Chris Smith: Hope, humanity shine in Sonoma County through the fires’ vast destruction

We're all hearing them, the countless stories of horror and gratitude, abject sorrow and joy-amidst-tragedy, unfathomable loss and soaring generosity borne of the fusillade of firestorms that first bore down on Napa and Sonoma counties in darkness a week ago and remain beyond control.

A sampling follows:

Last Sunday night, recounts retired sales exec Bob Schmidt, 72, 'We went to bed like everybody else, feeling good.'

He thinks it was about 1:30 a.m. when wind noises awoke him at his and his wife Joan's home off Santa Rosa's Parker Hill Road. Arising, he saw headlights streaming downhill.

'Now I start smelling the smoke,' Schmidt said. 'I tell my wife, 'We have to get out of here.' '

As they prepared to hustle to the car, their dog, Buddy, a deaf, 15½-year-old cockapoo, ducked out the doggie door into the backyard. Joan went after him.

Buddy, frightened, eluded her.

'I was screaming at my deaf dog in the backyard, trying to catch him,' Joan said. More frantic by the second, she and Bob reluctantly left without him.

Both of the Schmidts cook regularly for homeless women and children at The Living Room, the day center on Cleveland Avenue, and they have a key to the place. So they drove there.

Homeless women began to arrive and, learning that the Schmidts had to flee their home and leave their dog, comforted them.

Later Monday, the couple drove to Forestville and the home of Joan's brother, Louis Lacabanne. They never stopped fretting for their dog and home.

The Schmidts were out on Tuesday when a knock came to Lacabanne's door. A woman identified herself as Angie Duplicki of Windsor.

She asked, do you know a dog named Buddy? Lacabanne replied that he did. The stranger said she had him.

Duplicki has a son, 22-year-old Windsor High grad and Penn State senior Alex Duplicki. On Monday afternoon, he and friends Keith James and Andrew Rutkowski drove up into the fire-ravaged Fountaingrove area to check on another friend's house.

Passing near the destroyed Sweet T's restaurant, the trio noticed, in the backyard of an incinerated house, a small, black dog in a swimming pool. Alex Duplicki and his friends approached and found Buddy sitting in a few inches of water on the pool's top step.

They wrapped him in a sweatshirt and took him to Angie Duplicki's place in Windsor.

'He smelled like smoke really bad,' she said. 'He growled if we touched his paws.'

She fed Buddy and bedded him down, then phoned the Santa Rosa and Forestville numbers on his collar tag. Both were out of service.

So Duplicki went to an online reverse directory, where she found an address in Forestville. She drove there Tuesday. Learning from Lacabanne that she had the right family, Duplicki drove home, picked up Buddy and delivered him to Forestville.

Soon thereafter, the Schmidts sobbed with joy as they heaped love on their dog. Angie Duplicki would accept no reward.

The Schmidts took Buddy to the PetCare West Veterinary Hospital, where the old dog's burned paws were treated and dressed. Bob Schmidt went to pay and was told there was no charge.

He and Joan and Buddy now are with friends who opened their Santa Rosa home to them. Bob said the supreme kindness and caring that came from Alex Duplicki and his friends and his mother, and from the PetCare staff, and that he's witnessed throughout the community is phenomenal.

'What's happening in Santa Rosa, people helping people,' he said. 'It probably makes me more emotional than losing our house.'

…

The bullet in her back didn't stop college student Savanna Chasco from stepping up to do her part for disaster relief.

A 2015 graduate of Rancho Cotate High School and a junior at the University of Nevada, Reno, Savanna was wounded in the mass shooting two weeks ago in Las Vegas. A friend was killed.

Back home in Rohnert Park to heal, Chasco, who 20, learned of the fires and mass evacuations and she knew she had to help. She went to the Redwood Empire Food Bank and pitched in to get food to people forced from their homes by flames or orders to leave.

'I couldn't sit home and not do anything,' she told ABC-10 News. 'I'm mobile, so even if I can't be completely as functioning as I'd like, I can still do something.'

…

Matt Keegan suddenly has no home, but he does have an airplane.

The 40-year-old Santa Rosa native and partner in an organic grain company was away on business Sunday night when a neighbor banged on the door of his and his wife Sarah's home in Fountaingrove. Fire consumed the house soon after Sarah fled with the couple's two young kids.

Matt Keegan hurried back to Santa Rosa. Amid the chaos and emotion it occurred to him that the logistics of ground transportation might limit delivery of the massive amounts of supplies that fire victims and evacuees need and that many will need for a long time to come.

Keegan and his business partner just weeks ago purchased a new, twin-engine Cessna Citation business jet. A longtime pilot, Keegan is being taught the fine points of flying the jet by corporate pilot Will Whiteside of Windsor.

Keegan conceived an airlift, then rallied Whiteside and others, among them airplane owners Josh Hochberg of Sonoma Jet Center and Larry Brooke, the former owner of General Hydroponics of Santa Rosa.

Keegan reached out to friends and business associates in greater Sacramento and elsewhere in the state and asked them to gather up bottled water, diapers, clothing, bedding, packaged foods, first-aid supplies, anything that people who left their homes with little or nothing might need.

On Friday, Keegan's and Hochberg's and Brooke's planes flew to Sacramento to pick up the first loads.

'This keeps me busy,' Keegan said. He believes the flights will be helpful to people. He knows, following the loss of his family's home, the flying mission is helping him.

…

As Capt. Don Ricci and his crew from the Santa Rosa firehouse atop Fountaingrove were out fighting to save homes early Monday, the raging wildfire incinerated their fire station, No. 5.

Lost within it were the badges on as many as nine uniforms in the station's locker room. Those badges are treasured by the firefighters who earned them.

'They signify so much to us,' Ricci said.

He thought to dig through the ash and rubble and look for the badges. Others on his crew donned gloves and dug in.

They found six blackened badges. But not Ricci's.

'We're still digging,' he said.

…

Saturday, Oct. 8, was the happiest day yet in the lives of Grace Telesforo and Carson Amiral.

The Cotati couple — Carson co-owns the Making It Big apparel company and Grace works with him and as a hairdresser — recited their wedding vows on a glorious afternoon in Hopland. 'It was pretty perfect,' said Grace.

Maybe 36 hours later, vast swaths of the county she and her husband love was afire. Thousands were displaced.

Aware that huge numbers of people would need meals, Grace and Carson went to the Redwood Empire Food Bank and got to work helping to get food where needed. Grace also collected donations of food and with her dad, Phil Telesforo, who's recently retired from the San Francisco Fire Department, served breakfast to firefighters at the Rancho Adobe Fire station in Penngrove.

The newlyweds figure that whenever it is that they can break away for a honeymoon, Maui will still be there.

…

One of the largest signs that's gone up to thank firefighters, police officers and other first responders is the banner that Joe Wong and buddy Frank Clark attached to a pedestrian walkway above Highway 101 in Santa Rosa.

Wong, owner of Santa Rosa's Wraps N Motion and A Shade Darker, figures that for local and out-of-town public-safety professionals to work themselves to exhaustion and place themselves as risk 'is something that's not recognized enough.'

…

Ice has liquefied in freezers far and wide after electrical power went out. But the prospect of ice turning to water was a far larger problem to Gina Huntsinger than to most.

Huntsinger manages Snoopy's Home Ice, the rink late 'Peanuts' cartoonist Charles Schulz built near Santa Rosa's Coddingtown Mall in 1969. Days ago Huntsinger spoke on KSRO radio about how desperate she was for an industrial-sized generator after power was lost Monday morning and the rink's ice was in danger of melting, which would be a huge problem.

Huntsinger practically broke into Snoopy's happy dance when a benefactor wishing to be anonymous delivered an enormous generator on a semi-truck trailer. And again when electrical contractor Vince Sigal appeared and offered to hook it up to the arena.

'He's our hero,' Huntsinger said. Power from the generator kept the arena's ice frozen until power from PG&E was restored.

The Snoopy's Home Ice complex remains closed but Huntsinger hopes to reopen this week.

…

Superheroes and princesses are brightening the lives of some of the kids and adults who wait and worry at Sonoma County fire-evacuation centers.

Kyle Baxter and a group of friends calling themselves Hope, Love and Magic dress as Disney characters and defenders of all that is good, and they strive to delight people they think could use a smile.

Joining a cadre of other performers working to distract and entertain people evacuated from their homes, 21-year-old Baxter, or Spider Man, has appeared with members of his troupe at the shelters at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds, Windsor High School, Elsie Allen High School and Santa Rosa's New Life Church.

More magical appearances are planned, mostly for the kids

'We kind of figured,' said Baxter, who works at Prickett's Nursery, 'that they'd be freaked out by the commotion and all that's going on.'

…

Firefighters don't collect and keep toys only for giving away at Christmas.

'We always have toys just in case,' said Santa Rosa firefighter Cori Rickert. She added, 'I never thought this is what just-in-case would be.'

On Monday, members of the firefighters associations of both the Santa Rosa and San Francisco fire departments will distribute toys, board games, gift cards, toiletries, blankets and such at three Santa Rosa evacuation centers.

Even before the gift distributions, the San Francisco Fire Department has had a large presence in the North Bay: It has dispatched 12 engines to the region's fires, and some of its members live here.

Gift-bearing firemen and women expect to be at the evacuation shelter at the Finley Community Center at 10:30 a.m. Monday, at Elsie Allen High at about 11:30 a.m. and the Sonoma County Fairgrounds at about 12:30 p.m.

…

When a departure from Roland Hendel's rural property off Franz Valley Road between Calistoga and Santa Rosa grew urgent, the dog wouldn't come.

Odin is a Great Pyrenees, a guardian of livestock, and he was not going to leave the eight bottle-fed rescue goats for which there was no room in the car.

Hendel had no choice but to leave them. When he returned to his land days later, he expected the worst.

But there was Odin, weak and singed and limping, and all eight goats, and, said Hendel, 'several small deer who had come to for protection and safety.'

A crowdfunding appeal at youcaring.com seeks help to rebuild the property's pumphouse and goat barn.

…

A song came to singer-songwriter Joanne Rand of Arcata as flames ate at the state she loves.

'Blood red sun through the redwood trunks, the sky is ash and smoke,' she sings in 'California's Burning,' which can be listened to at soundcloud.com/joannerand/californias-burning-2-mix-master-101217.

'California's Burning and the sky is all aglow. We knew that this was coming 40 years ago.'

'I give all that I can, all that I can offer, and the best that I have is my song.'

…

Christine Aceves ventured back to the house she owns in Santa Rosa's charred Mark West Estates and there, amid the charred ruins, was a still-smiling garden Buddha.

'It was a sign,' said Aceves, a single mother of two girls, 'that life will go on, must go on, and I must try to find stability and happiness in the little things I have left.'

You can reach Staff Writer Chris Smith at 707-521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.