note: this article appears on pages four and five of the March 2021 issue of the Talent Historical Society Newsletter, The Historicale
On September 8th, the life of Talent, and many Talentians, changed forever.
I work for Harry & David and on that day, I was working from home because of the COVID-19 issues affecting our world this year. At about 11:00 a.m. I could see from my home office many vehicles zooming past our living room windows on the front of our home. This was certainly unusual because no one “zooms” in Mountain View Estates! The speed limit in the park is 15 mph.
I knew there was a fire in Ashland that morning, but even with the high winds I thought there was no way it would make it all the way to Talent. I have never been more wrong.
As I looked out our front windows, I saw strong winds with debris flying through the sky and a police cruiser parked around the corner with its lights flashing. I went out the front door and walked over to the cruiser. More cars rushed past as I crossed the street. It was an Ashland Police car and there was no one in the car. I looked down the street to see an officer walking down one driveway about a half-block away and then up the next driveway. It was obvious he was going door to door to alert people. I started walking quickly toward the house he was at.
As he exited that driveway and started towards the next, I called to him asking if we were being evacuated. He stopped, turned toward me and hollered, “YES, GET OUT……NOW!!”
I asked, “Where should we go?” He answered, “DRIVE NORTH!” I asked, “To where?” His response, “JUST GET OUT AND DRIVE NORTH NOW!”
I did get out, but only after I spent about 10 minutes gathering as many things as I could think of that were precious or irreplaceable to us. More on that later.
When I did get out, I didn’t go far. I parked in the Talent Truck Stop parking lot across Valley View Road from Mountain View Estates. I felt fairly safe because I was surrounded by the huge concrete parking lot of the Cummins (the old Walmart) parking lot across the street and the similarly huge gravel parking lot of the truck stop. There were many others who chose to stop here as well.
From that vantage point, we could clearly see the overpass where Valley View Road crosses I-5. I was videoing all the activity going on in the area when the fire got to the overpass. It jumped Valley View Road like it wasn’t even there. That’s when I realized how serious the situation was. This wasn’t a wildfire; it was more like an incinerator. Shortly after that we were all instructed to move out of the area to a safer location.
The “safer location” I chose was on the side of Rapp Road just where it crosses the railroad tracks. This was where I saw Jan Wright and her daughter and spoke with them for a couple of minutes. Jan was on her own evacuation route and would later join me as a fire victim who lost her home and all its contents.
After about 10 minutes there, I realized I could probably get a better view of the valley from Rapp Lane. I drove there and joined several Talentians that were watching the same horror I was. Again, I videoed, for as long as my phone battery lasted. I ended up spending probably an hour or so watching from that vantage point.
Finally, I decided to go down to the museum and charge my phone. Arriving at the museum, I found that the power had gone out. Once I realized it, I was not surprised, I had just not thought about that possibility. I returned to my car and idled for about 15 minutes charging my phone.
Then I walked to the corner of Highway 99 and Valley View Road. I stood with my back to Talent Market & Liquor’s concrete block building. That gave me what I knew was a false sense of security. The scenes I saw there were perhaps the most chaotic of a disastrous day.
There were two Oregon Department of Transportation workers who were “in charge” of the intersection. They had been tasked with maintaining order in chaos and directing traffic. I’m sure it was not something they had signed up for.
There was steady general public traffic coming down Highway 99 from the north. This included everything from motorcycles to semi-trucks. There was traffic coming out of Talent on Valley View. There were police, sheriff and fire vehicles speeding back and forth occasionally stopping and giving ever changing directions to the two ODOT guardians of the intersection. It was hot, it was windy, it was smokey and it was overwhelming.
There were people who wanted to drive south on Highway 99 despite the danger. The guardians stopped them. There were people who wanted to drive Valley View to the Interstate despite the danger. The guardians stopped them. They were yelled at and no doubt cursed, but these two knew their jobs and did them admirably.
At some point, it was finally decided there was no choice but to open up Valley View to the freeway to alleviate some of the crush of traffic. Seeing this, I hoofed it back to the museum to get my car. Driving this route, I could get within a half a block or so of my house and maybe I could see what was happening in my neighborhood.
I drove back to the intersection and was allowed through to connect to the freeway. Upon reaching the Cummins driveway, I pulled off the main road into the driveway. It was too hot and smokey to stay, but I got a quick look and from my parked car took a photo of what I believed was our house fully engulfed in flames. I stopped just long enough to take that photo and then rejoined the flood of vehicles headed for I-5.
It was about 4:30 and I finally decided to follow the officer’s orders and “drive north!” It didn’t take long to reach the south Medford exit, but from that point to my son’s house in west Medford, it took at least an hour to reach my destination.
I’ll share with you now my Facebook post from the next day to continue my story.
09-09-2020 This has been a long and tiring day. After a late-night trip to Talent last night to confirm that our house was indeed gone in the wildfire that swept up the Rogue Valley of southern Oregon, neither Stella nor I slept much.
We were fortunate to have our son Nick and our wonderful daughter-in-law Jana to take us in last night, feed us, and give us a place to collapse.
The very first thing I did this morning was to file our insurance claim for the house and contents. I knew there would be a very long line, forming quickly, today and didn't want to get lost in it.
We started out pretty early this morning and made the first stops in our busy day to buy clothing. Again, dozens of families lost their homes and businesses yesterday and overnight, so we figured we'd best buy some undies while there were still undies to buy!
We filled up the car with gas and then headed for Talent to see what we could see.
I've posted a video on my page showing what we found at Mountain View Estates, our home until yesterday. I have many more photos of our own personal devastation to help document our losses for the insurance company and may post a few of the more poignant ones on my Facebook feed in days to come.
We recognize that we are both in shock about what has happened. I expect it will take a while to sink in.
After our own home inspection, we drove around to see what we could see in Talent. Our sweet little town that we moved to in 1988 certainly took quite a blow over the last 24 hours. We lost several historic buildings (of course Ron would be looking at the historic buildings), many businesses and so, so many homes.
That's not to say there isn't a lot of Talent remaining, there is! Along with some of our most precious historic buildings. The firefighters drew a line along Talent Avenue and didn't lose anything behind that line. The fires were only a block away from one of the oldest church buildings in southern Oregon along with the star of our downtown, an 1899 Schoolhouse that has been everything from a schoolhouse to our City Hall, to our Library and our Community Center for over 120 years. (Can you tell that I kind of like that particular building?)
Again, I will post more photos in the days to come, today has been a little overwhelming.
Stella was already at work on Tuesday morning when this whole thing started, so it was up to me to be the one to bug out and decide what to take with me. Our whole neighborhood literally had minutes to make our decisions.
First in the car? The laptops! I had my personal laptop, one of Talent Historical Society's laptops and my Harry & David work laptop. (I was working from home when I noticed all the cars hurrying out of our park and went to see what was up.) I also grabbed Stella's personal laptop and her laptop from her church (she's the treasurer for her church). What I found out much too late was that she also had a work laptop at home. Oops! Didn't even realize that.
Next off the wall came the irreplaceable family photos which ranged in date from 1881 to 1957. They got stacked carefully in the car, so as not to break the domed glass in some of the frames. I stood in our bedroom looking at the upright jewelry box Stella got as a gift one year. How could I save that? I couldn't, so the drawers came out and the "family jewels" got tossed into the car.
Finally, I looked at my shelves of books I'd purchased over the past 45 years, so that when I retired, I'd have all this collected knowledge to continue my family research into both sides of our family, to pass on to future generations. I couldn't take it all, so I grabbed about a half-dozen of my most cherished and irreplaceable books and finished the pile in the car.
That was it. No clothing, no prescriptions, no CPAP machine, nothing else. All those things can be easily replaced.
Now since then, in perfect 20-20 hindsight, it might have been nice to grab our insurance files or our marriage license or our wedding album of some of the treasured genealogical memorabilia that I've thought of now but wasn't in plain view as the stuff I did grab.
I can't let those things bother me moving forward. I can certainly have my regrets, but what is done is done and here we go! Off into the future!
I spent most of the afternoon in and around Talent watching things unfold in front of me. I was stunned. By the time I did leave, I was able to drive close enough to our house to see, from about a block away, through the unbelievably thick smoke, what I was sure was our house fully engulfed.
By the time I made my way to Nick's house in Medford, Stella was already there waiting for me. I'd called ahead to tell her what I saw so she knew what was up when I walked through the door.
I'd been thinking about what the bright side of this could be so I could try to cheer her up. The kitchen! She hated the kitchen in our house and was hoping someday to be able to redo it into the kitchen that my cooking genius wife deserved. That was it. That was my opening line!
When we embraced, I started to tell her what the one good thing out of this was going to be, but she interrupted me and said, "The one good thing about this is, I don't have to use that damned kitchen anymore!"
That's why I love her. That's why we can face this together and come out the other end just fine. We were made for each other.
Since that Facebook post on September 9th, much has happened in our lives. We were lucky enough to find a place to live through a friend of a friend. We moved in around the first of October. It’s a nice temporary home. I retired from Harry & David on November 18th and we’ve ordered our new home that will be placed at Mountain View Estates sometime in late summer 2021. It will have a VERY nice kitchen.
We are really looking forward to being back home again…. in Talent.
No comments:
New comments are not allowed.