Benefield: Valley fire may stop the games, but not the spirit of Middletown

It’s Homecoming Week for Middletown High School. A rally in the gym was planned for last night. The Mustangs were scheduled to play a home football game against the El Molino Lions Friday night

None of that is happening. There was no school yesterday and there will be no school today.

It’s Homecoming, but many of the Middletown Mustangs have nothing to come home to.

“The whole town is basically completely devastated by this fire,” said Bill Foltmer, the football coach at Middletown High School for the past three decades.

The Valley Fire, which exploded into a fast moving inferno Saturday afternoon, has scorched more than 61,000 acres, razed an estimated 1,000 structures and is the cause of at least one death.

“No one is exempt from this one,” Foltmer said. “School board members, teachers, players, friends. This is hard one, you know?”

Foltmer, who was evacuated from his Hidden Valley home, knows his house still stands. He also knows he’s lucky.

“There are other people who don’t have any idea at all whether their house is gone,” he said. “It doesn’t burn down like halfway, it’s completely devastating. It’s ashes.”

Foltmer was evacuated from Hidden Valley and spent Saturday night in the Walmart parking lot and the past two nights at a ranch in Willits owned by the Hart family. Tony Hart is coach of the junior varsity football squad at Middletown High.

Hart and his wife Lisa lost their home in town. It was the place he built in 2000 with his father, and with a little muscle from Foltmer, from wood harvested from the family ranch in Willits. Now there is nothing left.

When the fire ignited, Tony Hart was in Napa for work. He never had a chance to grab anything to take with him. Nothing. Saturday evening, his phone rang and it was his neighbor.

“It was about 6:03. He was in tears and said “It’s gone,’” he said.

Foltmer said the devastation is everywhere and has touched everyone. It’s the beauty and tragedy of living in a small town.

“In this community, just about everyone who lost their homes, you know them,” he said.

“I have never seen anything like this,” Foltmer said.

And he hasn’t even seen it all.

Most people are prevented from going back into the area where the fire ripped through.

“Nobody can even get into Lake County right now,” he said. “I don’t even know where half of my kids are.”

His kids are his football players, his students at Middletown Middle School and all of the Mustang family.

As he was talking to me, Foltmer spied two students he knew walking down the street in Calistoga, where the largest of the Valley Fire shelters is being staged. Such is life when all tethers to normal seem to have been severed.

The upside? Honestly, there aren’t many. But there are a few.

There’s the text Tony Hart got from freshman Drake Harbison who plays on his JV squad, expressing condolences.

“A 14-year-old freshman boy thought about me. That’s pretty cool,” he said.

Foltmer, in the business of teaching kids more than 30 years, has been getting calls and texts from coaches he knows well and some he doesn’t. All have a similar theme: “What can I do?”

St. Vincent. Clear Lake. Lower Lake. Kelseyville. St. Helena. El Molino. They’ve all called. They’ve all offered help.

“It’s a little overwhelming,” Foltmer said.

Amidst it all, players have contacted the coaches. When are we playing? Can we practice? Foltmer doesn’t have the answer to that, he can’t even get back into town. But it’s good to hear.

In Hart’s family, in which one of his four daughters evacuated their home still wearing her Middletown soccer jersey, sports are a lifeline - a way to keep things normal when they are anything but.

Hart’s daughter Ashley even went to basketball practice at Santa Rosa Junior College Monday, “just to get her mind off things,” he said.

In Hart’s house, and in countless others across Middletown, Cobb and Hidden Valley Lake, sports are more than games.

They are direction, they are focus, they are discipline and they are community. The kind of community that inspires a 14-year-old freshman to text his coach and send his respects.

“That’s the thing about sports that people don’t take into account - that it teaches those kid so much more than banging a head against a kid,” Hart said. “It’s more than just running around and tackling people. It teaches people to be young men, those kids.”

Young men, and young women, who are having to deal with much more than most of us can imagine.

You can reach staff columnist Kerry Benefield at 526-8671 or kerry.benefield@pressdemocrat.com, on Twitter @benefield and on Instagram at kerry.benefield.