Over the past six weeks, my wife and I have been wading through our river of “stuff” in preparation for our move to Portland, Oregon.
Poring over photographs, clothing and hand-made crafts and art made by loved ones — deciding what was to be kept and left out — it was easy to forget that there were others out there who had been either terrorized or wiped out by wildfires that continue to ravage the west.
Fran Howe and Larry Tripoli heard no alerts that fire raged toward their Oregon home. It was the smoke that roused them at 4:30 A.M. on September 8.
Herding their cat and dogs together, Larry watched as flames breached the fence bordering their’s and their neighbor’s property. The power was out. Their car was in the garage. The garage door would not open. There was no time to manually open it.
Cat and dogs in tow, the couple raced down a slope toward the Santiam River. Fire chased them along the river bank past their neighbor’s cabin which lit up like kindling. That’s when the couple and their fur-kids took to the water.
Howe turned toward her husband and told him she loved him: “I really thought we were going to die,” Howe told The Oregonian.
A veteran, Howe had been involved in scrapes that were “pretty scary,“ but nothing compared to that day on the river.
“I was more scared than I’ve been my entire life,” Howe said.
Having survived the fray, Howe and Tripoli are grateful for the basics. The river that provided refuge. The first responders who rescued them. The fact that all their pets survived unharmed.
Scott “Sky” Johnson, his wife, Marybeth, and their cat, Tuku, shared a home perched 50 feet above the same river.
“It was the most amazing, gorgeous place you could ever imagine,” Johnson told KGW News.
The family’s home often echoed with songs inspired by the Santiam River which Johnson himself composed. But on the morning of September 8, those melodious echoes ended.
Faced with a wall of flame outside their front door, the family scrambled down a steep embankment and jumped into the river. They clung to a log in the freezing water for seven hours. As their home, studio and musical instruments burned, they sang a song:
You got to know what it knows
And we will lift each other up . . .
In the aftermath, Johnson and his family surveyed the carnage: “Our land was like an unrecognizable moonscape,” he said. “There was a pile of twisted metal where my studio was.”
Rather than mourn the loss of stuff, Johnson is focussed on gratitude for the open hearts of friends and neighbors who benefitted from the family’s past generosity. The apartment the family now lives in, the clothes, household items and even the computer on which Johnson did his interview were all donated by the community Johnson and his family built.
“We lived our life . . . donating what we could when we could and it feels like it’s all coming back. It’s just so beautiful.”
In the wake of these inspiring stories, my wife and I are releasing our river of stuff so that we can embrace the river of love.