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LAKEPORT — Fire plumes billowed over Cow Mountain as the Odom family, during a chaotic 90-minute evacuation from their farm, loaded up 50 goats, a miniature horse, a rabbit, 8 short-legged cats and three mice.
But even with borrowed stock trailers and a minivan, there was no room left for Ashwin, the skittish 19-year-old golden Mustang with special needs that 24-year-old Shea Odom Washman had nurtured over the past six years. In the barnyard, the rescue horse was bareback, wearing no saddle or bridle, just a loose harness and lead rope.
“I looked at my mom and I looked at my husband and told my husband to give me a leg up on the horse,” said Washman, who gave birth to her first child two months ago. “Then I rode him out.”
As the Mendocino Complex Fire continued to rage Tuesday 100 miles north of San Francisco, folks in this rural region who have endured five other major wildfires fires since 2015 are battle tested when it comes to evacuations. But the chronic fires are getting under their skin.
“It just brings up emotions that we just need to walk through, and know that there’s people in need, like us,” said Mary-Grace McMahon, who is putting up some of the Odom family at her Middletown house that barely escaped the Valley Fire in 2015. “We were helped when we were in need — now it’s our chance to give back. We are very closely connected. And it just causes us to reach out instead of shutting down.”
John Hall, who has lived in the Lake County area most of his 70 years, says he’s experienced so many fires and evacuations, they all seem to run together. His brother’s home burned three years ago.
“We don’t want to leave,” Hall said Tuesday, sitting outside an evacuation center at Twin Pine Casino and Hotel in Middletown. “We’re going to live through these fires until they stop. This is God’s country, and we want to stay here.”
Hot, dry winds on Tuesday continued to dog firefighters, who had been battling the blaze since Friday, but had contained them no more than 10 percent.
Fifteen wildfires are burning across the state, including in Redding and Yosemite where eight lives have been lost. The Carr Fire in Shasta and Trinity counties had consumed nearly 113,000 acres and was just 30 percent contained as of about 7 p.m. Tuesday, according to Cal Fire. At least 965 homes have been destroyed.
The stubborn Ferguson Fire continued to keep the major attractions of Yosemite National Park closed through the weekend — an extended closure — including the Yosemite Valley floor, Wawona Road, the Mariposa and Merced groves of giant sequioas and Hetch Hetchy.
Resources are stretched thin to tackle the River and Lake fires that make up the Mendocino Complex Fire, Cal Fire officials say.
“There is high demand for resources, then the Mendocino Complex breaks,” John Messina, Cal Fire’s operations section chief, said Tuesday morning during a Lake County briefing. “Resources are already committed. We are now facing limited resources to suppress this incident.”
The Ranch Fire, in Mendocino County northeast of Ukiah, has consumed more than 47,000 acres. The River Fire in Lake County, west of Lakeport and close to the Odom Family Farm, has burned 27,000 acres and destroyed 10 buildings.
A third wildfire broke out in the region Tuesday afternoon near County Road M1 and Mendocino Pass Road, east of Covelo, according to Cal Fire. As of about 8:50 p.m., the blaze had consumed 865 acres and residents were being evacuated from Mendocino Pass Road.
So far, these fires are powerful but small in comparison to the others that preceded them in recent years, all of them raging through big timber, thick brush and steep terrain not far from the summer resort town of Clearlake.
The Valley Fire destroyed more than 1,900 structures three years ago in Napa, Lake and Sonoma counties and is listed as Cal Fire’s fourth most destructive wildfire in state history. The Clayton Fire in 2016 at Lower Lake destroyed 300 buildings. Last October’s Redwood Fire in Mendocino County destroyed 546 buildings.
For those who chose to stay these past years, whether they were burned out or not, many have become experts in the art of evacuation and emergency preparedness.
Like many locals, Washman’s mother, Leah Odom, had signed up for emergency Nixle messages from their local sheriff’s department to warn of fires and evacuations. Cal Fire incident reports are bookmarked on their phones. Facebook message groups set up from previous fires swing into action, where neighbors offer horse trailers and beds for the night. And some have experienced enough to know what it meant when a Cal Fire summary reported Friday afternoon that 121 firefighters were posted on Old River Road.
“They’re not going to hold it,” said Odom, who noticed the first plumes when she was leaving a Lakeport movie theater Friday afternoon. “It’s not going to happen.”
During the past three years of fires, the Odom family, including Washman and her husband and baby, has been on the giving end. When fires destroyed neighborhoods in Middletown and on Cobb Mountain, the Odoms’ three-story Victorian-style home four miles west of Lakeport, designed by Leah and built by her husband, Matt, had been spared.
In the midst of the other fires, mother and daughter became animal rescue experts. With special permission during recent fires, Washman and Odom have been allowed into evacuation areas to feed abandoned animals, leaving buckets of water, dog and cat food and hay. And every time, they have opened their homes to evacuees.
When Odom received the evacuation alert Saturday morning, however, she knew they were the ones needing help. She called her father-in-law first.
“Grab the stock trailer at the Bernals’ house and bring it out here as quick as you can,” she told him.
Within minutes, friends and relatives showed up to help as well.
“I was praying, Lord, we need a miracle here to get everything out. God just provided the people, provided everything,” she said, except a spot for Ashwin, the Mustang with a barbed wire scar and a chronic abscess on his leg.
Washman had already strapped her 2-month-old son, Marcus, into the car seat of her husband’s vehicle. But even being tended to by family friends, Marcus was screaming.
“That’s probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done is ride past him,” Washman said, “but I knew if I didn’t take my horse, he wouldn’t make it out of there.”
She made it to the top of the long dirt driveway when the horse dug in his hooves.
“You can’t panic. Animals sometimes know your emotions before you do,” she said. “I had to take a deep breath.”
She slid off the horse and took him by the lead rope, walking nearly four miles in cheap flip-flops to get to the fairgrounds, where he could stay the night.
Meanwhile, her mother had secured the goats, first at Willie’s Hillbillies, then at Udderly Blessed goat dairy. But just like the animals that had to be moved twice as the fire shifted course over the weekend, the Odoms moved from relatives in Kelseyville on Saturday night to the McMahons in Middletown by Monday.
On Tuesday, they moved the goats yet again, this time to makeshift pens at the McMahons’ home.
They weren’t certain of the fate of their home until Tuesday evening. They had heard a spot fire had flared up nearby. But Odom received a photo from a neighbor who was able to drive by. There it was, the big blue farmhouse, nestled among oak trees against the golden dry hillside, floating almost ghostly in the smoky haze.
Odom posted it on Facebook and wrote, “God is good all the time.”
