My Son Called My Stone Wall A ‘Total Waste of Health’ — Until The 1987 Wildfire Hit It
Part 1
The first person to laugh at my stone wall was Greg Davis.
That was back in 1982 on a Tuesday afternoon when the sun was beating down hard on the valley.
I had been hauling stones from the creek bed for three months straight.
Every morning before dawn, I would walk the property line that separated my ranch from the vast forest.
I would choose stones, some as small as my fist, others so heavy it took everything I had to roll them into place.
By afternoon, my hands would be bleeding and my back would be screaming.
I was sixty-eight years old then, and people had started to treat me like I was already dead.
Greg stood on the other side of my half-built wall, shaking his head.
He told me it was the biggest waste of time he had ever seen.
He reminded me that the fire danger had passed two summers ago.
But he could not see what I was building.
I told him without looking up that fire danger never passes.
He left without another word, and I was alone again with my rocks and my thoughts.
I had lived in this valley for over forty years and seen the big fire of ’76.
I watched it consume three ranches and kill two men who tried to save their cattle.
I watched the forest grow back, thicker than before, taller than before, angrier than before.
Experience had taught me that when push came to shove, the only thing that could save you was what you built with your own two hands.
My wife Brenda had died seven years before I started building the wall.
She would have told me I was trying to build a wall against death itself.
Maybe she was right, but it gave my hands a purpose.
My son, David, came home for Christmas that year, his first time back since he left for the city five years ago.
He was a lawyer now, successful, with a wife and a six-year-old daughter named Megan.
When he saw the wall, something shifted in his face.
We were standing at the edge of the wall, maybe two hundred yards of it completed.
I told him I was building a firebreak to slow a fire coming from the forest.
He used his lawyer voice, the one that meant he had already decided I was wrong.
He told me I should be resting and enjoying my retirement.
I told him I was not most men.
Winter forced me to stop for the first time.
By spring, I was back at it, expanding the wall westward.
By 1985, the wall was three feet high and ran for nearly two miles along the property line.
It wasn’t perfect, but it was solid, and it had weight and presence.
In 1986, the weather started to change and the grass turned brown faster than it should have.
By 1987, it was undeniable that we were in one of the worst droughts anyone could remember.
The forest beyond my property line started to look less like a living thing and more like a pile of kindling waiting for a spark.
I worked on the wall with a desperation I had not felt before.
I pushed myself harder and longer, stopping the winters off.
The wall had to be finished before the fire came.
David called in July, which was unusual, and asked about the wall differently this time.
He suggested I think about evacuating because the news was saying this drought was going to be really bad.
I told him I was not leaving, and that the wall would protect the house.
August 15th, 1987, was the day I planned to finish the wall.
The fire started somewhere in the national forest about fifteen miles to the northeast.
By evening, it was ten thousand acres, and the smoke was thick enough that the sun turned red.
My hands were shaking, not from fear, but from the sense that something I had prepared for my entire adult life was finally arriving.
The evacuation order came at four in the afternoon on Friday.
Sheriff Craig came to my house personally.
He told me the fire was moving faster than anyone predicted and could be here by morning.
I told him I was staying and that my wall would slow the fire down.
He left around six, knowing better than to argue with an old man about how to face death.
I stood on my porch, watched the sky turn orange, and waited.
Around half past two in the morning, the wind shifted, and I could smell the burning earth.
By three, I could see the glow on the horizon moving toward me like something hungry.
The wall was glowing by a quarter past three, looking like it was on fire itself, burning from within.
The stones glowed orange and red against the black night sky.
Then I heard the sound of the world screaming, every burning tree crying out in agony.
As the towering inferno swallowed the darkness at exactly three-twenty in the morning, I closed my stinging eyes and wondered if five years of bleeding hands would actually be enough to hold back hell itself.
