Steve Dousman:
CLASS OF 1962
Baldwin High SchoolClass of 1962
Baldwin, NY
Steve's Story
September 18, 2020, SANTA CRUZ MOUNTAINS, CA.
Rough year. Times are tough all over. At the beginning of August I woke with a lumbar event. It happens every now and then since the airplane accident in '76. I've been doing a 2 mile run every morning (today is day 1148) before breakfast and I don't give up easily. Oh, you should have seen the million year old man hobbling down the driveway that day. It took about 3 furlongs for the endorphins to kick in and hide the pain. Each day was a little better, and I was almost normal after a week.
3 AM Sunday (8/16) I awoke to Linda's words, "Wow, it's pouring." The roar was intense. The trees outside were shaking violently. Lightning flashes illuminated the sky from all directions. No thunder. Something didn't seem right so I got up and went to the window. No rain. It was just wind making all the noise. After a while the wind reduced, but the cloud to cloud lightning silently persisted. Amazingly, I fell back asleep almost immediately. Then, at 4:30 the crack of thunder got me up. To the west, out over the Pacific, heat lightning was a nonstop curtain for over a half hour. Meanwhile audible strikes were surrounding us.
At daylight, neighbors were calling us saying that they saw smoke from our direction. The ATV took me up Water Tank Hill, and on the other side I could see a plume of smoke coming from a ravine within our newly acquired 160 acres. 911 queried my life history and the color and behavior of the smoke. I gave them a definite street address for the smoke, but it wasn't adequate to stop the interrogation. Finally, "I'm heading down the road to investigate. I'll call you back ."
When I got to the location where I suspected the fire was, the forest was too dense to see anything up the slope. I headed out the gate to confirm that the wind didn't down any trees that might block the access. On my way back, from a part of the driveway that was at the same elevation as the fire, I could see orange light flickering through the trees across the ravine. This time I told 911, "I see flames. I hear the crackling."
"We are dispatching a crew."
Engines and water tankers arrived. About 10 firefighters manually hacked their way up the slope dragging their hoses. The base of the fire was maybe 200 feet upslope. Eventually they contained it to about 100 feet wide and about 600 feet up very steep slope. CalFire was unable to provide any aircraft help because of so many other incidents. We were favored that the storm had dropped a little rain and surfaces were somewhat moist. Also, early morning was overcast, although temperatures did later climb to high 90's. At sundown Monday, a fresh crew of four was here to stay the night and make sure everything was out. Firefighters from four fire districts plus Cal Fire participated.
Then all hell broke loose between the San ...Expand for more
Lorenzo River and the Pacific.
We stayed at Fourwaters. In a week we did a remarkable amount of improvements. Not that we weren't in decent shape to start with, but with 500 acres to care for, one can never do enough defense. This year we also have the Sunhouse to protect, and we have put in hundreds of hours of fuel reduction labor during the spring and early summer.
We are about 4 miles east of the San Lorenzo River and they held the line there. Sunday (8/23) we got the remnants of Genevieve and it actually rained. Just enough to connect the dots but mighty unusual for August.
The antenna tower (5 miles west of here) that provides our wireless internet was destroyed on Weds night. Our phones on Verizon also failed about then. Fortunately we had bought and kept our previous satellite hardware as opposed to leasing. Linda drove two miles down the road and was able to contact Hughes. All I had to do was plug in the modem and we were reconnected to satellite. Suddenly, I realized how abysmally slow the satellite was and why we switched to wireless. We had no phone service from Verizon for four weeks.
Fourwaters is in the same fire management zone as Loch Lomond Reservoir, in the Santa Cruz City watershed, and the zone was not explicitly listed for mandatory evacuation. We were packed and ready to go if necessary. We knew nobody was going to come here to defend this place like they did for the first strike. We had about 25 firefighters here to put out our one acre lightning blaze. Had they not extinguished it, it is reasonable to assume that it would have moved right up the hill, jumped Skyline Blvd, and headed into Silicon Valley. That would have made the news! Such is the fortune of being among the first to locate a fire and call it in.
Smoke has varied from not so bad to times when the noonday sun was missing and the sky was so dark orange-brown that there wasn't enough light to read by. We are starting to see more clear sky above but we are not yet at that lovely Ektachrome blue.
I've been getting so much exercise recently that I actually weighed in last week at 148.0. I haven't seen that number since weighing in for my last wrestling match in '62 against Tom Salvatore of Valley Stream Central. On the bus ride to VSC, Coach Hartman told me I would be wrestling Varsity......158. I guess he was saving Warren for the Nassau finals. Amazingly, nobody informed me that Salvatore was undefeated. Salvatore won by points, not a pin. He learned what it is like to use hands to try to peel an abalone off a rock. I considered that a win for me (and so did everyone else).
I think I feel fortunate these days that my greatest problem (I don't trust barbers with Covid control) is whether I shave my head or grow a pony tail.
"Luck is the residue of design." John Milton (or Branch Rickey?)
Peace be among y'all, Steve
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