Locals band together, grieve amid remains of Beachie Creek wildfire devastation
By Fedor Zarkhin | The Oregonian/OregonLive
Geri Gust stopped the conversation when she noticed an unlikely survivor of the wildfires dangling from a branch.
“Hey, I still have wind chimes!” she said, walking over to a bush at the edge of her property and unhooking a butterfly-shaped ornament with a large green marble inside a metal spiral. “Just look at that!”
It was a discordant moment of forced joy amid the ruined landscape that is much of Gates, a tiny town east of Salem that suffered an outsize proportion of the damage wrought by this season’s second-largest fire in the early morning hours after Labor Day.
Just over two weeks after the flames tore through the canyon, destroying hundreds of homes and killing four people, the mental and emotional fog has been slow to clear for the town’s residents.
Wildfire damage in Gates, Oregon off Highway 22 in Marion County on Monday, Sept. 21, 2020. Wildfires ripped through the small town of less than 500 people a little over a week ago, destroying many homes and businesses. Sean Meagher/Staff
Some rummaged through ash, metal, roof tiles and stray concrete in search of tools, resilient trinkets and anything else that may have survived. Utility workers along Oregon 22, the main road through the Santiam Canyon, cleared debris and mended power lines. Locals who still have homes managed a torrent of donations to help those who don’t.
For the most part, though, the real work has yet to start. Much of what was destroyed remains in undisturbed piles of rubble, often next to the skeletal remains of cars – one of the few possessions still recognizable after a blaze.
The Beachie Creek fire, which combined with fires near Gates started by downed power lines, destroyed 486 homes across the approximately 193,000 acres it touched, state officials said.
At first glance, the carnage can be hypnotizing, drawing gasps and pulling newcomers' eyes to those objects that kept the form of what they were before Sept. 7. But the piles of debris strewn through the town quickly dissolve into a single gray, black and rust-brown scene.
From the beginning, the emotions have been complicated.
Gust, 64, said she evacuated her home just before it was too late. She couldn’t bring herself to do anything to get ready to leave, she said, and sat in a corner and cried.
“I sucked my thumb,” she said, “crying like a baby.”
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Back this Tuesday with her boyfriend, Gust was trying to hook a neighbor’s camper to a friend’s pick-up truck, so they had somewhere better than a tent to store the things they extracted from the remains of their double-wide manufactured home.
But the friend’s truck wasn’t wide enough. That meant they couldn’t move the camper the 40 or so feet from one property to the next.
Gust was categorical when asked if she would consider using the camper while it was on the neighbor’s property.
“At some point, your pride just kicks in,” she said.
The couple has applied for Federal Emergency Management Agency help twice. They were denied both times. The Red Cross is putting them up at a hotel until Oct. 2, and they’re still not sure where they’ll go next. Their home was not insured.
‘STRANGE THINGS HAPPEN’
For some, hope is the only option when they don’t know what happened to their most precious possessions.
Fran Howe and her husband Larry Tripoli pulled past the Marion County Sheriff’s Office and National Guard roadblock at milepost 33, on the eastern edge of Gates, followed by two friends who came from Seattle. It was the second visit to their property since it burned down in as many days.
An insurance adjuster was on the scene when they arrived, his laptop on the trunk of the car.
Four neighbors had vastly different experiences learning they could die if they stayed much longer.
The Santiam River flowed nearby as a chainsaw on their neighbor’s property buzzed, interrupted by the intermittent crack-thud of falling trees. The smell of soot wafted up the property on a breeze coming up from the river and past the leveled house.
Howe’s childhood friend, Deb Fitz, stood in the corner of what used to be the dining room, where Howe kept an antique chest with jewelry she had collected for years, and fished out a bent and discolored silver bracelet with a centerpiece stone – the most intact item she found.
Deb Fitz rummaged around in the remains of her friend Fran Howe's house, looking for any salvageable jewelry in what used to be the dining room. Most of what she found had melted together into unrecognizable globs.
Fitz and Howe, both 63 and former military kids, have been friends since second grade. They stayed close even as their fathers moved bases.
Fitz eventually moved to Seattle, and she and her partner would come down to visit at least a few times a year. They would sit on the deck facing the Santiam, drink sangria and watch rafters go down the river. The last time Fitz was here was also for a difficult occasion: Howe’s mother was dying.
Now, Fitz said she and her partner have come to help any way they can, though they’re mostly in “listening and hugging mode” for now.
“It’s a blank sheet of paper,” she said, “And I want for them to scribble in and let us know what they need.”
She turned around from the dining room corner where she was fishing for jewelry and, laughing, pointed to a lop-sided, rusted and collapsed bed frame: The bed she’d use when she visited.
Fran Howe and Larry Tripoli realized they had to run when they saw flames bursting out of their neighbor's fence. The couple and their three dogs took refuge in the Santiam River until rescuers took them out 18 hours later. They returned to their property this week to talk through next steps with an insurance adjuster and to look for whatever items may have survived the fire.
Howe has also found some unexpected things. In the remains of a shed packed with holiday decorations, Howe found a flat porcelain Christmas ornament with Santa depicted on one side. It needed no more than a moist wipe to look fresh.
But what Howe is really looking for is far more precious -- the wooden urn containing her mother’s ashes. The box was in a nightstand on the first floor, Howe said, so perhaps it was protected when the second floor collapsed. It’s worth a shot.
Howe has two weeks to look for that and anything else she wants to keep before she goes in for back surgery, after which it will be difficult to do more than the most basic physical tasks, and her husband will have to take over.
Oregon couple took refuge in Santiam River as raging wildfire consumed their rural home near Gates
They lost everything except for the three dogs that ran with them to the river.
Then, there’s her cat, Minoue.
Moments before the couple ran down to the Santiam River to escape the approaching fire, Tripoli opened a sliding glass door. He hoped the cat, which had hidden under a bed, would know to bolt if the fire got to the house. If it did, then Howe wasn’t worried, she said. It had been feral and could survive in the woods.
The first time she came back after the fires, Howe brought two metal bowls for food and water and put them in front of the pole barn that stands unscathed next to the home’s remains.
Fran Howe hasn't seen her cat, Minoue, since she ran from the Beachie Creek fire that soon engulfed, and then destroyed, her home. But her husband left open a sliding door to give the cat a way out. They just don't know if the cat took it.
“I hope she’ll come,” Howe said.
The hard choice ahead will be whether they should rebuild. First, the septic tank, well and trees must be inspected. Then, they have to think – something there’s been little time for in the last two weeks.
It’s a complicated decision. They love the space – they put 13 years into it and had planned to retire there. But the reality of reconstruction is daunting.
“I think it would be sad if we leave,” Howe said. “But it’s going to be sad if we rebuild, too.”
Fitz was quiet, spending minutes at a time simply looking in the direction of the gutted house and the river. It hit her for the first time how close her friends were to the fires – the ground was scorched almost all the way to the riverbank.
The work with the insurance company wrapped up in about two hours. Fitz got in the car to start towards Salem. A carrier Howe wanted to take in case they found the cat was in the back.
Fitz had looked at the bowl of food Howe had left the previous day. It looked like it hadn’t been touched.
“But, you know,” she said. “Strange things happen.”
‘CANYON STRONG’
Rick Smart and Jeremy Smith stood outside of Kelly Lumber Sales, in Mill City, a town west of Gates that also sustained damage in the wildfires, though not nearly as bad as Gates.
The men tripped over each other to describe the work they had done to help the community.
Smith, 44, said he had put his crew of five concrete-layers on 12-hour shifts hauling water and hose houses down to protect them from encroaching fires, he said, and personally spent about $750 on fuel and $8,000 to pay his employees to do it. Smart, meanwhile, said locals had been coming to his Facebook page for live updates on their homes.
Smart called Smith to let him know his home was still standing.
“I said, ‘Bro, we’re saving houses,’” Smith said.
Neither one of them took anything for the work they did, though an anonymous donor paid Smith’s water bill for the next six months or so, he said.
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A White Grand Cherokee Jeep pulled over as they spoke. A woman stepped out and walked up to Smart, pushing a small wad of cash towards his chest.
“I don’t want that,” Smart, 46, said as she implored him to take the money. “You know better than that.”
“I know you, that’s why I want to help,” she replied as he tried to turn away.
All he could do was offer her a hug, he said. And then another one.
“Keep your head up,” Smith told her. “It’s all going to be good.”
“Canyon strong,” she said, before heading back to the car.
The men collected themselves, looking down at the ground and then each other.
“I was right about to tell her to split,” Smith said. “Before I got emotional.”
‘IT’S OVER, MAN’
Perry Drevo sat in a chair on the neighbor’s nearly immaculate lawn. That neighbor’s home was untouched, the green grass offering little to no fuel for the fire. But Drevo’s home was leveled, charred remains of appliances sticking out from pieces of slate, metal and ash.
Drevo, 74, said that before she evacuated, she grabbed only her puppy, an Australian Shepherd named Eddy, and two days' worth of clothes.
“The rest,” she said, “well, you can see what happened.”
The house, on the Linn County side of Gates, stood right on the bank of the Santiam River, and her son, Sam Drevo, needed to clear the toxic ash from the area closest to the bank before the rains came. The area nearest to the river was covered with the remains of a deck Sam Drevo built in the spring – his “covid deck.”
Wildfire damage in Gates, Oregon off Highway 22 in Marion County on Monday, Sept. 21, 2020. Wildfires ripped through the small town of less than 500 people a little over a week ago, destroying many homes and businesses. Sean Meagher/Staff
Trees flanked the opposite bank, and salmon were spawning in a small eddy.
“This is Salem’s drinking water,” Sam Drevo said. “Think about that.”
The first order of business that Monday was to remove the thousands of screws he’d used on the deck. He and his friend, Andrew Hansen, rolled a wheeled magnet back and forth across the soft ground, then lifted the contraption over a wheelbarrow and let the screws fall with a clatter.
A hole in the ground hidden in the trees emitted a slow plume of smoke that Sam Drevo and Hansen hadn’t noticed at first.
“Not too much to worry about burning down now,” Sam Drevo said after Hansen pointed out the spot fire.
Sam Drevo, who’d also lost property in the fire, brought a crew of about 15 people in to finish the job Tuesday. They brought in five tons of hay that they laid over the ground near the bank of four nearby homes and laid down tubes by the river to prevent erosion.
Still, Sam Drevo isn’t hopeful about the future of the town or the river. He listed a variety of numbers, from the hundreds of thousands of acres burned to the homes destroyed.
“It’s over, man, it’s over,” Sam Drevo said. “I don’t know what to say.”
Were you affected by the wildfires? Get in touch.
-- Fedor Zarkhin
fzarkhin@oregonian.com | 971-373-2905 | @fedorzarkhin