"We Will Rebuild"

Our most powerful stories come from the field. With permission we share Josie Woodbridge's story. Josie and Josh, a former Asheville hotshot now working for Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest, lost their home in Talent, OR, to the Almeda fire.

We send our condolences to all those affected by the devastating impacts of wildland fire. No one is immune from wildfire. May we all take a moment to reflect upon Josie's story and seek for understanding the resilience expressed in her words. 

Two weeks

Time of death: somewhere in the hours after my frantic 3pm evacuation and a heart-sinking text from my dad’s wife as they evacuated later that evening down Talent Avenue to Ashland: “Talent is on fire. We did see down Arnos, honey, and it didn’t look good. I’m so so sorry”. By early the next morning I’d seen two videos posted online of our street in flames. 

Yesterday I opened Facebook to an article in the Oregonian plastered with a photo someone had snapped standing in our driveway surveying the wreckage of our garage, and beyond. Josh had gone back the day after the fire and taken photos while I cuddled the kids, so I immediately recognized the particular silhouette of his warped weight rack, the only thing besides the chimney that stood higher than a couple feet from the ground, and our neighbors pick up truck beyond that, now ashen white splashed with fluorescent pink retardant, body flush with the cement. It felt strange to see the dead carcass of our house plastered there, so public, yet undistinguishable by anyone other than us amongst the thousands of other homes that look just like ours now: a pile of rubble and ash, our years there disintegrated in a matter of hours.

The days since the fire blur together, exhaustion consumes, and grief comes in waves I let pass over me, move through me. But mostly I am kept busy: the insurance claim, the immediate necessities to replace (glasses, contacts, documents, medications I failed to grab), looking for a rental, and all the love and generosity flooding our way. I know we are blessed. I look around the living room at the boxes of toys and clothes and books and cards, and know this: we are the lucky ones.   

But I miss familiarity. I miss our hallway walls, our floor, it’s smooth surface familiar beneath my feet as I glide from room to room, complaining about the endless laundry. I miss our dirty laundry— our clothes, soaked with our smells. Now we wear the scents of someone else, and sleep in someone else’s beds. I lay awake against an unfamiliar pillow and watch different rooms burn in my mind: the kitchen, where I stood barefoot and concerned at the black plume out the window that day, now engulfed in flames, the pictures on the fridge that Finn has drawn me curling into singed fragments. The counter Josh so lovingly stained and installed, it’s rich cinnamon wood slowly blackening, collapsing. I see the living room, where we spent countless hours piled together on the couch, where Finn slept for a day straight when he had an ear infection, and the fire devours it. It moves quickly now to my grandmothers piano— the one my dad learned to play as a boy, that he played me to sleep with when I was a girl, and that I learned on in my preteen years, resisting those lessons as preteens do. I watch as the bench ignites, and I know that tucked inside it’s lid, so too do the sheets of music collected over the years— some faded and classic, some glossy and bright, fleeting obsessions of a teenage girl (Alanis Morrisette, Jewel, and Mariah Carey). Down the hallway as the light fades outside, night coming, but sky glowing orange across swaths of our tiny town, the bedrooms lay waiting, full of so many heart strings. Finns room, soaked in his exuberant energy, that even when he was away, I’d feel him there, vibrating in each stuffed animal, each crumpled sock, each toy, and all his “treasures” stuffed into drawers and boxes and jars. In minutes it’s devouring his innocence, burning so hot and so fast through his nearly six years on this earth. Suzanna’s room is next, the one I’d just finished putting together, and I cringe at the crib on fire, seeing now her startled look as I strapped her forcefully into her carseat for our getaway. Our room is last, and I just want to hold onto my husband, bury my face in his shoulder and cry, as the life we’ve built dies. The bed, our nest, where we’d been dating, then engaged, and one weekend in November come home to married. Gone. 

It feels like a death. A gruesome, violent death of a loved one that weighs eerily on my heart. And, it feels wrong to say that out loud as I also know: it is just stuff, and the death of a loved one would have been far worse. But that stuff marked our place on a map and held within its imperfect walls so much of our love, so much of our life, notches on our timeline, that now, without being tethered to it, in moments it feels like we are floating and drowning all at once. 

“We will rebuild” reads a sign erected in the debris down the road. And we will. I’ve left a piece of my life once before, walked away and left everything, and started anew. At the time it was the most painful thing in the world. But looking back, I see the priceless ways in which it freed me, and led me straight into the arms of the life I have now. I wouldn’t be here, alive and well, with my precious little family, if it weren’t for that wreckage way back when. And I trust that someday we will look back on this, the rubble of our life as we knew it, as a mile marker for some still-unknown new beginning. Clean slate. Fresh start. And to do it all with the three human beings I hold dearest to my heart… I know it will be okay. The trauma is real. The heartbreak is real. And so is the love and compassion and beauty greeting us each day since our home burned. Thank you, all of you, who have reached out and shared so much. Your generosity is immense, and our gratitude is as well. In a country, a world, so divided, it’s been miraculous to witness so many people come together in love ❤️

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