Near-miss of fire a 'miracle'

ST. HELENA -- At about 4 p.m. Friday, Jimmy McDannald, having spent most of the day feeding wood into his chipper in an ongoing effort to keep his house off Deer Park Road safe from fire, decided to go to the store.

He wanted ice cream and other things. His shopping list -- which included a 16-ounce container of Crisco to make cookies and a grapefruit for breakfast -- may well have saved the life of the 83-year-old retired truck mechanic.

Not 20 minutes later, parked on a road called Sunset Point, he watched the house he had built in 1970 go up in flames.

The fire -- caused by a pickup that went off the road and hit a rock, creating a spark -- lapped up a hill of pine, manzanita, fir and bay trees, hopped two dirt driveways and devoured his 1,500-square-foot home.

"You could see it," he said, throwing up his hands in mimicry of the flames.

He called his wife on a CHP officer's phone because he'd left his at home. Darlene McDannald was in Lodi, where she works part time as a caregiver for an old friend.

"Our house is gone," her husband said. "Our house is gone."

"You're kidding," was her response. "No, it is," he said.

The fire, which had burned 400 acres and was 80 percent contained Saturday night, had threatened 200 homes and forced about 400 people to evacuate Friday. McDannald's was the only home claimed by the fire. Full containment was expected by this morning.

The last remaining area closed off to residents -- the ridge-top gated community of Crestmont -- was reopened Saturday evening. During the day, as smoke rose from below, a bird cage perhaps 10 feet in diameter and filled with plump, white, cooing doves sat in the garden of a vacated home, visible from Crestmont Road.

On Deer Park Road, orange paint marked the point on the upside of a hairpin curve where the pickup thought to have caused the fire had left the road.

McDannald said people have told him they saw the driver trying to put out a fire "with a shirt or something -- his heart was in the right place, but . . ."

Saturday afternoon on McDannald's 10-acre property -- purchased by his parents in 1942 for $500 -- the acrid smell of ash mingled with the sharp scent of pine. Smoke tendrils curled from the destroyed home, now a bed of thick ash and charred wooden beams, the odd coffee mug, a lamp base, a sink, a few ceramic urns.

Helicopters thudded overhead following the fire's southeast course down the valley floor, making drops of fire retardant and water.

McDannald stood by his tomato plants, near the pine tree his mother brought back from Yosemite to plant, near his junipers and cedars, all torched now, and said: "When you get a fire of that intensity, and the wind, it's just, it's just overpowering."

The tall Douglas fir that had provided such nice shade, and that he'd built his redwood house around, was a blackened sentinel to his narrow escape.

The house was circled by a dirt drive, and he'd been chipping on the southeast corner, by the lounge where he and Darlene would watch the sun come up.  The fire had swept up from the northwest, across the spot where his truck was parked, over the home with its lodgelike living room and high beams, over the wood chipper and beyond.

"I might not have been able to get out fast enough," he said.

He said he might have tried to save some things, perhaps the diary his great-grandfather had kept when he came across the Great Plains in 1865.

Instead, he had gone shopping. "By golly, I think it was divine guidance," he said looking skyward.

A barn where McDannald kept nine vintage motorcycles was gone, too. About 200 feet away, a neighbor's house stood untouched, windows gleaming in the sun.

Earlier Saturday, Darlene McDannald had watched her husband pick through the ashes of their kitchen, where they had just installed a new counter and stove.

"We've got each other still, they're not going to take that," she said. "It's just a miracle he wasn't in there."

She led the way to his Ford Ranger pickup and retrieved a bag of groceries.

There were Green and Crisp salad mix, fresh spinach, cauliflower, an avocado, a mango. She pulled out a container of Soy Dream Milk: "Oh, I brought some for him already," she said. "He just didn't see it."

You can reach Staff Writer Jeremy Hay at 521-5212 or jeremy.hay@pressdemocrat.com.