Bonny Doon Fire: Community
Our community has settled into its own slow burn even as the fires recede. As of today, August 28, over 25,000 of us in Santa Cruz county have been repopulated. That leaves only about 50,000 of us still stranded and anxious to find out when we’re on. Unfortunately for my family and me, as one of the first to be evacuated, we’re apparently going to be among the last to go home. At least we have a home to go back to, for which I am endlessly grateful.
Bonny Doon has a FB group that has been a lifeline for us. FB is a pain in the ass to put it mildly, but it does have a function. If you don’t live in a mountain area or some similarly remote place, you may find it hard to grasp the multiple meanings of ‘no power.’ As I mentioned in my post Absence, without electricity, there’s the annoyance of no lights and the difficulties of no oven or stove for cooking. Additionally, many of us run into bigger issues. For those of us with well-water pumps that need electricity to keep it on (that’s a lot of us), we have no water. For those of us with only cell phones (most of us), we got nothing. The Doon doesn’t have cell towers — a contentious issue for years as some say it would be a blight on the landscape. But no towers means once our WiFi is down, we have no connection to anything. The Bonny Doon FB group has been the source to keep us informed.
Evacuation under any circumstance is also no power. We are subject to the laws of Mother Nature and to outside agencies for everything. We’re subject to their interpretations, guidelines, rules and laws. Particularly people living in rural communities tend to frown on that feeling of powerlessness. Two things happened in response.
One was that a number of Dooners refused to evacuate or came back not only to protect their own home but to help others. There are countless stories of people whose home had already burned staying to help save their neighbors’ homes. Of people sharing skills and equipment. Of organizing firefighting and supplies at a level multi-year firefighters hadn’t seen before. Little Bonny Doon made national headlines for its stubborn grit — and success — in the face of police and firefighters insisting people leave. Don’t misunderstand. It wasn’t that people thought the firefighters weren’t helping. They weren’t available. Without its own fire department, getting triaged out over and over, and with fires all over the state, Dooners stepped up.
The other thing that happened was that our FB group went into overdrive. It became the information hub to the community and its linchpin. People could find each other, animals left behind, assistance with hot spots, ways in when normal routes became unavailable, updates from officials and CalFire, and assistance of every kind. Just this morning I saw someone’s mom stayed behind and was cleaning out neighbors’ refrigerators. GoFundMe’s are springing up for others who lost everything. A spinoff group for Dooners Rebuilding BD has been sending out information and resources of all kinds.
And therein is the contradictory nature of tragedies. Exactly what disempowered us also gave us great strength, connection and personal power.
This feels to me like a microcosm of much of what’s happening around us. Long ago, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, “the Anti-Semite makes the Jew.” He meant that Jews’ strong identity came not from Judaism per-se but because of the atrocities committed against them as Jews. Similarly, racism both destroys Black lives and empowers Black communities. Environmental disasters do the same.
This is not to discount victims who have lost everything and have no ability to rebuild lives shattered by bullets or disasters like these fires. It is merely to note that while we often talk about community, right now Bonny Doon is among the groups that are vibrantly redefining its meaning through a strengthened identity with place, sense of belonging and personal power.
