The famous wine is not what draws Southern California’s Maria Triliegi repeatedly to Calistoga, the amply graced resort town nestled among hills at the top of Napa Valley and near to vineyards that straddle the Sonoma County line.
Triliegi travels to the North Bay to spend time with her grown daughter and 20-something grandson, and to plot leaving L.A. to join them. She ventures north, too, to linger and reflect at a roadside memorial to Michael Dornbach, the first person to fall to the disastrous Tubbs Fire of October 2017.
Dornbach was 57 years old, an outdoorsman, a disabled longshoreman, a dreamer, a tattooed teddy bear of a man — and one of Triliegi’s two sons.
“That’s one of my favorite pictures of him,” she said days ago as she eyed the snapshot that adorns a wooden cross erected to the side of Petrified Forest Road at Mountain Home Ranch Road, just over the Sonoma County line. To create and maintain the memorial, with its rock-bordered little garden and handsome bench, is therapeutic for Triliegi and her family.
Triliegi is an animated, contemplative woman who works as an astrologist and life coach. Five years into her mourning and questioning, she struggles still with the knowledge that Calistoga was not her son’s town. He was just visiting.
“He had only been there one night,” she said
Michael Dornbach had been living on his mother’s property in the seaport neighborhood of San Pedro, about 450 miles south of Calistoga. He packed up his newly purchased Dodge pickup on the Friday night of Oct. 6, 2017, said farewell to his mom and headed north to look for a piece of country land — maybe in Humboldt County, maybe on Lake County’s Cobb Mountain, maybe on the Klamath River — that he might afford with the dollars he’d saved and on which he could build a simple cabin or park a trailer.
Dornbach’s intended first layover on his land-shopping expedition was a familiar place: 18 acres off Mountain Home Ranch Road that are home to his then 19-year-old nephew, Robert Lee, and several members of Lee’s extended family.
That first night, Saturday the 7th, Dornbach phoned his mother in San Pedro to tell her how beautiful it was there, how bright the stars.
The next evening, Sunday the 8th, Dornbach and Lee welcomed a visit by Laura Dornbach, who lives just down the hill in Calistoga proper. She is Michael Dornbach’s sister, Lee’s mother.
She took the two of them home-baked cookies. “It was 8 o’clock when I left,” she said.
That Sunday evening, something was vexing Michael Dornbach: He could not find the keys to his Ram 1500 Crew Cab pickup. The annoyance burst into a crisis not long after 9:43 p.m., when the winds picked up and flames flickered to life next to electrical wires just north of Calistoga, near Highway 128 and Bennett Lane.
The Sonoma County property where Lee, his other relatives and his visiting uncle were settling in for the night is just four miles up the steep Petrified Forest Road from there, closer as the ember flies.
As the firestorm approached Mountain Home Ranch Road, Lee and the relatives he lived with made ready to flee. But Dornbach, still searching for his misplaced keys, held his ground.
“I begged my uncle to come with me,” said Lee, who’s now 24.
“He was getting stubborn with me. We argued,” Lee recalled. He said Dornbach, who was not only his uncle but his fishing buddy and friend, told him he’d fought fires and he’d be OK.
Dornbach died that Sunday night, apparently at about 11 p.m. — just an hour or so after the initial flames appeared down off Highway 128. An agonizing, full day passed before the desperate hopes of his sister and nephew there in Calistoga, and his mother in San Pedro, were dashed by the worst news of their lives.
Maria Triliegi would write in a tribute to her son, “My Michael, Mike, Mikey burned in a fire that wasn’t even ours.”
No escape for dozens
From Calistoga, the historic, wind-enraged Tubbs Fire spread to Franz Valley, jumped Porter Creek Road and engulfed great swaths of Rincon Valley, Mark West-Wikiup-Larkfield and Fountaingrove before blasting across Highway 101 into north Santa Rosa and laying siege to Coffey Park.
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