Tiffany and Travis got the keys to their home on June 8th, 2020. 3 months later — to the day — the Holiday Farm Fire reduced it to ash.
As if the pain of losing their house wasn’t enough, both their family dogs, Duke and Hammy, also perished in the fire. Their six-year-old daughter, along with Tiffany’s sister and niece only narrowly escaped themselves, being rescued as flames surrounded them on all sides and taking overnight shelter at the McKenzie Track.
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Yet when Tiffany speaks of the future, it is not with bitterness, but with hope, and fierce determination. Her plans? REBUILDING. She almost spells out the word and says it loud, like a mantra.
“Rebuilding bigger, better for the kids, giving them something to hold on to for good.” That is what keeps her going as she deals with being separated from her daughter, who has been living with her aunt in California ever since the fire. “They’re recovering, and she’s safe. We’ve got no power, no water, that’s no way for a six year old to live, I grew up like that, and I won’t put her through it. She’s still doing distance learning at the McKenzie school down here, which is awesome, she loves that.”
No Warning
“Travis was seven and a half hours across state elk hunting. I had my sister staying with me who lives in California so it was me, her, my six-year-old daughter, her six-year-old daughter and our two dogs Duke and Hammy,” Tiffany recalls.
“It was a windy day. Around 8:30 we’d seen there was a brush fire that had started. About an hour later I call the fire department and I asked if we should evacuate — they said no. I took a few pictures of it burning that way, I call Travis and say there’s a brush fire. He asks if he should come home and I said that by the time you get here it’s either going to be out or everything is going to be burnt. And then I went to work. I drove down with no service and I got down to Cedar Flats and I’ve seen everybody on the Blue River Bulletin Board saying this fire has got out of hand, we’re going door-to-door trying to get our neighbors out so at that point I call my sister and told her I need you to wake up and tell me what’s going on, I need you to look at your surroundings ok? So she walked out and she sent me a picture and Lazy Days was already engulfed. And our front porch was on fire. She didn’t know what to do, she couldn’t get out — the windows were bursting as the rosemary and gladiolas planted outside had caught fire. I told her to wake the kids and soak their blankets, and get the fire extinguisher from the kitchen to clear a path outside.
Get Them to the Road!
“She says to me ‘ Tiffany I think we’re gonna die’ but I said Sheena, you have two girls, don’t say that, get them to the road, she said she can’t see anything, and then I hear my six year old daughter saying “I know where the road is” so she’s running with her aunt and her cousin barefoot through the grass that’s on fire down the driveway, she makes it the 110 yards.
“So I’m driving way too fast up the road, I had a vehicle, it kept going, I went around a turn just after Vida and I hit a tree and blew both my passenger tires and I made it from Vida which is 14 miles away made it up Blue River bridge and I realized my car was only going at 9 miles an hour so at that point I bailed out and I’d seen all the headlights and sirens coming down the road and I stopped a Springfield-Eugene firefighter, his name was Mike and said I’m less than four miles from my house, I have my daughter on the phone, she’s with my sister and my niece and they need help.”
But just as they got within half a mile of the property, Mike got the call that the wind had shifted and they needed to turn around. In desperation, Tiffany got out of the car and walked towards them, telling her sister to stand by the mailbox on the road so they could find them.
“So I tell her to stay put next to that because they have the address and the mile marker and at that point my daughter screams mom it’s really hot I need you to get to me, and I say I’m coming. As we’re heading past my neighbors white fence on fire I got the call that the Junction City fire department had turned around and headed back and that they had picked up both my girls and my sister in front of the mailbox. They said they were lucky to be there, because those trees above them could have come down at any point. So we spent the night at the school track and at about 3 in the morning they told us that they finally got the road cleared and we were able to head back down so we followed this big long line of cars for about an hour and a half it took us following that plow truck.”
Holding on to hope
Amazingly, even as she tells her heartbreaking story, Tiffany remains positive even as she acknowledges the scale of the tragedy. Talking about how the fire destroyed her beautiful apple and hazelnut trees, as well as the cranberry and blueberry bushes that thrive in this part of Oregon, she says how the money she’s saving up will also go towards planting new ones.
One of few trees that survived in her 3-acre property stands next to the grave of her dogs, Duke and Hammy. Father and son died together in her daughter’s bedroom, who they had always been so protective of.
“We couldn’t even discipline her, Duke would just place himself in front of her an give us that ‘she’s just a baby, calm down’ look, and she knew it, so whenever she was giving me attitude, she’d just run a lap and go to the front and touch the fence. She told me after the fire that she knew EXACTLY where that fence was, she had done that so many times. It might just have saved her life.”
Like so many pet owners that day, Tiffany was desperate to go back and look for Duke and Hammy, but was not allowed to as it wasn’t safe. The family dogs used to sleep on her bed, and when the sliding glass door in her bedroom burst with the heat, they ran into her daughter’s room. Her sister was unable to get them out, and Tiffany said that she had to leave them and save the children.
“I had assumed, because she’d left the front door open and the sliding glass door was gone, that my dogs had got out,” she says through tears, remembering how animal rescue workers had found Duke and Hammy’s remains two weeks after the fire, still together in her daughter’s room. “It’s even worse because I said the words ‘you have to leave them’ it’s one of those things that I’ll have to deal with.
McKenzie Strong
Last week Tiffany and Travis went to look at some modular homes in their price range, and she smiles as she describes how pretty they were. Talking about the bathroom sends her giggling, which is perhaps not surprising for someone who has been camping out for several weeks, and plans to spend the upcoming winter months doing more of the same.
“timeframe for that is a year or two, hopefully sooner, but there’s a lot of cleanup to be done and we’re not going to jump ahead and leave our neighbors behind. So we’ve been cleaning up a little bit and scrap metaling and then helping our neighbors out so that we can all rebuild at the same time, we don’t want to rebuild our house and see someone next door that still has their pile of ash.”
That spirit of community runs through everything they do, both in what they give and receive from their neighbors. Their church got them a generator and a 5th Wheel which gives their camping setup a bit more comfort than the tent they originally bought with their loss of dwelling insurance. And even as Tiffany commutes hours to pull in night shifts at Vodoo Doughnut in Eugene, she also makes time to help her neighbors clear up, and leaves boxes of free doughnuts back at Blue Sky Market in Rainbow to cheer up the local residents and first responders.
Rebuilding Blocks
Tiffany and Travis are particularly concerned about the future of the community, and the challenges that rebuilding will bring, especially for those without insurance and the means to navigate complex planning processes and regulations. A lot of their neighbors, they believe, are simply not going to be able to come back without help. Their own property is next to one of the examples of where this is already becoming clear. Lazy Days RV Park was home to many of the lower-income families in the valley, and it has been entirely destroyed, along with most of the structures in the town of Blue River. It seems unlikely the owners will open it back up, which leaves many of those families short of options. But that doesn’t make them less determined to try: “We’ll just have to rebuild and make it beautiful again,” concludes Travis.
For the latest information on the recovery and rebuilding of the McKenzie Valley, and to contribute to those efforts, visit McKenzie Recovery