Our Warriors of the Ridge: Living Through an Inferno

By Stan Morrison

It was the worst wildfire in California's history, killing eighty-five individuals and destroying 18,000 homes and businesses.

Survivors, who only lost their homes and belongings, suffered a different fate. This is one of those cases.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Newman Springs Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: May 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9781648019289

Book preview

1

Oh my god, I’ve lost everything, cried the elderly woman wearing second-hand, donated clothes at the Red Cross sanctuary at Gridley, California. We—my wife Linda and I—had been there at this time a couple of weeks after the wildfire. It was the only time that I truly felt the impact of the so-called campfire.

The poor woman had just heard of her home’s destruction, and I have to admit that this was the first instance that I was affected by the result of the conflagration. I had already heard untold accounts of the horrors of the fire, but it was this one time at Gridley, overhearing this woman in front of the building, that for some reason it struck me in the heart, and I had to face the terrible humanity loss we all suffered.

My wife Linda and I still didn’t know whether our home, and its contents, had survived.

*****

We arrived in the small town of Magalia in late June 2018 and stayed—until we could find a house to buy—at my brother Bill’s triple-wide mobile home. He was a retired ironworker who had had a stroke a decade or so prior. It was good to see him again after eight or nine years. Even though it was nice to see Bill again, my wife Linda and I slept on an air mattress until we could find a house. She also became acquainted with friends and attended the local churches. Linda immediately met terrific individuals, whom she still occasionally has contact.

As was noted, we drove from Phoenix to Paradise/Magalia; only after we spent five years in Tempe, Arizona, as full-time caregivers at my mother-in-law’s, Mary Eleanor Backus. She lived to be ninety-seven years old.

During the five years we acted as caregivers, we used to say to Mary that certainly she would make it to a hundred or over. We could never think of the term for an individual who reached that century age.

Linda’s mother and father had always been extremely supportive of my efforts, so when I decided to write a book on my thirty-year job as an author-researcher focusing on the metaphysical, she was all in support. It took a solid year to write the book, and it was accepted in serial form in Alternate Perceptions Magazine Online.