Letter: Notes from the burn scar

Bob Regan is a songwriter in Nashville, Tennessee. He was raised in South Lake Tahoe in the 1960s. Regan Beach is named after his late father, Thomas F. Regan. This was originally published in the Boston Globe. It has been two years since the Caldor Fire started in Grizzly Flats before it burned 221,835 acres.

The map of the Caldor Fire looked like an angry earwig, its red pincers closing around the exact location of my summer cabin on Strawberry Creek near Lake Tahoe, CA. I gave my retirement dream no more than a ten percent chance of surviving the next forty-eight hours.

Two days before I had awoken to a beautiful Sierra summer day, a cracking blue sky, a light breeze. I knew the fire was burning farther down the canyon, but the firefighters would surely have it contained before it made it this far, wouldn’t they? By mid-afternoon the wind was up, the sky was an ominous orange, ashes floating down like leaflets from an enemy bomber. The air quality index was a gasping 850. “Evacuate immediately,” we were told.

When I purchased the cabin two years earlier, my hope was that the older me might reintroduce himself to the mountains and meadows I had roamed as a boy. But, after a few hikes through tinder-dry forests in record high temperatures, past cabin-sized brush piles the Forest Service hadn’t been able to safely control burn, I realized I might actually be coming home to say goodbye.

Did my cabin make it? Two summers later, I’m writing this from my deck overlooking Strawberry Creek. On the far bank, tall pines bristling with new growth shade a manzanita-covered hillside. My cabin and seventy or so others in this small tract were spared, thanks to the heroic efforts of firefighters along with fortuitous topography and a favorable wind the day the fire was upon us. A thousand other structures did not fare as well. I am living in an oasis in a burn scar.

Panning out and scanning the larger landscape of my own long life, I see other days that started off sky blue but by nightfall, I had given myself no more than a ten percent chance of surviving: a death, a divorce, a disaster. And, yet survive I did. I live on in the burn scar of my own life.

My favorite hikes now take me through scorched earth, but that earth shows signs of new life--ferns thriving in the ash-laden soil, Indian paintbrush, blue lupine, snow flowers flaunting their colors in delicate defiance of the infernos of 2021. Walking on, I might round a bend and find myself in an unmolested glade, lush vegetation sweetening the air with chlorophyll, a blue-green stream gurgling past. Why was this acre spared? Why was I spared?

Yes, I ache for all that was lost, but I remind (and reprimand) my small-minded, selfish self that these mountains have stood sentinel for millennia while numberless forests thrived then succumbed to ice ages, volcanic eruptions, and, yes, fires. And I have stood for seven decades, my exterior scorched, sloughed off, and renewed again, my core intact.

Tomorrow I will wake up early and stretch my protesting frame, then lace up my hiking boots and set off, my new mantra keeping the pace: Focus on what’s left. Focus on what’s left. Focus on what’s left.

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In 2017, Bob Regan and his family gathered at Regan Beach for a rededication ceremony. He wrote a song about his dad and the other forefathers of South Lake Tahoe - https://southtahoenow.com/story/10/01/2017/regan-beach-rededicated-stone-memorial.