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VACAVILLE — Carol and Bruce Schafer are no strangers to tragedy.
They lost their seven-year-old daughter Lisa to leukemia 26 years ago, three months after their son Greg was born. This month, historic wildfires took their dream home.
But they know they will pull through this, too.
“Losing a house? This is stuff. But losing (Lisa) was horrific and there’ll never be anything worse than that,” said Carol. Lisa Schafer was diagnosed at three-and-a-half, underwent therapy for two-and-a-half years and was in remission for seven months before she relapsed and died six months later.
“So this is just stuff that can be replaced,” Carol added.
The Schafers returned Wednesday to their 20 acre property Northwest of downtown Vacaville for the first time since they evacuated their home a week earlier. An early-morning text from a neighbor alerted them about the approaching inferno.
“We were downstairs because the smoke was already bad here,” Carol recalled. “We could hear the wind — the wind was just howling.”
With prescience, Carol started taking photos of the living room. Before finishing the one room, Solano County Sheriff’s Office deputies had already arrived to order the family to leave. Carol went upstairs, grabbed birth certificates, the deeds of trust to the three houses the couple owned, rounded up their dogs and left.
They could not escape by just backing out and pulling away because a power outage meant the gate at the end of the driveway was locked.
The Schafers made it out and waited seven days until county officials allowed residents to return to their homes. The six cattle that had to left behind appeared unfazed by the previous seven days of destruction, but the Schafers’ 20 acres were mostly reduced to ash and metal. Only a barn, a brick wall and a metal gate were left standing after the blaze.
“We never thought we’d come back to have nothing. But there’s so many people that have lost their homes. I feel like it’s Napa all over again, or Sonoma, or wherever,” Carol said. “I don’t know if it’s going to get any better around here.”
The LNU Lightning Complex fire, California’s largest this year and second-largest ever, burned through at least five cars, one boat, a 1,400 square foot house and a barn across the street and another barn and home the Schafer’s own on Wild Oak Trail.
By the time CalFire LNU officials contained roughly one-third of the fire and began lifting evacuation orders Thursday, it had also scorched 368,868 acres, killed five people and injured four others.
“We’re going to have a busy couple years I think,” Carol said, chuckling as she looked across the blackened hills behind where her home stood a week ago.
She refused to feel sad as she surveyed the rubble though, rattling off her favorite memories — good and bad — accumulated since the couple bought the lot in 1989.
For now, the plan is to rebuild the home, a replica of Mount Vernon, the former plantation of George and Martha Washington.
Insurance adjusters told the couple they could go buy a new home elsewhere if they wanted to, leaving them on the fence about staying in Solano County.
While they’re uncertain about what they’re going to do, Schafer feels like they will start over right where they have spent the last 31 years.
“I really think we’ll probably rebuild, just because we loved it so much here.”
