing around a couple dozen trees. It was hard work, but it was also energizing and deeply satisfying.

After the workday at our community meeting, we were discussing strategies for getting the rest of the unit preparation done, and the idea emerged to take inspiration from the Rill founders and organize not just a 3-hour workday, but a full work weekend dedicated to tending the forest. A Forest Stewardship Weekend. We looked at our calendars, and everyone was free the weekend of August 1 and 2, so we decided to do it, and see who would be willing to join us. I created a signup form and and sent it out a few days later.

I had no idea what the response would be, but I am thrilled that in the past couple of weeks, more than 30 people have already signed up. Most of them have never been to the Rill. Instead of the redwoods in my dream, we will be working to tend black oaks and madrones, two other native trees that I love just as deeply as redwoods. And I think at least most of the people who are coming will listen to me.

I am excited for this opportunity to welcome new people to the land, to work together to tend the trees, and to throw a party in the middle of it. After the workday on Saturday we’ll invite people go swimming, play ping pong and lawn games, and meet the goats. There will be live music and a dance party after dinner. We are providing all meals, and camping on the land is welcome and encouraged. Some people are coming just for Saturday or Sunday, and some people will spend the whole weekend with us.

If you’d like to join us, registration is open until Saturday, July 25. Sign up here.

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Shortly after reading the short email that ended the suspense of waiting and ushered in an unfathomable new reality, we got a call from an animal control officer. He had made it up to the Rill and been able to rescue 2 of the 3 goats, but the third goat had refused to come with him. He asked if we wanted to go back up with him to see if she would be willing to come with us.

Relieved to hear that all of the goats had survived, we immediately said yes, and arranged to meet him at the large animal hospital in Cotati. We threw on sturdy shoes, grabbed our N95 masks, and were out the door and into our Prius.

For years before I met e and before we moved together from the Midwest to California, I had dreamed of finding land that would become my long term home. In that dream, there were always chickens, bees, and goats. When e and I arrived at the Rill in 2015, there was already a healthy flock of chickens living in the orchard, a couple of beehives near Ken and Uta’s house which I quickly began tending, and an animal barn and 11-acre pasture, which at various times had held cows, sheep, goats, and llamas, but had been vacant for a number of years. This seemed like a perfect opportunity to realize my goat dreams, and e — who has always loved animals — didn’t need any convincing. When we brought up the idea with the members of the Rill, however, they were concerned about brand new renters acquiring livestock.

Someone suggested we find a Rill member who was willing to embark on the goat project with us and be the official owner of the goats, and Joanie volunteered. Another renter had previously lived with goats at Green Valley in west county, and had heard that some of those goats needed a new home. By the end of 2015 things fell into place for us to acquire 3 goats from Green Valley and form a Rill goat co-op, which Penny joined as well.

We all pitched in to buy feed and pay vet bills, spent many days together with wire and pliers and t posts shoring up the pasture perimeter fences, and tracked goat fertility signs so we would know when to take them to the buck to breed. The next summer, our first set of kids was born, and we divvied up the milking, feeding, and cleaning chores with a rotating schedule on a spreadsheet, which allowed me to milk 3 mornings a week when I was at home and have others cover for me during my frequent work travel and less frequent vacations with e.

Within the first year, the other renter moved away and left our goat collective, but then we met JulieAnn, a neighbor down the road who was eager to milk. Soon she took on every Sunday morning, bringing her baby daughter with her after she was born and often spending hours down at the barn. On the day the Glass Fire started, e and Kellea and I encountered JulieAnn just finishing milking, her daughter, now a toddler, splashing happily in a bucket of water.

But the fire had dispersed everyone, and in the chaos of evacuation, e and I were the only members of the goat co-op with capacity to participate in the rescue mission.

As we drove from Fairfax to Cotati, we made a plan for e to go up with the animal control officer to the Rill to get Annie (we knew she would be the one who had refused to leave) while I stayed at the animal hospital with Bambi and Joy, the goats who had already been rescued.

But when we pulled into the parking lot of the animal hospital and saw the officer sitting in his truck, with his blue surgical mask down around his chin, we hesitated. Was e sitting next to him in the cab worth the covid risk?

It was hard to think clearly with everything else we were already trying to grapple with, but we decided to err on the side of caution. e wasn’t ready to drive up alone, and I didn't want to be stranded at the animal hospital with no vehicle for who knows how long, so we quickly pivoted and told the officer we would both follow him in our own car.

The first set of police barricades was at Hwy 12 and Mission Blvd, in the center of Rincon Valley. Another at Calistoga Rd. Maybe a third at Saint Helena Rd too? Each time we encountered a blockade, the animal control officer explained our mission, and our little green Prius was waved through behind him. He had to promise he would bring us back out with him too.

At the first barricade we could see the blackened hills in the distance, right up against Calistoga Road. After we turned onto Saint Helena Rd, we saw the first flames, emerging from stumps, some very close to the road. There were many trees that had come down across the road and had been hastily cut to clear a passage, jumbled piles of wood rounds left on either side.

As we turned off the pavement and headed up the gravel road to the Rill, the landscape became more disorienting. Just a pile of rubble at the first fork in the road, where two days before there had been a guest house, owned by of one of our neighbors and recently turned into a vacation rental that was frequently occupied by city dwellers seeking escape from over six months of being cooped up in their apartments 24/7, who would sometimes wander up the road to the Rill.

At that fork we also encountered downed power lines across the road, the animal control truck ahead of us suddenly veering off to the right into what had been a grassy slope. I followed him with trepidation, worried our little Prius wouldn't be able to handle going off road, but we made it back onto the gravel without incident.

We crossed the lower pond spillway bridge into the central area of the Rill and came across Rick, collecting acorns off the ground.

Inspired by the Indigenous practices he learned about through reading M. Kat Anderson's Tending the Wild, Rick had taken up eating acorn mush for breakfast. This involved weed whipping the grass around choice oak trees, daily visits to those trees in the fall to collect acorns that had dropped before animals got to them, then drying and processing the acorns before cooking. Sometime in the year or two before covid kept us out of each other's homes, a bunch of us were gathered at the round wooden house (called the Yurt) where he and Sue lived for some meeting or social occasion, and Rick excitedly explained his entire acorn process to us, showing us the drying setup on the screened porch, the hammer for cracking the hard shells to release the inner edible meat, the blender for chopping the meat up and mixing it with water to leach the tannins out, and his covered bowl of the latest batch of cooked mush in the refrigerator. He told us he would make a big batch every few days and then heat up a small portion each morning, eating it with berries.

Excitedly holding up his bag of acorns, Rick greeted us by declaring, “They're still good! And the deer will have plenty to eat, too.”

A few dozen feet away in the community garden, whose former perimeter fence now had many gaps left by sheds and fence posts that had burned, a group of deer were standing in the bed of carrots I had planted and tended, eating the still-green tops. That little bit of green was a sweet splash of color against the otherwise sepia landscape and sky.

Downed power lines that were suspended low above the road prevented us from driving up to our house and the top of the pasture, so we parked at the bottom, where the barn had stood, and walked the rest of the way up.

e went to search for Annie in the oak grove at the top of the pasture while I went to check on our house.

Our woodshed, which had stood 6 feet away from my office was gone, just the metal roof panels lying on the ground.

Yet our house, Madrone House, miraculously, was still there.

Near our house I encountered Sasha, and asked her about a burning stump 50 feet away from the house, which looked dangerous to me. She told me not to worry about it, that the house would be OK. I hoped she was right. But would it be OK?

I opened the front door of the house and everything was as we left it, including the giant stack of dirty dishes in the kitchen and the curtains hastily piled in the middle of the floor to get them away from the windows before we evacuated. I sent a silent prayer into the universe, knowing that the house could still burn, praying it would still be there the next time we had a chance to come back.

I closed the door and circled the outside of the house, taking in just how close the fire had come. Marveling that my giant leaf pile seemed to have burned in place, 30 feet away from the house, despite the winds.

I checked on our three beehives. First, the top bar hive in the backyard, which my friend Frank had built for me in Chicago and I had moved, empty, across the country when we came to the Rill. I was determined not to buy bees and only fill it with a swarm, and despite many creative swarm traps we had put out, it had stood empty for 5 years until earlier that spring, when newly-unemployed-due-to-covid Bill, on a weekday walk with his two young kids, had spotted a swarm on a small oak tree near the Rill shop. Bill and Ken captured the swarm in a plastic storage bin and brought it to the house, where I took a break from my daily Zoom meeting marathon to transfer the cluster of bees into the hive.

The top bar hive was sideways on the ground. The bottoms of the legs of the stand that it rested on had burned and the hive had toppled off, but it was intact and bees were flying.

The second hive was a langstroth hive, perched on the hillside between our house and Ken and Uta’s Garden House. The previous winter, Bill and I had rescued that colony out of an oak tree which had split in half during a storm at the house of a friend of Penny’s in Rincon Valley, leaving the bees and their comb exposed to the elements. Standing on ladders, Bill and I had carefully cut each comb out of the tree, rubber banded it into a hive frame, and place it into a new hive body with as many of the bees as possible. Then we brought the colony up to live at the Rill.

After the fire, that hive was still standing, but scorched on the outside. Getting closer, I saw honey oozing out — the hive had taken so much heat that many of the wax combs had melted. The bees inside were dead.

The third hive, which had stood right next to Garden House, was gone, along with the 3-story house. The house had transformed into a surprising small pile of rubble and ash, in comparison to the large volume of space it had occupied before it burned. Of the beehive, only the cinder blocks it had stood on remained. Chris helped me carry the cinder blocks over to our backyard, and place the top bar hive back upright, on top of them.

Perhaps at Chris’ suggestion, I realized I could probably still salvage some of our frozen food. I went to the shed and opened the freezer, grabbed a large plastic storage bin, and started loading up ziplock bags. Pesto, roasted tomatoes, and raspberries from the garden that we had spent all summer putting up. Peaches from our favorite queer owned farm. A few jars of goat cheese made with Joy’s milk, the last she would ever produce. Once it was full, I realized the bin was way too heavy to lift. And the car was all the way at the bottom of the driveway. Then I noticed the folding wagon we had picked up off the street a couple months earlier in the corner, and found my solution.

I looked out toward the pasture and saw e emerge out of the oaks with Annie on a lead. Leaving the wagon at the top of the driveway, I walked out to meet them. Annie was clearly in distress, and she had always been a stubborn goat. She did not want to go anywhere.

It took both of us an excruciatingly long time to get her down the hill. She would only move 5 or 10 feet at a time. We offered her food and water, talked to her gently and sternly, pushed and pulled. Eventually she would budge a tiny bit farther down the steep, hot, black hillside, and then as soon as it seemed like we were making progress, she would stop again.

It felt like hours had passed by the time we finally got Annie into the animal control truck. Then it was time to leave, since he needed us to come back out with him to keep good on the promises he made at the barricades.

Both of us were also were reaching the limit of our capacity to be immersed in the overwhelming, smoldering and smoking aftermath of the fire.

I quickly ran up to get the wagon and pull it down the driveway while e got the car and drove it up to meet me where the power lines were down, and then we went to the garden to retrieve the one chicken who had survived the fire. She had been the naughty one, not laying eggs in the nesting box, so had been separated from the main flock in the orchard and placed in a small coop under the olive tree where her eggs would be easy to find. The olive tree seemed to have sheltered her from the heat, and the bottom portion of the coop was entirely metal wire, so it did not burn.

We put the chicken in Erma's cat carrier, loaded her into the back of the car, and said goodbye to the Rill again.

Wildfires are named after a road or other feature where they start, and the Glass Fire had started early Sunday morning on Glass Mountain Road, near the Saint Helena Hospital. Almost a year later, I went to visit my grandmother Lydia in that hospital, and drove right past the place where the Glass Fire started.

As the Glass Fire grew bigger and more intense over the course of that Sunday, strong offshore winds from the northeast carried firebrands all the way across the Napa Valley to a ridge near the Sonoma-Napa county line, starting a new spot fire. Because they were initially so geographically separate, this new fire was given its own name, Shady Fire, though I’m not sure what feature “shady” referred to.

View from the deck of our house at 8:26pm on Sunday, September 27, 2020 — the glow of the Shady Fire on the ridge to our east, the not yet full moon, and the lights of other Rill houses as we all prepared to evacuate.

Within the first day, the Glass Fire would catch up to and absorb its offspring, and the separate name would be dropped.

In Fairfax, our sleepless Sunday night turned into an eerie grey Monday morning, the light of the sun filtered through oppressively thick smoke.

Near dawn, news about the Shady Fire arrived via a tweet from trusted local source Sarah Steirch:

Resources are being pulled off St. Helena Road due to the growth of the #ShadyFire NW. Crews could be in danger if they stay. Fire is expected to impact both sides completely. They’re building lines now from Calistoga Rd north to Mark West.

St. Helena Road is our road. The address typed thousands of times, texted to visiting friends, handwritten in the top left corner of envelopes.

Both sides completely meant our community, our home.

And no firefighters there to protect all that we loved.

Another tweet that morning listed numbers to call for help evacuating animals.

e and I called and left messages with animal control and local nonprofit Sonoma CART (Community Animal Rescue Team), asking for their support in rescuing our goats. We couldn’t believe that we hadn’t thought to call earlier, but we just didn’t realize it was an option. Now, we feared it would be too late.

A volunteer from Sonoma CART tried to go up to get the goats, but was turned away at the police blockades. That morning some Rillers also attempted to go back up to check on things, but they too were stopped at the blockades. All the firefighters had been pulled out already. It was just too dangerous for anyone to be in the area.

In between obsessively checking twitter, email, and every other information source I could think of on my phone and computer, I wandered between the bedroom downstairs, the living room and kitchen upstairs (masked for covid safety), the deck outside (masked for the smoke).

Krystin and Karen were in and out of the house, trying to carry on with their lives under the apocalyptic sky, checking in with us from time to time. e and I occasionally talked, but most of the time there were no words to say.

I felt a hazy numbness, a whiplash between the go mode of evacuating and the interminable waiting of being evacuated, the certainty of the fire and the uncertainty of not knowing exactly what it was burning, what it had already consumed.

I responded to inquiring texts from friends and family with brief “thank you, we're ok right now” messages or simply a heart emoji. I tried to eat at appropriate times. I did my best to distract Erma from hissing at the K's cat Petrichor through the glass door that separated their spaces.

I studied the satellite fire heat maps, comparing the location of each red dot with the outlines of the Rill’s and neighbors’ building footprints on the map’s base layer. Did a dot right on top of a building mean it had definitely burned? Did a building without a red dot nearby survive?

On Tuesday morning, I posted my first update to social media since the fire had started:

Our second morning of being evacuated from the #shadyfire now merged with the #glassfire and the sun is a deep red over the SF bay from this hill in Fairfax where Karen and Krystin have been sheltering us. The photo does not do it justice — imagine the whole sun the color of its edge. The shady fire started on Sunday evening on our road east of us and up the mountain — we could see the smoke and flames from our deck. It burned through our land and all the surrounding area yesterday but we don’t know yet how much of our land it burned, whether our animals that we had to leave behind (goats, chickens, and barn cat) survived, and whether our homes or other buildings remain. We do know that at least one of our close neighbors lost their house but another close neighbor’s house was still standing as of mid day yesterday. Looking at satellite heat sensor maps it seems that the main area of our community where the homes are may have been spared so far, but the only way to really know is to be there on the ground. The fire is still actively burning at over 40,000 acres and 0% containment. Holding deep sorrow and disbelief and hope and love and gratitude as 2020 shakes us to our core in one more way.

A few Rillers, accompanied by wildland firefighter friends, tried again to get up to the Rill early Tuesday morning, and this time successfully talked their way through the evacuation blockades.

Cell phone coverage was spotty with infrastructure impacted by the fire, but Chris managed to send Amy a few brief updates via text message, which she sent on to the Rill internal email list:

The shop, the solar array, the Hub and Madrone Home are the only structures left. All other buildings and homes are gone.

Many power poles are gone.

Water system status is unknown.

Message about the animals was unclear so I am not going to convey it until I hear something clear back from him. So please hang in there on that.

Please hang in there.

So much love. So many hands are holding you, and all of us.

I don’t know if there is any way to accurately describe how it felt to learn our entire community had burned, our home was still standing, and our animals might or might not be OK, all at the same time.

A sense of crashing down.

Deep body-wracking sobs.

Waves of reckoning and disbelief.

In a recent episode of the Modern Love podcast, Elizabeth Gilbert was interviewed about her latest memoir, All the Way to the River. Describing how it felt to be with her best friend turned romantic partner who was simultaneously dying of cancer and relapsing into severe drug addiction, she said:

And it was like the ground fell out from underneath me. And I feel like that’s an experience that I now recognize as being a universal human experience, maybe not to those exact details, but I don’t think anybody gets to go through the entire course of their life without having seasons or chapters or episodes of their life where it’s like, oh, I thought there was ground underneath my feet, and there is none.

For me, reading that email about what the fire had taken and left the Rill, I felt like the ground fell out from underneath me.

But there was another feeling too.

e and I moved from the midwest to California in July 2015, and just two months later the Valley Fire broke out in Lake County to our northeast. We didn't evacuate that time, but we were scared.

In 2017, we were woken out of deep sleep on the night of my birthday by Rick calling to us from our front door: “There is a wildfire to our north. You need to get out now." That was the Tubbs Fire, which burned my grandmother's and two of my uncle's homes, five miles away. We spent 10 days living with our friends Lisa and Jesse in their 1-bedroom flat in Petaluma. The fire came within two miles of the Rill.

In 2019, the Kincade Fire threatened to come our way and we preemptively evacuated, back to Jesse and Lisa's house, again for 10 days.

And the month before, in August 2020, we had days of ashes and entire partially-scorched leaves raining down on our deck from the Walbridge Fire in western Sonoma County.

For the previous five years, almost the entire time I had been living at the Rill, my fire anxiety had been mounting.

By the summer and fall of 2020, it was to the point that I was constantly holding my breath, waiting for the fire to come for us.

Now that the fire had come, I could finally exhale.

We were in a red flag warning, and it was e’s turn in our rotation of overnight watch shifts. The fire was far enough away not to be an immediate threat, and think I tried to go back to sleep, but probably was not successful.

Two days earlier, my friend Kellea had arrived for a weekend visit, her first time ever visiting the Rill. As we greeted at the HUB keeping our 6 foot distance (no hugs at that point in the pandemic), Kellea told me “as I was driving in, I told myself I always wanted to remember what this place looked like to me the first time I saw it.”

As the sun came up that Sunday morning, I made pancakes for Kellea and her kids to eat on our back porch, and we watched a thick band of smoke begin to stretch across the sky from east to west. We walked to visit the goats and wander through the garden, and then Kellea decided to head out with the kids earlier than planned, just in case, taking the long way around back to their home in the Sierra foothills, steering clear of this new growing wildfire.

After Kellea left, I raked leaves from around the house, just the latest layer that had fallen from the live oak trees that surround it and shed their evergreen leaves continuously through the year. As I raked, I talked on the phone with my friend Rosie about a challenging group zoom call on some topic related to racial equity that we had both been on and I had helped organize in a way that didn’t end up landing very well. As I finished raking, looking at the giant pile of leaves I had created, I remember a deep sense of futility, imagining the wind gusting and blowing all those leaves right back up against the house, wondering if any of the racial reckoning of that summer would ever lead to true healing or change.

In the afternoon, e and I packed our cars. First the go bags and pre-identified essentials. Then a few extra favorite pairs of shoes. My grandmother’s sewing machine. Winter jackets in case the weather turned. Another bag of clothes. Art. A few hours later, both vehicles were filled to the brim. We were feeling increasingly certain that this was not like the other evacuations of 2017 and 2019, when we were displaced for 10 days each time but all we lost was some food in the freezer. We both felt an eerie conviction that this fire was the one that was going to come for the Rill.

As dusk approached the fire appeared to still be on the other side of the Napa Valley from us. I started cooking dinner and e went down to feed the goats and lock them up for the night.

Then, a phone call from e (who only texts unless it’s something truly urgent). e out of breath, speaking in short bursts of words: There’s a pulse point. Fire on tarwater road. Locking the goats out of the barn. I’m running to Ray’s to look.

I looked at my phone and saw the alert, turned on the Broadcastify channel and listened as one then multiple engines sent out to investigate the new fire reported back they were unable to locate anything on tarwater road. As I listened I got out glass leftover containers and put the rice, beans, plantains and collards I had been cooking into them, enormous portions as I’d been making enough for Monday lunch leftovers. Midway through packing up the food I glanced up out the kitchen window and saw the glow of the fire. It wasn’t on tarwater road, but it was definitely close.

I decided to initiate the emergency group text to everyone at the Rill, a system I had just successfully set up and tested the day before. Fire is in our watershed, leave towards Santa Rosa, watch out for incoming fire engines. I could hear sirens as I hit send.

I surveyed the giant pile of dirty dishes on the counter and in the sink from a weekend hosting guests who couldn’t come inside our house, added my new dishes from cooking dinner to the pile, packed the food in the car, got our cat Erma into her carrier, and went through the house preparation checklist: curtains down, lights on, propane tank off, ladder against the house.

e and I drove down to the HUB and wrote on the whiteboard the time we were leaving, exchanged a few words with neighbors we saw along the road, and caravaned out in the darkness. Partway down the driveway, my phone blared with an evacuation alert (though not yet for our zone), followed by a call from my mother, who was living in Calistoga with my grandmother and who I had already encouraged to evacuate, though my grandmother (who lost her house and everything else she owned in the 2017 Tubbs Fire) was dragging her feet. I urged her again to push through the resistance and leave, and then turned my attention back to the road.

We arrived at our friend Michael’s house in Santa Rosa near Montgomery Village and sat outside, unsure if we should go in — what to do with covid precautions when you have just fled your home?

Sitting on the front steps, we attempted to eat some of the dinner I had cooked, neither of us having much of an appetite, and watched the fire crest over the ridge and descend on the Skyhawk community on the outskirts of Santa Rosa. It seemed like it was coming for us and I did not feel safe. I called my friend Karen and she asked if we wanted to come stay with her and Krystin in Fairfax — their house was well set up for us to have separate spaces and not share indoor air.

Driving south with a yowling cat and music blasting to compete with that noise, I had to stop for gas. A guy there saw my filled-to-the-brim car and asked if I was evacuating. When I said yes, he insisted on buying my gas. A small act of kindness from a stranger in a bizarre and terrifying night.

We arrived at the K’s house around midnight, and Krystin gave me the first hug I’d received from anyone other than e in over 6 months (masks on). It took a solid 30 minutes for the 4 of us to unload both our cars, stashing most of our crates and bags just inside their tall fence to avoid tempting any late night wanderers from breaking in.

In the wee hours, e and I lay down in the guest bed and turned off the lights, though we knew sleep would be nearly impossible. Our phones pinged and vibrated with alerts and texts from loved ones all night long as we tossed and turned, thinking of our home, the land, our beloved goats left to fend for themselves.

Just a week earlier, e and I had listened to a podcast episode with Terry Tempest Willams about wildfire and a piece she had just written: A Burning Testament. After we listened, e sent the link out to everyone at the Rill, writing:

It is only 10 minutes and very beautiful (the poem is read at the end) and feels important to listen to as we make our way through this and every other fire season together. Home and fire and what endures.

After hearing the excerpt, we hunted down and read the whole burning testament together, read it again.

And as we laid in bed the night the fire came for the Rill, waiting for morning, waiting to know what had burned, Terry Tempest Williams’ words returned to us and kept us company.

From A Burning Testament:

We are witness to ghostly horizons lit with the scalding colors of, red, orange, purple, black, the blowout of close to five million acres of land being ravaged by fires with such velocity it is melting our capacity to feel the full magnitude of what is happening – We are not okay.

We are saying farewell to what we love and why we stay. How can we stay? The landscape of the American West is burning and we are burning, too.

We cannot breathe. This is our mantra in America now. We cannot breathe because of the smoke. We cannot breathe because of a virus that has entered our homes. We cannot breathe because of police brutality and too many black bodies dead on the streets. We cannot breathe because we are holding our breath for the people and places we love.

To the power of these burning, illuminated western lands who have shaped our character, inspired our souls, and restored our belief in what is beautiful and enduring—I will never write your obituary— because even as you burn, you are throwing down seeds that will sprout and flower, trees will grow, and forests will rise again as living testaments to how one survives change.

Go now, listen to the podcast, and then read the whole burning testament. Then please come back and share your thoughts.

More to come.

“I want us to live. I want us to want to live in this world, in this time, together.”

— adrienne maree brown, we will not cancel us

I am part of a small group of friends who met at a retreat in 2015 and have remained in touch ever since. We had each individually encountered a powerful form of bringing people together called the “Circle of Trust,” based on the work of Parker J. Palmer, and felt called to learn to facilitate this approach for others in our communities. We traveled from different parts of the country to gather on a wooded island in Puget Sound and participate in a retreat designed for prospective Circle of Trust facilitators to discern whether this was a path we wanted to pursue. During the retreat, the five of us clicked in a way that only feels possible within the container of a place-based, intensive, multi-day experience — relishing together the abundance of incredibly delicious food that continuously appeared at our table during long family-style meals, finding commonalities and exploring differences in our life experiences, sharing frustrations with the limitations of this particular form of facilitation so heavily influenced by worldviews and cultural norms of older white people, and exchanging creative ideas for how to evolve what we loved about the Circle of Trust into something that resonated more fully for each of us.

Although we have yet to all gather in person since that retreat where we first met, our small “courage circle” has remained in touch and accompanied each other over the past decade through group chats and video meetings ranging from simple check ins to co-facilitated online mini retreats. Recently, I recalled an online gathering that this group of friends held in January of 2020. As we reflected on where we stood at that moment and what might be coming in the year ahead, I remember sharing that I had a feeling that 2020 was going to be a really good year.

I thought back to that moment often in the months that ensued, as we entered COVID-19 lockdown in March, as I learned of George Floyd's murder in May and awakened to the magnitude of ongoing daily violence against Black lives, as a snowstorm of ashes from the Wallbridge Fire fell on our house in August, as the Glass Fire burned through our community and upended my life in October, and through the painful transition out of the all-consuming job that had become my identity at the end of the year. Both in the process of living it and looking back five years later, I would not describe 2020 as a really good year.

I doubt that I will ever begin another year with the kind of optimism I had five years ago. I definitely don't feel that way about 2025. Every year it becomes more undeniable that we are in the midst of an unfolding multidimensional global crisis, one that is unlikely to resolve within our lifetimes. Chaos and uncertainty are the new normal. Between the LA wildfires, the inauguration of an openly racist, fascist, misogynist US president, and the subsequent barrage of executive orders designed to rapidly dismantle the structures of our society and strip rights and support from every marginalized community and identity, the first month of 2025 brought plenty to grapple with.

As I have been reflecting on how to engage with the times we are in, I've returned to one of the teachings that Parker J. Palmer himself introduced in the first Courage and Renewal retreat for young leaders that I attended in Georgia in 2014, “standing and acting in the tragic gap." Palmer describes this tragic gap as:

On one side of that gap are the harsh and discouraging realities around us. On the other side is the better world we know to be possible — not merely because we wish it were so, but because we have seen it with our own eyes.

Palmer teaches that when we are confronted with the tragic gap, there can be a tendency to “flip out” into either corrosive cynicism on one side or irrelevant idealism on the other — two ends of the spectrum which lead us to passivity and inaction. The challenge and practice is to stand in the middle of the tragic gap, holding the paradox of both how bad things are and how good they could be, and to act from that place to do what is within our power to create the world we envision.

Miki Kashtan also teaches about this gap, and the importance of mourning in enabling us to act wisely and within our values:

Mourning is an act of softening. It supports us in softly closing the gap between what we want, envision, or long for, and what actually exists. In the absence of mourning, we are likely to try to do it with some degree of force: either by trying to force ourselves not to want what we want, or by trying to force what is out there to conform to what we want. Mourning is a continual soft pathway to accepting reality without numbing ourselves, without distracting ourselves, without blaming ourselves, and without engaging in a spiritual bypass. Mourning brings tenderness to everything we put into it.

I am learning that building a regular practice of mourning can be a powerful antidote to the despair and overwhelm that can arise in the face of the magnitude of global crisis. As we allow the sense of grief to be and move through us as it arises, without suppressing or pushing it away, mourning can give us insight about what is important to us, and give us more energy to take the next right step.

One of this January's paradoxes was that the same dry weather pattern that fueled the destructive wildfires in Southern California also created excellent conditions for putting beneficial fire on the ground here in Northern California after our abundant fall rain, especially last week in advance of the atmospheric river that arrived on Friday.

Now that I am certified as a California State Prescribed-Fire Burn Boss (CA-Rx), we have a lot more flexibility for the Tribal EcoRestoration Alliance (TERA) to jump on burn windows as they arise, without having to coordinate scheduling with external burn bosses who often have other priorities as was the case until I received my certificate in November. We had been planning to burn next week, but when we saw the rain in the forecast we were able to mobilize to burn earlier and hit the weather window perfectly.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, spanning the new moon and lunar new year, I had the honor to lead a series of ecocultural burns with TERA on collectively stewarded land called The Incline, high on a ridge above the Eel River in Potter Valley, on the ancestral territory of the Potter Valley Tribe.

Like nearly all of what is now known as California, the land at The Incline bears the marks of both the long history of thousands of years of Indigenous stewardship and the last few centuries of colonization, resource extraction, and neglect. This land is home to many legacy black oaks and madrones which once thrived in relatively open woodlands maintained through cultural fire. The removal of fire since California became a US state in 1850, as well as logging and subsequent lack of stewardship has created the conditions for intense encroachment by Douglas-fir, whose rapid and prolific growth has shaded out and weakened the old growth hardwoods as well as reduced the availability of nutrients and water.

Similar to our community at the Rill, some of the stewards of The Incline were more eager to put fire on the land than others, who expressed concern about possibly damaging the trees in places that had become sacred to them when we first spoke last summer. At our initial site visit, we discussed starting very small to build familiarity and comfort with beneficial fire before expanding treatment across the 160 acres that encompass The Incline. With my support, they developed a burn plan for the lowest-hanging fruit, a handful of small burn units already bounded on all or most sides by existing roads, which they had already thinned of many small-diameter fir trees (visible lying on the ground in the photos above and below).

Over two days last week, we burned six units totaling 4.5 acres with a collaborative of TERA's intertribal crew, North Bay Jobs with Justice worker leaders, The Incline land stewards, and a handful of other regular volunteers who are part of TERA's on-call EcoCultural Fire Crew. The burns were designed to reduce the buildup of leaf litter and larger downed fuels while protecting mature oak and madrone trees from damage. They also served as important training for all participants, many of whom are relatively new to fire, as well as an opportunity to stretch our language skills for everyone who had any level of bilingual ability in Spanish and English. Everyone was happy with the results and the stewards of The Incline who live on the land expressed both gratitude and eagerness to continue with more ecocultural fire in the coming years.

One of the tragic gaps present here is how many hours of organizing, permits, preparation, and people it took to intentionally burn just 4.5 acres, a tiny fraction of the millions of acres in California that desperately need to be burned under the right conditions as soon as possible. The fresh destruction of the LA wildfires underlines just how far we are from the scope of care for the land that is needed. But it is heartening to know that across the North Bay in 2024, nearly 1,000 acres were treated with beneficial fire through collaborative burns. I celebrate the success of every community burn, no matter how tiny, while mourning the enormous gap in capacity to catch up to the fire deficit that has been built through two centuries of genocide and fire suppression, and the inevitable wave of many more destructive wildfires that will keep coming while we struggle to make up for lost time.

As I was reflecting on the first day of burning and tweaking my plans for leading the next day's operations, I received a message in our courage circle group chat from Marcia, who recently relocated from the United States to Japan.

Checking in — how's everyone holding up? What is bringing you fear? What is bringing you hope? How can we support each other?

The tangible and alarming ways that the foundations of ecological and societal health and so many people's basic freedoms and rights are being assaulted by the forces of capitalism, colonialism, greed, and ignorance with mounting speed and scale definitely brings me fear.

And in the face of this fear, community-based burning gives me hope. I feel blessed to have the opportunity to bring people together across a broad spectrum of cultures, identities, and experiences, to engage consciously and intentionally with the powerful, transformative element of fire, taking the small actions that are within our reach to heal the land and ourselves.

I first heard about the fires from my wife e, who spends a lot more time than I do paying attention to news, and is particularly tuned in to fire and climate related events. I think my immediate response to e telling me about the Palisades fire was "that's devastating, and not surprising."

What did surprise me was having numerous friends reach out to me to check in on how I was doing over the first few days of the wildfires -- while I appreciated their care and concern, I was honestly a bit confused why this event in particular prompted them to contact me. Then I realized that for many people these fires are incredibly shocking and perhaps even seem like an anomalous event. For me they are not.

I recognize the immense losses that so many individuals, communities, and ecosystems in the LA region are experiencing from this particular collection of wildfires. I recognize that as of today 27 people have lost their lives, and that thousands of people's worlds have been shattered in these past couple of weeks, will take years to rebuild, and will never be the same. I recognize that the land and air and water and all life that they support are currently receiving another massive influx of toxic pollution that will have ramifications locally and globally for many years to come.

I feel and grieve all of this.

And I also experience these fires as just one more deeply tragic and inevitable expression of the cumulative effects of all the ways that humans have acted foolishly, selfishly, and shortsightedly over the past couple of centuries in how we relate to what we now call California — in particular:

1) Violently suppressing the regular intentional burning that was practiced by Indigenous people across the state from time immemorial

2) Systematically extinguishing all wildfires without regard for the potential ecological benefits they might provide, further exacerbating the buildup of excess vegetation and leaving the landscape to burn only in the most extreme uncontrollable events

3) Rampant resource extraction and degradation of ecosystems, biodiversity, and hydrological cycles

4) Building way too many highly flammable houses within fire-adapted landscapes, especially chaparral which has evolved to burn hot and fast with stand replacing fire

5) The astronomical production of greenhouse gas emissions through burning fossil fuels, industrial agriculture, deforestation and other activities that are destabilizing our global climate and exacerbating the extreme weather conditions that fuel firestorms.

In looking back, I can see now that I have been being initiated into this understanding of wildfire for almost a decade.

e and I moved to Monan's Rill in the summer of 2015. Two months after we arrived, the Valley Fire broke out in Lake County, close enough for us to feel its threat. Then the 2017 Tubbs Fire came much closer, burning the homes of my grandmother and two uncles, and causing us to be evacuated for 10 days. When the Kincade Fire ignited in 2019, e and I decided to evacuate before there were even warnings issued, and were exiled from our home for another 10 days. And for the entire 2020 wildfire season, we were both convinced it would be the year that the Rill burned. When the Glass Fire ignited across the Napa Valley in at 4am on a Sunday that September, we spent the entire day preparing to leave, feeling a heavy certainty that this would be the fire that finally hit our community long before we got the alert of the spot across the valley to our mountain and saw the flames from the kitchen window.

The broader pattern and inevitability of wildfire was etched into my being over the course of those five years, laying the groundwork for my much deeper learning journey with fire that began with the Glass Fire, and which I have been chronicling here since early 2021.

After the depth of immersion into fire that I have chosen (or that has chosen me) these past four years, the reaction of the general public to the LA fires is at times frustrating, comical, enraging, and heartbreaking. The finger pointing and blaming of firefighters and politicians, the obsession with figuring out how the fires started, the absurd commentary that completely goes against any basic understanding of fire science, and the striking lack of acknowledgement of the actual underlying causes of tragedies like this.

In contrast to mainstream media, I have felt kinship with a few public responses to this unfolding crisis, including:

Lyla June and Jessa Calderon's video Indigenous Women Speak on LA fires, where they point to the causality of colonization and removal of Indigenous cultural fire in creating the conditions for these wildfires, and the essential role of returning Indigenous cultural burning to the landscape to save what is left.

Obi Kaufman's essay California is Fire, especially this paragraph:

While the political pundits pontificate with pointed fingers, core truths remain undiscussed in popular media, and the singular opportunity for cultural transformation is lost. Perhaps the greatest truth that goes remorselessly unacknowledged (especially in the context of the Los Angeles County fires of January 2025 that still burn as I write this) is that land fire in California is not the remainder of an equation that would otherwise balance; fire is not a bug in the system, fire is the system. Fire is the grand instigator of California’s ecological adaptivity, the disturbance that propels the adaptive cycle, opening niche resources necessary for core aspects of habitat configuration, biodiversity propagation, and soil fecundity. Without fire, California is not California.

And a series of posts that my friend Jiordi Rosales shared from The Condor's Rest (@condors_rest) on Instagram:

What all of these have in common is pointing to the much broader context within which these fires are occurring, and within which many more massive wildfires inevitably will continue to arise in the coming years and decades. They also point to the essential shifts that we all must make in our understanding and our action if we want to continue to coexist with the fire adapted landscapes within which we live.

I am grateful, within this broader context, to have a particular place in which I am rooted and to which I am responsible, both the 414 acres that comprise the Rill where I live, and the broader bioregion of Sonoma, Lake, and Mendocino counties that I engage with through my work. The potential for overwhelm is so great, and being able to tangibly impact one small portion of this beautiful, living planet helps me to continue to move forward every day in the face of the immense ongoing destruction and the unfathomable escalating chaos that will continue to come our way, likely for the rest of our lifetimes.

Teaching and tending land with fire at the Tribal EcoRestoration Alliance

I continued to deepen into my role at the Tribal EcoRestoration Alliance (TERA), planning and teaching in EcoCultural Fire Trainings, organizing and leading burns, managing grants, overseeing communications, and building organizational capacity. Some highlights of the fall with TERA included:

• Mentoring my colleague Jordan Reyes to lead his first cultural burn on his Tribe's ancestral land at Middletown Rancheria's Ignome Oak Grove, at the same burn unit where I did my first burn boss trainee assignment a year earlier

• Welcoming some new Tribal fire crews to participate in TERA burns and trainings, as well as many wonderful new and returning volunteers

• Teaching in several fire trainings for North Bay Jobs with Justice worker leaders with the Watershed Research and Training Center and Fire Forward

• Teaching hillside firing techniques and mentoring groups on developing real-world firing plans in an all-outdoor NWCG S-219 Firing Operations course at Hopland Rancheria, with 58 participants from a broad range of backgrounds and geographies who traveled to learn together

• Leading my first tule burn at Big Valley Rancheria, which required some tricky management of fire behavior and smoke in this unique fuel type, and hearing and receiving the gratitude of Tribal members for collaboratively bringing fire back to properly tend to this vital cultural resource

• Training new folks in the Fire Effects Monitor (FEMO) role, a position which I officially became qualified for this summer

Engaging students in restoration and wildfire resilience at Santa Rosa Junior College

Simultaneously to a full plate with TERA, I picked up two part-time roles at Santa Rosa Junior College after almost a year hiatus. On alternating weeks, I co-taught an Ecological Restoration class in the Natural Resource Management department with my colleague Alison Pollack for a lively, inquisitive, and quirky group of 25 students of all ages, and co-supervised a new cohort of 12 interns in SRJC’s Wildfire Resilience Program with the team I love and worked with extensively from 2022-2023. Highlights of the semester at SRJC included:

• Spirited conversations with Ecological Restoration students about how restoration interfaces with colonialism, Traditional Ecological Knowledge, and Land Back

• Spending time with students in the beautiful Shone Forest again

• Coaching women and nonbinary WRP interns in using chainsaws for the first time

• Bringing WRP interns to Audubon Canyon Ranch's Martin Griffin Preserve for their first broadcast burn with Fire Forward

• Field trips with the Ecological Restoration class to the Cultural Conservancy's Heron Shadow and Monan's Rill

Bringing good fire back to the Rill

In my spare time outside of those three jobs, I planned and led my Fire Forward Fellowship capstone burn at Monan's Rill (yes, it finally happened in October after several false starts). The burn was our first post-wildfire prescribed burn at the Rill and the first bilingual broadcast burn for the Good Fire Alliance, with North Bay Jobs with Justice worker leaders making up all of the firing and holding squads working on the eastern half of the unit. Organizing this burn also was my first significant foray into coordinating with our local CAL FIRE battalion chief (who issued the burn permit and from whom I needed permission to burn on the specific burn day), Bay Area Air Quality (who approved my smoke management plan, issued the air quality permit, and from whom I also required permission to burn on the specific day), and Sonoma County Fire District, who provided a staffed fire engine to assist with the burn. These relationships are analagous to those that I have been building in Lake and Mendocino counties through my work with TERA over the past 2 years, but every agency and every individual is different!

The burn at Monan's Rill was my final burn boss trainee assignment, and after receiving my final evaluation from Sasha Berleman, I submitted my task book to State Fire Training. In a surprisingly short turnaround for government bureaucracy, I received my California State Burn Boss certification from CAL FIRE on Election Day, a culmination of four years of intensive training including participating in 60+ burns across California and in Minnesota, North Dakota, and Portugal.

Post-Wildfire Restoration at the Rill

But wait! There's more! Simultaneous with planning and implementing the Rill burn, the post-fire forest stewardship project at Monan's Rill that I have been working on securing funding for and organizing with North Bay Jobs with Justice and Resilience Works for the past three years finally moved into the implementation phase, with a crew of 10 workers getting started on the first treatment area of the 73 acres to be stewarded through the project, and Mario Parullelo Lahoz, a firefighter from Spain living at the Rill temporarily to train and supervise the work crew (Mario was also very helpful in translating my briefings at the Monan's Rill burn so I didn't have to say everything twice). Unfortunately, my involvement with the hands-on work of the crew was very minimal given my other commitments this fall, but I enjoyed seeing their headlights as they arrived to the land during morning goat milking time each day, and occasionally heading up the hill on the weekends to see their progress. I was able to join the celebratory lunch on the last day of the first month of work, enjoying pozole and chapulines with the group of amazing humans who have been tending the land, people I have gotten to know through various trainings and pile burn events over the past couple of years.

A few weeks after the Rill burn, we sowed thousands of native grass seeds (purple needle grass, California fescue, California oat grass, and blue wild rye) across the prescribed burn area at with volunteers, using seed which we had collected from the land with other volunteers over the spring and summer. Among the seed sowers were my mom, my childhood best friend Nissa, her husband Brian, and their son Auden. With the alternating rain and sun we have had the past couple months, the burn unit (and the whole landscape) are greening up quite nicely.

Celebrating Leadership and Community

In early December, sandwiched right in the middle of two warm and dry weeks that were packed with TERA burns and fire trainings, I co-hosted the 8th annual Celebrating Womxn's Leadership in Food Symposium, a beautiful event that I've helped to co-create since the very first one in 2016. My involvement with CWLF and the daily tending of our goats keep my connection to the 20 years that my career focused on agriculture before shifting to fire and broader land stewardship after 2020. As has become the yearly ritual, one of my main contributions to the symposium was designing and facilitating the world cafe, a social technology I learned in an art of hosting training in 2012 and have been bringing to events all over the world ever since.

That same weekend, I also convinced e and Chris to collaborate with me on doing some experimental burn plots in the meadow below our house, to see if winter burning of the grass thatch would have an impact on the relative composition of native and non-native plants in the meadow. After some initial pushback ("now that you're a burn boss, you just want to light things on fire all the time!") we had a fun hour playing with fire in the mild conditions. I look forward to seeing what comes up in the spring!

Now with the arrival of winter and the seasonal rain, cold, and darkness, it's time to slow down and recharge. I am grateful to have time for rest and renewal over the next week before the good work picks up again in the new year.

Sending warmth and gratitude to you all.