Susie

September 26, 2024
Story collected by E. Vegvary and Karyl Clark
Written by E. Vegvary

Courtesy Susie Lawing

The eastern side of Cohasset Ridge was incinerated the second day and night of the Park Fire, Thursday, July 25 through Friday, July 26, 2024. Yet, the burn scar is currently displaying a discomfiting beauty. And though the scarring is revelatory in that it is a deep and emotional injury for those who call Cohasset home, some survivors have found a way to appreciate this stalwart and eerie elegance. The ruined landscape instills a kind of quiet awe in the viewer. It draws one up short at first, the destruction total and overwhelming, but then entices a deeper glance, a sustained recognition of loss. Not just for ourselves. The trees stand dead and dying, a few with their needles and leaves copper against the blackened trunks.

Three months after the fire. We are sitting with eighty-one-year-old Susie Lawing, beside an RV trailer, overlooking the emptied pond. Once fed from Mud Creek, the one-mile-long PVC irrigation pipe was melted. Susie’s twenty-seven-acre property she named “The Enchanted Ridge” is fire ravaged. The trees, the pond, the cabins and dance studio, the in-ground pool, and the house that Susie tells us was one of the first homes built on the Ridge. Mill owner Perry Vilas built the home in 1904. Susie moved her family into it in 1973 and raised her four children here. She has lived her life in gratitude to this property. Thankful to the earth, the trees, the water, the plants, and the animals that called the forest home just as she did.

Her property is also the site where the free school, Cohasset Country School, operated. She tells us, “A school for teaching children resiliency.” But that is another story for another time.

It is the eve of Samhain, the thinning of the veil. The stark shapes of the denuded trees against the autumn sky are standing sentries to grief. Past, present and future. Susie says, “It’s time to gather. This weekend, Day of the Dead. Word of mouth. Let’s see who will show up. It’s a funeral, you know? For the trees.

“This is when we honor our ancestors also. I have a son that died. This is when the veil is really thin. Let’s at least be open to hearing answers from our ancestors. And let's listen to the trees. The trees!”

The mid-afternoon sky is strafed with clouds. A strong wind is steadily buffeting them toward a rainstorm that will arrive in the evening. The western horizon displays layers of stripes, clouds or contrails. Susie questions, “Stripes? Never had stripes before.” For those on the Cohasset Ridge with a view, the sunsets have been spectacularly colored the past few months. She admits the sunsets have been gorgeous, but she questions what’s causing such an explosion of color every night.

Susie is a survivor. Her strength of character is immediately recognizable. In the two hours we spend with her she embodies crone, mother, maiden at various moments throughout telling us stories, recollecting memories, discussing her lifetime of pro-forest activism, alchemy studies, spiritual workshops, and the trees. “The trees are alive! They are what allow us to breathe!”

She is a fierce student, a wise teacher, a spiritual human. Daughter, sister, wife and lover, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother.

She’s dressed for the cold, but still, it may prove impractical for her to trailer camp on her property through the colder seasons. Her son is going to bring her a propane heater. She knows she may have to spend the winter and early spring in town. “We’ve lost the rhythm of our lives,” she says thoughtfully.

There is a large collection of rocks and pieces of rock laid out on a table. Susie picks up a palm-sized shard of recognizable Cohasset volcanic stone. Tilting it back and forth trying to catch it in the sunlight. “Have you heard of zeolite? Oh, gosh. You can't even see the sparkles. There's no sun out, but there's sparkles! This one has a lot, but you can hardly see it.” Zeolites are porous minerals with high absorbency and ion-exchange capacity. “What happens when a volcanic eruption happens, and it hits the water? The lava comes down and when it hits the water, it creates zeolite. It's a mineral.” She puts the chip back down. “I think it's good for everybody. It is. My understanding is that it's magnetic and so are the toxins and heavy metals that all of us picked up from the industrial age.

“My friend Martha told me about the zeolite. She lived here. I met her in Japan thirty-five years ago. And she and her husband came here at the end of the summer when I had so many guests. They just showed up on my doorstep eight and a half months pregnant. We're looking for a place to have our baby in the woods. Well, okay. They had the baby here in that cottage that used to have the spring going underneath the house. It's not there anymore. There were virgin timbers back there. There were three at that time. Big ones.”

She grows angry, “And that is what I would like to draw some environmental concern to, what's going on here on the Cohasset Ridge at this time. They just started today cutting right down there, right down the road. And they've already cut here. We have had a forest fire and you're getting big green trees. Who are you?” She answers her own question, “They're loggers. Yeah, that's their business but why are they taking the green ones? That's different than cutting the dead ones. That sounds like stealing.

“The first time I came up after the fire, they had already cut all the trees on our road. That was a week afterwards. I had no notice and there were a good twenty big trees. They were beautiful trees. Now I find out that we could have stopped all that. Or we could have at least had them leave the trees on our property so we could have them milled. That sounds like stealing. What happened to the thirty feet from the center of the road access?

“There’s lots of ways that big entities get away with pushing, pushing it a little over the line. We call that educated lies.”

She is outraged, seething, but in the quietest, wisest way. Words come fast and furious, memories of pro-forest protests, attending Forestry and Environmental Agency meetings over the decades. Talking with members of the logging and timberland industries. Trying to get someone, anyone, to listen to concerns about the Lassen Foothills woodlands and the fragility of the unique Cohasset Ridge ecosystem.

Susie is a strong advocate for intelligent forest management. “We have a relationship with trees that we don't have with anything else. Not bushes, not shrubs. It’s the supply of oxygen. It’s an exchange. We can't live without them.

“Trees are full of water! They hold it and slowly transpire it.”

She continues, “Do you know that the headwaters of Chico Creek have been being cut for the last couple of months, and they're illegally cutting right to the stream? That's the reason, before the fire, that One Mile got mudded in, and it's going to happen all over again. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised. I went down to the creek yesterday. Do you think there's erosion on the roads? Nothing compared to the steepness of this canyon. And all of it is just this light dirt. It's horrible. And sheets that are thirty foot long of ash and soil that when the rains come, if we don't get them light and slowly, which we need to get over and over. Otherwise, if we get a heavy rain first—” she holds both arms up over her head and wooshes her hands down, open fingered, palms out “--goodbye, salmon!”

The conversation returns to the uniqueness of Cohasset. Its trees, water, soil. She was long part of an active and proactive group of Cohassians educating others, locally and state-wide, about the ridge. “Cohasset is an island,” she explains. “Most ridges continue, right? We don’t. Water is important here. Cohasset water should be protected. We were instrumental in forwarding the Sensitive Watershed Nomination in 1995. The Tuscan aquifer? The deep water? Half of it’s under Cohasset.

“Cohasset soil is special. One hundred feet of ash. We need to remind people about this. The dirt, the soil. The deep roots of our trees.” She would like to see more environmental activism, especially now after the Park Fire. “Let’s start by listing the assets of Cohasset!” She believes passionately in focusing on the positive.

The focus shifts to storytelling. The stories the hill holds fast. How stories can be lost, forgotten. Susie remembers. “You know, there used to always be old timers. Old Timers Day. All the old timers would get together. We went up to the Promontories and sat in chairs like this. And the old timers just told stories and visited. Imagine that.

“Time to visit. Gathering is hopeful. Bring back the potlucks. Let’s see who wants to create community. Again.

“We have to unplug. We have to get back to storytelling.

“One of the biggest, most important things we need to do right now is listen.”

She shows us the necklace she’s wearing. “This is what the lady at the little store downtown, 2nd and Broadway, did for the fire, for Cohasset. A phoenix.

“We can rebuild with positivity! We can rebuild and have fun doing it!”

In talking of rebuilding, we must talk about the Park Fire.

“I was here that day of the fire. I've done workshops here for forty-five years. Two people had come that were doing a yoga and writing workshop, and they had put all their things away. And it was the day before the workshop was going to start. So we were down by the pool, having a vodka cranberry and just relaxing. It was a nice warm day, and we said, well, let's go up and make some dinner. So, we just happened to come up to the house and just a few minutes after we got up there a police car came in the driveway, told Dana, the main person, they told her you have to be out of here in ten minutes. Dana just came in and said, ten minutes, we're out of here. I would not have left, right?

Photo by Dana Lawson through her windscreen of Susie in her car as they evacuate past the Cohasset Store.

“But she insisted because she has a cell phone and you got to have contact, you know, or something. But I already thought about fire. I come and get in the pond, okay? You know, and the pond had water in it. But I don't know,” she grows quiet, contemplative, “with a fire like this. The water might have boiled with what went on.

“I think it's absolutely amazing that everybody got out alive. Yes. Isn't that amazing?

“And I give partly tribute to… I don't know about this zeolite, but I mean, my vitality is a lot more than a lot of eighty-one-year-olds. Is that from the zeolite that I've lived on for fifty years? Maybe we're all living on it. There's things about this place that are really special.”

She wants to show us the wreckage of her home, something in the ash and twisted metal.

“When they do the salvage, I want that metal piece, to use it for a piece of art. It’s an upright grand player piano. We had so much fun with it. I’d make a lunch for all the kids from the Free School, they’d come in the house here. They loved the player piano! We’d all sit down and sing, just sing.”

The explosion of plant growth on the property is both a shock and a surprise. She says she was a waterholic and tended endless amounts of plants, trees, and bushes over decades. She is a gardener. She struggles to identify burnt objects in the foundation of her home but has not an instant of hesitation pointing out plants by name and age that are resprouting.

She indicates the grove of “mother trees” that stand in front of the ruins of her house.

“Some of these dogwoods are coming back! I planted one for each of my sisters. This is a magical story. I have five sisters. Six of us. Years ago, I planted six dogwoods and six more came up naturally, evenly spaced, to create a circle. It’s called the grove. When you look from a distance those are a good twenty to forty feet taller than the others. The mother trees.”

“That red, that’s madrone, now the pink flag means don't take it.

“This plant is coming back; I planted it and it's a Princess of India. It’s a bit invasive.

“This one’s flowers were purple but when it comes up naturally its flowers are white.

“These are all lilacs coming on and I have lots of herbal stuff that can be transplanted in the spring. Early spring is the best time to transplant herbs.

“The comfrey was up in a week.

“Be careful,” she warns. “I almost stepped into a big hole the other day. An old cedar stump. The fire went down into their roots. If you walk next to them, you can just sink into where their roots were.”

She points to other twisted trunks of domestic trees. “Those little trees. They're not going to come back from the top. Not from the top. No. But they'll come back from the bottom. But now that's a sugar maple. It's coming back from the bottom.”

“The next one is a mimosa. And that's coming back from the bottom. And there's one branch on the top that's got one. I think it was such a hot fire.

“One thing you have to address is cumulative impact. You can't cut too much too fast for the biodiversity of the area to come back.”

Susie’s understanding of the Cohasset woodlands is as factual as it is intuitive. “This,” she indicates both her property and all the ridge, “has been clear cut twice. I was told that if you were standing here in the 1930s you could see all the way to the valley.

“It’s been said of the Black Forest in Europe - We cut it once, it came back. We cut it twice, it came back. We cut it three times and it didn’t come back.” She grows quiet.

There are a staggering number of trees being felled on the hill post-fire.

After we walk around the foundation of her historic, three-story home, the amazing chimney with its dual fireplace faces, Susie stands on what was once a portico. There are stacks of vintage Lenox china. “Samaritan’s Purse came and found all those. Guess I should have used them!”

“So many lost things,” she muses. “I was the treasurer, I had so many treasures. There’s personal stuff. I lost at least twenty journals that I've written since I was in my twenties. I lost at least thirty videos that I made, and I lost all the family videos. But you know what? They were just sitting there. We weren't really seeing them a lot. You know, it's fun to look back, but …” She trails off.

“Yeah. Living. Living simply on the land. Simply. Simple. Christ said, the meek shall inherit the earth. My alchemy teacher said that was in Arabic. What he really meant was the simple will inherit the earth.” She pauses for emphasis, “We don't need.”

She has a notebook. “Dana gave me this because I didn’t have much of anything. Not even clothes or a directory. The Dana that I evacuated with. And inside it’s inscribed: the most important thing in our lives is what we are doing now.”

She radiates wisdom when she speaks, smiling through joy, anger, and grief, imparting hard lessons learned and earned. She wants to share a poem. “It's the first thing I wrote, and I haven't been writing. I’m writing again. But this is the first thing I wrote while the fire was going on. Still going.

“I didn't think I'd be on a new adventure creating my life at eighty-one. And there's nothing wrong with that. This is what I wrote.”

I am grateful for a new way of living

for simplicity arriving.

I can easily let go.

I do not have to clean up my fallen dream.

My messes in barn, attic, shed, basement, closet, school, irrigation, pool, spring.

Chico Fabric Designs, Tehama gold olive oil extracts.

I am free to do now.

I can let go with ease.

It is a new adventure.

A new creation of us.

I'm excited for the new to manifest us.

I am grateful for me now.

I'm grateful for us.

~ Susie Lawing