JAN 13, 2025
Story collected by E. Vegvary and Lara Conkey-Weibelhuas
Written by E. Vegvary

Daisy tells us that she doesn’t think she really has a story. Daisy’s daughter Claire says that they do. Claire’s two-year-old daughter, Ember just wants to go home.

Daisy Vose Emerson, fifty-three years old, is known to and beloved by many Cohasset residents. Strikingly redheaded, with a quick smile and a gentle nature. She’s lived her entire life in Cohasset. Her family had suffered a house fire when she was a girl, but of course, nothing like the complete devastation she and so many others were faced with after the Park Fire destroyed two-thirds of this small mountain community.

We meet up with her on her property. It quickly becomes apparent that the Park Fire has not only destroyed her home but also her peace of mind and perhaps a sense of day-to-day well-being. Her pain is worn in her glance and the set of her mouth, and one wants nothing more than to offer a hug and encouraging words in the face of so much injury.

The Park Fire decimated homes and properties altering the rhythm of victims’ lives, but as time marches on a long-term effect of such devastation surfaces - a dampening of casual hope for the future most of us carry through our day-to-day lives. It’s become difficult if not impossible for some of the fire victims to see past the current upheaval, the shifting of the foundation beneath their feet. Survivors have been forced to stand still just so that they can hold on. It’s now been six months.

Claire Afflerbach is twenty-six years old and has been living with her mother since before Ember was born. Drake, Claire’s husband, is incarcerated. The couple have experienced tragedy and heart ache over the past few years. The devastation of the Park Fire is yet another loss that must be borne and dealt with by this brave and fiercely optimistic young woman. Strength is in her voice with every word she speaks.

Daisy helps care for Ember and the family care for one another. Claire also is a lifelong resident of Cohasset and proud of her connection to the ridge as well as her family heritage on the mountain. She has become interested in volunteering with the Cohasset Community Association and believes that Cohasset can only be helped through the Park Fire aftermath by fellow Cohassians. Friends, family, and neighbors become interchangeable definitions for her. She is a homegrown mountain girl through and through.

The Vose family legacy is a recognized part of Cohasset history. Currently, the entire County is familiar with the Vose property because of the one hundred vintage vehicles they owned, destroyed in the Park Fire. The field of cars and trucks is a shocking revelation where Vilas Road meets Cohasset Road.

Daisy’s father, Frank Vose owned the hundred acres on the west side of Cohasset Road since the 1960s.

Daisy’s sister Ginny owned and operated Voses Secondhand and Antiques Store which was also sadly destroyed the second day of the Park Fire. The store had been a landmark and also a popular browsing spot for antique pickers since 1966. Although the store burned, Ginny and her daughter Tawnya returned after the fire to discover their homes were still standing. Daisy lost the modular home that sat just behind the store.

“Long time families have been here forever. Most those places burned,” Daisy says.

*Voses Secondhand and Antiques Store. Courtesy Claire Afflerbach.*

Daisy has always lived on her family’s property. “We lived in a house by the road that burnt down when I was like, nine or ten. Then we lived in a travel trailer, and then we lived in one of the sheds for a while, and then my dad bought that modular, and we lived there.”

Frank was a lifelong collector of unique items. Birds, antiques, and of course vintage cars.

The vehicle field has proven endlessly fascinating to Cohasset residents and countless others. It’s an astonishing collection and a surprise to many.

Daisy explains the surprise, “There was one hundred last time my dad counted. They were well hidden with all the brush.”

Now they are on display. A haunting and deeply poignant daily reminder of the fire to anyone driving past. Unfortunately, a seemingly endless parade of oglers and even looters regularly stop to get a closer look or sadly, help themselves to an emblem or two.

Daisy and Claire, who are in a temporary living situation in Durham, have been forced into resignation about the unauthorized attention. They’ve been contacted by friends and strangers about possibly selling the cars, or at least harvesting parts that may still have value, but Daisy’s hands have been tied by bureaucratic red tape. She’s now been told by recovery officials that once the debris removal begins, all but ten of the vehicles must be hauled. In the meantime, they, like others on the hill, have been strictly instructed that debris is not to be handled.

She explains. “That's why we haven't been touching anything. Because they say we'll get disqualified, and it's like, $300,000 to clean it up.”

Claire, “And then they say it's $500,000.”

Daisy, “They keep upping it.”

Claire is frustrated at a seeming lack of compassion. “But they said because we were asking about –"

Daisy interupts, “— the cars all the time.” She’s frustrated, too. “They're always checking for asbestos, checking the dirt. They're always there.” She pauses. “I don't think they're doing anything because we're wanting to –"

Claire, “— keep the cars and stuff. And they said, well, how are we supposed to explain that to your community? That we're spending more money on your property than other peoples? That's what they said at the community meeting when we were having those. How are we supposed to what's the word, I mean, not verify, justify that to the rest of the community.”

Conversation returns to the vehicles themselves. “My dad loved DeSotos, and Plymouths, and Chryslers, and Dodges,” Daisy says proudly. She knows exactly what the collection was comprised of, all the makes and models.

Daisy and Claire each have “their” car and truck.

Claire tells us, “Mine was a Diamond T.”

*Claire and her Diamond T. Courtesy Claire Afflerbach.*

Frank Vose, patriarch, father, grandfather lived to the wonderfully ripe old age of ninety-four and passed away in 2023. He knew the value of his car collection. Daisy is relieved in a small way that he isn’t here to see what the Park Fire wrought, on his property, to his vehicles, and the family.

She reminisces about her father. “Anything my dad did was over the top. When I was a kid, he had chickens and birds and over there by the barn, there was a whole row of cages, like cage, cage cage, cage, cage. He used to order exotic birds from all over the world and eggs. They had a huge incubator.” Daisy is shaking her head, smiling. “People would come look at his chickens. He had like, every kind of chicken. And then he had pheasants and birds. And then he had emus. He rescued them.” She laughs, “Those were kind of mean.

“He did livestock too. He'd go buy at the livestock auctions and bring them back and then go sell them at auctions.

“He was logging when he met my mom, Darlene, and well, they were only engaged for like, three, six weeks. Three weeks? They got married in 1950. He saw her jumping over a fence chasing a goat.” She loves this story. “They met at the dance hall up here. It was after the dance. She invited him by, that day or the next day or whatever. And he pulled in, she lived down there across from where the Cohasset Store is now, and she was chasing a goat. Barefoot. Because she never wore shoes. He was in his truck, and he was just watching her. The goat jumped over a fence. He's like, goat got away. And she jumped over the fence and caught the goat. And he said, that's the woman for me.”

*Frank Vose. Courtesy Claire Afflerbach.*

Wednesday, July 24, 2024, the day the Park Fire began, Daisy was home on the hill watching the baby. Claire was at work, in town.

Claire begins. “We saw it on the Watch Duty app. It was at five acres. So, I was okay, well it's in Chico. And those fires had been popping up every day, like Oroville (The Thompson Fire). I screenshot it and sent it to my mom. I went back to doing my work and then it was fifty acres. But in the park. So, I did my whole workday.

“I thought, we’ll just start getting ready because we used to get ready for every evacuation and usually, we'd have the car packed.”

Mother and daughter confer about how they made decisions that day. Back and forth.

Daisy acknowledges past evacuations. “We evacuated during the Camp Fire. We went with Tawnya to Corning. And we packed everything. Okay? All of our pictures. Everything.” And then an unbearable truth. “This time we didn’t.”

Claire continues. “I got gas in town because I'm like, well, I'm gonna need gas. By the time I was going up, the bottom of the hill is evacuating. I got home and I told her there's a plume of smoke that way, just start getting ready. She already had Ember dressed. And then we got the warning. So, we started speeding up. Fifteen minutes later and the phones started ringing.”

Daisy nods. “Everything was ringing.” They are referring to the cellular alerts via Butte County Sheriff’s Department’s reverse 911 system.

Claire affirms. “It was exactly fifteen minutes from warning to go now in our area.” She checks her phone for time stamps from that day. Most Cohassians have their texts, screenshots, photos and videos from the Park Fire near to hand. “The evacuation order was 6:05, so warning was 5:49. That order was 6:05.”

“Then the sheriffs, not in our driveway but going past ours with their sirens!” Daisy says, “Every car coming up was a sheriff. I’ve never seen so many in my whole life.”

The hours that became minutes were chaotic. Claire remembers, “I got off work at 4:00 but I got gas, right? Then I came up here. At first, the phone was starting to go off with the warnings. The evacuation orders were just below, not in Cohasset, but we're the next zone.

“We had started getting stuff ready, but everything we picked up we were like, we don't need that. And we put it down. And then we never grabbed anything else. We just kept picking stuff up and putting it back down.” She looks over at her mother.

Daisy nods. “Because we're trying to figure out what we should take.”

Claire interjects with explaining. “We have five dogs. That took most of our time.”

Daisy continues, “We only got one cat because it's the meekest one, right? I snagged him and the other ones were hiding. My favorite one was hiding under the bed. And then the other ones were outside.

“We had two cars. Her car and my car. And my car was full of dogs. And then she had her dog in hers.”

Claire, “Ember was watching TV. We went outside to put the seats down and put the car seat in the front. We had to use the back space for all the dogs in her little Soul.”

Daisy smiles. “Yeah, my little Kia Soul.” She’s counting the animals. “And a turtle and a pigeon and a pigeon box. My car looked like a circus.”

Claire, “And then my dad pulled in yelling, get out, get out! Look, it's burning up. Get out. He said to get the pictures and get out, but he didn't let us go back in the house.”

Daisy remembers, “I told Cory my pigeon was on the couch.”

Claire says, “He ran in and got the pigeon. We told him to leave the doors open because of the cats. He did that, but then our phones wouldn't shut up.”

Daisy, “People were calling us, even my son was calling us from Texas. He knew because everyone was just posting at that point on Facebook. Somebody called him.”

“We were going to go back in,” Claire says wistfully. “But we didn’t.”

Daisy, “I called my sister Ginny, and told her, we need to evacuate. She’s like, right now, what? Are you sure? What zone are we? I'm like, right now.”

Claire says, “Oh, we got our running shoes on, too, because of the Camp Fire. People were running down the road, so we were like –"

Daisy agrees, “— we'll put our tennis shoes on.”

The phones were continuing to alert, the house phone ringing non-stop and when it was picked up it was the emergency recording. Both women admit their heads were spinning from the noise and the overwhelming feeling of responsibility for baby Ember.

Claire explains, “Now that we think about it, we know exactly where everything is, where we could have grabbed it. It's not like we didn't know where it was. We just didn't do it. Didn't do it … yeah.”

Daisy is more circumspect about the things left behind. She tilts her head toward her daughter, “She keeps kicking herself over and over and over and then she makes me frustrated.”

Claire is remorseful. “Well, the main thing is we knew where it all is. The home videos, the baby blankets and the quilts, the wedding dress. My wedding dress that I didn't get to wear yet. And our pictures, which are all in her room. I guess we didn't go to her room.” She doesn’t hear how she’s talking about things in the present tense.

The family had a group evacuation plan. They would meet at the Walgreens on the north side of Chico. It took several hours before all of them were together again. Claire’s father, Cory wanted to try to make it back up to Cohasset to help where needed. Claire implored him not to because of Ember. The group ended up at Claire’s in-laws in Durham. No one slept that night. Like so many other Cohasset residents, they were paying close attention to the news and the Watch Duty app.

Claire picks up the story. “Then was it the next day we saw the store on fire?”

Daisy sadly concurs. Yes, she whispers.

“The San Francisco Chronicle posted the Vose’s store on fire. So that's when we were like,” Claires voice lowers with grief, “Oh, no. Our place probably not doing good behind there. Behind the store.”

“It was weird that we saw the store on the San Francisco news,” Daisy says. “Why wasn’t that local? We saw video of the store burning and there’s fire trucks around and people looking at it. Why didn’t they put it out?”

*The Vose’s Antique Store, July 25, 2024. San Francisco Chronicle.*

Claire is scrolling through her messages. “Here. On July 25th, 8:43 a.m., Kyle told me that the fire had got to town. So not like our house yet, but … let's see. July 25th, 8:43 a.m.. Some burning structures. Fire just got here. I said, from which side? He said, your side. Pretty sure Roe (Road) is burnt. That was July 25th, 10:41 a.m.. And then on the 26th, I asked if he could look to like, tell us and he said, Gone. Everything. Kyle is a friend who stayed up here.”

“Then the news posted our yard. Oh, yeah.” Claire sighs, clearly exasperated by and tired of the attention brought on by her grandfather’s ruined collection.

Six months post-fire and Daisy and Claire are unsure of the future. They would like to return to Cohasset, to their legacy property but creating that possibility for themselves, for their family, is complicated and expensive. Daisy doesn’t know how they will be able to return even once it’s scraped and deemed inhabitable. She was not insured. “We don't know what we're doing because I don't have any money.”

With the help of donations, they were able to purchase a thirty-three-foot-long travel trailer that the small family are now living in. Far from home.

Daisy is clearly grateful for the trailer, but things have changed. “We had our schedule when we were at home. Ember had a bedtime. Now she doesn't like bath and bedtime. She just goes to bed when we go to bed, which we go to bed when she goes to bed because she won't go to bed.

It's just like we don't have a home to go to. We have a trailer.” She continues, “Yeah, the house was falling apart. But it was our house.”

Claire is nodding. “Now we're like, dang it, why do we complain about the leaks?” She grows quiet, looks over at her child. “At first, she kept asking to go home. She wanted to go home.”

Later, Claire has thought more about Cohasset and what the mountain community means to her, past present and future. “Cohasset is our home, where my family’s roots are. I met my husband when we were just kids up here before I even knew he would be my husband.” She laughs. “It’s where we have friends that we can’t explain to others as just friends because they are actually family, since generations of families have grown up together. I want my daughter to experience that, too, and I don’t want this fire to take away that from us.”

Sadly, wildfire devastation leaves victims struggling with complex trauma long after the initial loss. Complex trauma is defined as - varied and multiple traumatic events, often of an invasive, interpersonal nature.

Early in the morning of January 31, 2025, CAL OES began removing the cars from the Vose property. Daisy and Claire were given no official notice. Family in Cohasset alerted them and they drove up the hill. It was raining steadily, and Claire and Daisy and Daisy’s sister Ginny parked at the site of Vose’s Antique Store, overlooking the property. The three women watched and cried and bore witness as heavy equipment rolled and hoisted and lifted the ruined vehicles onto flatbed trucks stacking the carcasses one on top of another. Traffic on the road had to be stopped and controlled throughout the day as the long line of trucks hauled Frank Vose’s dreams away.

Daisy and Claire

Jonathan

Hazel