One Year Later - A Story of Resilience

Almeda fire 2020, Josh and Josie Woodbridge

O N E    Y E A R    L A T E R 🔥
by Josie Woodbridge

[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.]

Photo: Josie and Josh Woodbridge

Like thousands of phantom limbs, it’s been a year plagued with momentary lapses in comprehension of the things and the life that no longer exists. Sometimes it seems I will forever struggle to wrap my head around the whole of it, the entirety of the loss: pieces of past lives, mine and Josh’s, boxes and baggage that found their way over decades to finally reside under one roof; collections born from our lives intersected, the combined one we were building; precious keepsakes saved from the first weeks, years of our babies lives; and a lifetimes of passions, mine and Josh’s— Prismacolor pencils, hundreds of them in various phases of use, oil paint tubes both plump and new, and rolled wrinkled to the tip, paint brushes and embroidery thread and canvas stretchers and portfolios filled with art and notebooks of writing and endless stashes of mementos. And there were fly rods, passed on for generations, as well as built from scratch in recent years, flies tied by grandpas hands, and by hands still learning; fishing nets and hike packs and vintage rifles and boxes and boxes of books. It’s still strange to think that I cannot resurrect photos of my childhood— they’re not in a “cloud” somewhere, they aren’t saved in folder on a desktop; they’re ashes, they’re dust. Some will live in memories, for a time, but eventually they may disappear completely, no trace. But perhaps most haunting is the way it felt like a death of our life together up until that point, as if all those living memories made in all those corners of that home were also devoured violently in those flames. A year later, and I’m still taking mental inventory of what was taken from us that day.

Photo: Josie and Josh Woodbridge

I didn’t really cry over the fire until recently. I think I was so focused on surviving it at first, protecting my almost six year old (now almost seven) and newborn baby girl from the horror of it and the thick-as-molasses aftermath we waded through for months and months, and still do, sometimes, to this day. It was a surreal wave of trauma and grief and disbelief that we rode both alone and as a community, which began as a 24-hour storm surge of heat and flame and dry leaves tornadoed on reckless wind which we weathered, and then wandered the wreckage in the eerie monochrome calm afterwards, together, combing the rubble of the torn landscape in subdued desperation, for anything that might’ve survived the blast, asking each other, “is this really happening? Is it really all gone?”.

Photo: Josie and Josh Woodbridge

Last night, on the eve of the one-year anniversary of the Almeda fire, I gathered school supplies in a pile next to a new backpack as the kids slept, nervously anticipating Finn’s first full day of first grade at the elementary school in our little town that burned. Tomorrow morning we will drive through the burn scar, I thought, where new growth has filled in the space between blackened tree skeletons, and past our lot where the rebuild inches along at a snails pace, and I will imagine for the millionth time what it will be like be back there someday. Somehow, I didn’t see it coming, feeling so emotional about this anniversary. Moving forward has been my MO all these months: moving on, moving past, keep moving, practice gratitude, because we must, in order to survive it. So to pause and go back to that day— I guess maybe I thought I was beyond that? But here it is, and here I am sorting out which tears are being shed for my first baby starting school, and which belong to the somber grave visits of all the things we lost that day. And in my mind I scatter flowers on the driveway of our deceased home.

Photo: Josie and Josh Woodbridge

Resilience and strength and bonds— all words that lift us up and help us focus also on the things we gained that day. This community is incredible, humans are indeed resilient, and life necessarily goes on. But September 8th will be a day that burns on my calendar forever, I suspect. So thank goodness for love, for family, and for the ways in which we connect with one another. Holding my loved ones a little closer to my heart today, and sending love out to our Valley, as we each remember that terrible day, one year later 🔥💛 #almedafire

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Read Josie's "We Will Rebuild" post from 9/23/2020.

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