My Gentle Barn (31 page)

My pores were filled with soot, as were my nostrils and mouth. I felt completely black, inside and out. My hair had been whipped into a rat’s nest, my ears were still ringing, and my whole body was trembling. This was my state as I leaned against my car in the dark at the side of the road, safely away from the flames.

I called Stacy to ask her to meet me at Denny’s with my daughter. Then I called Jay.

“We just unloaded all the animals,” he said. “We’re coming to get you!”

“No need,” I said. “We’re all out, and we’re all OK. Meet me at Denny’s.”

I also called my mom, who had surely seen the news with Molli and Jesse.

When I got to the restaurant, Stacy and the toddlers were already there, settled into a booth. My gaze found Cheyanne’s face, and I burst into tears, my body flooded with all the emotion I hadn’t had the luxury to feel over the last four hours. I lifted Cheyanne from the high chair, and the feel of my soft baby girl in my arms soothed and rejuvenated me. I sank into the booth and let the cushions have my weight. A few minutes later, Jay and Logan came in, as fire-blackened as I was.

Jay slid into the booth next to me and wrapped me and Cheyanne
in a big hug, and Logan talked excitedly about the adventure we’d just been through. A waitress took one look at us and brought us hot drinks without even asking. I’ll never forget her smile or the taste of the cinnamon spice tea as it slid down my parched throat.

That night, after Cheyanne and I were safe and sound in a trailer on the land of the sister rescue—where the majority of our animals were being housed—Jay went back to check on our property. Amazingly, our house was still there. The fire department ordered him to leave, but he refused; he was going to see to it that we didn’t lose our home. At one point the roofs of both the house and office caught fire and a helicopter dumped water on them. Fire trucks showed up off and on to help out, but they were needed everywhere at once. So Jay and a volunteer fought the fire back all through the night with a couple of garden hoses. Every time the flames were extinguished in one area, they sprang back up in another—the roots of burned-down trees and bushes so hot they reignited again and again. The flames melted the vinyl fences and burned some of the wood ones, and the wind blew other fences away entirely. Some trees burned, others were snapped in half by the wind, and still others were chopped to pieces by the firemen in an effort to remove tinder from near the house. The flames scorched the roofs, leaving the interiors of the house and office smoke damaged. And the exteriors were still being thrashed by seventy-mile-an-hour wind and debris when Jay left our property in the morning.

The following day, the Buckweed Fire—as it came to be called—was still burning, but Jay and the firemen had beaten it back to a safe distance from our land. As we figured out where all our animals were and began to make our rounds to three different locations to feed and check on them, I was exhausted and still a bit shaky, yet deeper down, beneath my sore muscles and trembling, the fire had begun to work its magic on me. In the plant kingdom, there are some species that will
only germinate after a fire. The hard, resinous seeds lie dormant in the ground until a wildfire cracks them open, allowing them to sprout, grow, and flourish. I was like one of these plants. It was as though the fire had rushed through my life and burned off the debris—obstacles, doubt, fear—and cracked me wide open. New seeds would soon be sprouting all through my life—seeds of trust, surrender, and faith.

The Buckweed Fire burned more than thirty thousand acres and destroyed sixty-three structures. Fifteen other fires tore across Southern California within three days, and more than five hundred thousand acres would burn by the end, with more than three thousand structures destroyed. We were so very grateful that our house was not included in the count.

For days, the fires were in all the newspapers and were featured on local, national, and international news stations—and apparently the Gentle Barn was mentioned a number of times during this coverage. Although we talked to reporters by phone, we had no way to watch the news in the little trailer where we were staying. Besides, we were busy tending to our animals, who were scattered all over Santa Clarita. On one of his trips to feed our horses, however, Jay heard an announcement on the car radio from our mortgage company. “If you’ve been affected by the California wildfires and need help with your mortgage, please call us.” Jay called right away, and they deferred our current and overdue payments to the back of the loan. Figuring the loan company on the car might also be willing to help, he called them too, and they agreed to do the same. Our financial pressures, for the time being, were lifted.

Slowly we began assessing the damage, filling out insurance claims, and getting workmen in to mend the fences. Once the shelters and fencing were secure enough to keep the animals safe—a couple of weeks after the fire—we were able to return with our animals and
our children, but there was still so much damage that needed attention. Much of the fencing was charred or melted and would need to be entirely replaced, the exteriors of the house and office were wind-scarred, the inside smelled like smoke, there were holes in the roofs, and the land was black and barren as far as the eye could see. On the day we returned, news stations met us at our gates and got footage of our scorched land and the animals being unloaded. They asked us to explain what the Gentle Barn was all about and to talk about our experience during the fire.

“We’re just so relieved that we got all the animals out,” I told the reporters. “And we’re incredibly grateful to the firemen and everyone else who helped us.”

It was true. Despite the damage and the work that lay ahead, the emotion that kept washing through me was gratitude. Fences and roofs seemed so unimportant compared to all the lives that had been spared. The animals themselves seemed surprisingly unperturbed; they settled in as though nothing had happened and resumed their lives, once again serving as models of how to live with grace and ease.

When Jay was able to get back in front of a computer, he discovered that donations had been coming in through our website for days. Some from California, others from around the country and even from other places in the world. Checks started arriving in the mail, too. People who had seen us on the news were moved by our plight and were sending monetary help—which we would need more than ever because we’d just discovered that our place was underinsured.

From the end of October to the end of December 2007, all our focus was on repairing and rebuilding (and waiting for insurance money to arrive). Our at-risk youth program and visitor Sundays were canceled until we got settled back in. With delays in insurance money and glitches in the repair process, the roofs on the house and office would take nearly ten months to be reconstructed, but that wasn’t going to stop us from reopening the Gentle Barn. Two months after
the fire, when all the fencing and outside structures had been repaired, we held our first public event—a Winter Wonderland. We had snow brought in and invited people to come with their kids to play in the snow and meet the animals. We also invited the fire department and thanked them publicly for saving the Gentle Barn, and we dedicated the new cow barn to them.

In the weeks and months following the fire, it slowly sank in: There were now people all over the world who knew about us and cared about our mission. When I’d insisted that a miracle was going to find us, I’d had no idea it would ride in on the back of a wildfire. But what an amazing miracle it was. Not only did every single animal come out unscathed, as did all the people who had worked with such courage to get them out, but kindness and generosity had met us at every turn. The donations in those first couple of weeks proved to be only the beginning of a flood that would continue for months, helping us fully restore our property. The fire had given us a breather from our financial predicament and it had put us on the map in the animal-loving world—a widespread community that wanted to support our work now and in the future. It was impossible to doubt the worth of what we were doing with so much support flooding in, and this energy carried us forward.

But the most remarkable growth took place inside of me. I was moved and inspired and forever changed by the fire. In the face of such a force of nature, I had been derailed from my habitual patterns of trying to manage and control the outcome. It was so big and so powerful and so scary that I was forced to surrender and be guided—forced to allow others to help. It was in that surrender that I found a new strength unlike anything I had ever experienced. I felt held and safe and provided for. I was not alone after all; I was just a tiny current in the large, gorgeous flow of life. I came away with a knowing so deep and so unshakable that I could handle anything life threw at me, and anything I felt truly called to take on, because I wasn’t doing it alone. I had the huge, crazy, beautiful universe backing me up.

Three months after the wildfire, we were still riding the wave of awe and surrender—saying yes to all of life—when we got a call from the sister rescue who had come to our aid during the fire. They had gotten access to the property of an animal hoarder in Lancaster and needed help pulling out two hundred farm animals who were being horribly neglected and abused. There are all types of hoarders—people who try to fill up the emptiness inside them by collecting things. Some hoard newspapers or books, some hoard candy wrappers, others hoard animals. Animal hoarders collect far more animals than they can possibly care for properly; some hoarders are also abusive toward their animals, and this was the type in question.

This sister rescue was planning to evacuate the animals the very next day and had come up shorthanded. After all the people at this
rescue had done for us, we were thrilled to be able to show our gratitude by helping them out. Jay and I couldn’t both go; someone had to run the at-risk youth program, take care of our animals, look after Cheyanne, and pick up our older kids from school. We decided Jay should go, and he was happy to help.

All day, Jay helped lead and carry malnourished and terrified farm animals off the hoarder’s property. As he worked he passed dog kennels by the side of the dirt driveway—a sea of cages on a huge slab of concrete with no shelter whatsoever. Every kennel was filled with several dogs, some dead from starvation, illness, or attacks from the other dogs, others still alive but emaciated or torn apart. There was no food or water in any of the kennels, and the cages had not been cleaned of feces or urine in a very long time. When Jay asked about the dogs, he found out another rescue operation was handling it.

“I don’t know, Jay,” I said after he’d told me about the dogs and the devastation he’d witnessed. He was so upset by it, he had wept as he’d described the scene.

“They told me it was being handled,” he said, wiping away his tears.

But I felt in my gut that something was not right. Why were the dogs still there at the end of the day? The next morning I asked Jay to call and make sure the dogs were being taken care of.