Emergency RV, Part IV: Stories of Resilience

This is part four in a series.  You can catch up here:

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

LAUREL HUNTER: How did you decide who would get an RV?

WOODY FAIRCLOTH: I have two sons that graduated from West Point and are in the Army, so I have a soft spot for veterans. First responders have always been at the top of our list. Firefighters are out there trying to help the rest of us even while their own houses are burning to the ground. Early on, we decided that veterans and first responders would always be high on our priority list and people with special needs like disabilities and medical conditions – single parents in vulnerable situations. Immediately following the campfire, we heard about a six-year-old with cerebral palsy who was being fed from a feeding tube, and his whole family of six were living in a minivan. That family went right to the top of our list.

LH: That’s incredible.

WF: There was another blended family of six with kids ranging from twelve to eighteen years old. They got the evacuation notice were packing belongings into the back of a pickup truck. They hooked up a motorcycle trailer for their kids’ dirt bikes. At some point, the dad tells his son that he needs to get Grandma about a mile up the hill. So, he told his 18-year-old son Brayden, just take the truck and go.

So, Brayden got in the truck and was driving up the hill, and a burning tree fell in front of his vehicle, catching the truck on fire. The kid gets out of the truck, hops on his dirt bike, takes it off the trailer, and just rips it up into the woods. When he got to his grandmother’s house, the trees above it were on fire, and flames were coming up over the back of the house. Grandma was standing on the front porch with her walker, and the kid said, “Grandma, you’ve got to get on my bike.” She said, “Well, what about all my stuff?” She had a little wagon full. He said, “Grandma, we’ll get the stuff later. You’ve got to get on my bike right now.”

She hopped on his bike, and he said, “I was tearing it up like my Grandma wasn’t even on there and, but she was holding on tight.” And as he’s ripping through the blazing forests, her slipper fell off, and she was yelling, “I dropped my slipper!” He said, “Grandma, I’m not getting your slipper!” This hero kid escaped the fire with his grandmother on the back of a dirt bike. Everybody got out safe, but I thought we’ve got to help them when I heard that story. To this day, we refer to them as the DBK (dirt bike kid) family. They are a wonderful family, and we later learned that DBK’s stepfather is a Purple Heart recipient. It was an honor to be a part of a team that was able to help this family full of heroes.

LH: What is the saddest moment that you’ve had, and what is the most hopeful?

WF: I work at Comcast, which has been incredibly supportive of the work I’m doing as Comcast had eight employees lose their homes in the campfire. I was interviewed for a Comcast speaker series on a Zoom call about our work to an internal audience. Following the call, a co-worker who was on the Zoom call contacted me and told me that she had met a family from Paradise before the fire at a solar eclipse party in Oregon. Since and shared with me, she had kept up with the family that they had lost their home and business in the fire. They didn’t have insurance, so they had been living on their property in a used RV and a wedding tent for almost two years.

Their adult son, who is around twenty-six, got really sick in February with Covid. He was on a ventilator, and they gave him some experimental medication. Everything went wrong, and he ended up losing both of his legs below the knee. It’s unimaginable to me tragedy visiting someone’s family twice in such a short time. My co-worker asked me if this was the kind of family we would help. They immediately shot to the top of our list.

The very next day, I got a call from Livermore, California, from a woman who said she had just retired and was cleaning up her affairs and that she had a Class-A motorhome with a wheelchair lift, and it was fully ADA accessible. We’ve never found an RV with a wheelchair-lift before this. I never even heard of one. I called the kid who lost his legs father to tell, and I asked how his son was doing. He paused and said with a trembling voice that he is not well – every day, he said he didn’t want to live like this anymore, and naturally, his mom and dad were so worried about him. I told him we have an RV with a wheelchair lift for his son, and we can bring it up that weekend.

Weeks later, the dad sent me a picture of their son being fitted with prosthetics on his legs. And his son texted me, saying, guess what? My ex-girlfriend is coming out to spend the weekend with me in my rig! I was so happy. I visited the family and Jake a few weeks ago on our last trip to Paradise, and he looked like a different person – beaming and happy and sober – just beautiful.

LH: That’s an amazing story of resilience.

WF: When we finally found our first responder, a Native American woman, and ten-year Cal-Fire hotshot, she’d been couch surfing, sleeping in her car, and she had pneumonia. After I heard from her, I got a call from someone who had this 1956, fully-refurbished Greyhound Bus. I mean, the baddest-ass thing you’ve ever seen. Just gorgeous. It was worth $80 to $110K, truly a work of art. The owner saw what we were doing and told me that he wanted to donate it. I told him, “I’ve got a firefighter who called me ten minutes ago.” I called the firefighter back and told her what we had for her and her partner. We met them, and this thing just floored them. They invited me over that evening, and we were sitting around a fire pit outside the bus; they asked me how we decide who to give RVs to, and I told her that we just kind of know it when we see it.

She then told us that she had been a waitress at this restaurant, and even though her manager had fired her, she still regarded her as an amazing person. She had posted a picture on Instagram of us all sitting around the bus; the former manager “liked it: When her name popped up, she thought, oh my gosh, I wonder what’s going on with her – she had young kids. I called her, and she was having a terrible time. She was living in a shelter. Her baby had Norovirus and was in the emergency room. Her son had burns on his back that needed medical attention. My new firefighter friend, her partner, and their three dogs and a cat drove me to Napa in the am to pick up a motor home from another donor that we had lined up.

We drove to Napa to meet the gentleman who was donating his family’s motor home. He told us that he recently had to admit his wife to a memory care facility. All their memories they made in the motor home are gone, so he said it was time for another family to make memories in the same RV that brought his family such joy.

I’m choking back tears at this point, and to keep myself from bawling, I turned and introduced him to the female firefighter and her fiancé. Now the firefighter and her fiancé happen to be a same-sex couple. The older white man immediately stiffened up and started wagging his finger, saying things like, “My church is having a big issue right now about you people.” I’m thinking, oh my gosh, this is turning into a total train wreck. These are now my friends who offered to help after being helped, and I have zero tolerance for bigotry in any form. Before I could utter a word, he continued, “You know, my church is completely divided over the issue of what you guys are doing.” I literally took a step in between them, and I’m about to share a piece of my mind with this man, and then he quickly adds, “But I’ve got to tell you something. I’m with you!” All four of us just bust out laughing/crying, and we jumped up and down in his driveway in a 4-way group hug. That may have been the sweetest moment I’ve ever witnessed.

I drove that motor home back to Chico and went to the Silver Dollar Fairgrounds (the shelter) to find the restaurant manager. She tells me that the night before, she’d been trying to comfort her kids – they were so tired of what they were going through – and she’d put them to bed and just started praying, saying, God, I can’t do this anymore. And she opened her Bible and found herself on the page where Jesus gave his Sermon on the Mount – don’t you see all the flowers and animals in the field and the birds in the sky – I wouldn’t let any of them starve and be without – why do you think you are less than them (Matthew 6:25-34)? She said, “I closed my Bible, and was comforted and went to sleep knowing that the next day an angel was coming. I didn’t know he would look like you – a giant redhead man!

Don’t miss our last piece of this story available here in time for Christmas!

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This multi-part series is authored by Laurel Hunter, a freelance creative writer with over 20 years of experience covering a broad range of topics. She and her family are 2018 Camp Fire survivors who have since relocated to the Pacific Northwest Olympic Peninsula.