“Living here is not easy.” How did the earthquake bring people together?

SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA — I woke up Tuesday morning to a phone call from my editor just before 8 am — earlier than usual — with the kind of assignment you can’t plan for.

There was an earthquake. big one. Can I drive five hours north from my home in Sacramento to Humboldt County? right Now?

I rushed to pack a bag, scooping up phone and laptop chargers, a notebook and pens and business cards to prove who I am. I opened my maps app and typed in Fortuna—a historic logging town, population of 12,000—that I hadn’t been to in eight years of living in California.

I didn’t have time to do much research, but I knew it was a 6.4-magnitude earthquake that killed two people, injured 11, and closed a bridge over the Ile River. I knew that people had gone to bed the night before with very different lives than they had woken up to.

What I didn’t know was that the new place would feel very familiar and reporting would be easy because of that sense of community. Surrounded by giant red trees, this coastal county, about 55 miles from the Oregon border, reminded me of my hometown in West Virginia, in the heart of Appalachia.

Both are areas defined by connection to nature, fading 20th century industries and people who are resilient as hell.

When I arrived in Fortuna just before 2 p.m.—after a long, winding drive that included a snowy detour through God- and GPS-intelligible Shasta Trinity National Forest—I entered the first restaurant I saw. Double D Steak & Seafood is closed but full of people cleaning up broken liquor and wine bottles – the smell hits you in the face.

Most of the people who helped were not employees but volunteers: the owner’s son enlisted his friends to help clean up and take out the trash. The proprietor, who was wearing a camouflage Santa hat despite having been up since 3am, greeted me and showed me to the dining room that had been ready days before for the holiday celebration, now full of smashed ornaments, twisted pictures and a downed Christmas tree.

It was my first glimpse of a town ravaged by nature but filled with people helping each other through crisis while absorbing a little bit of normality.

In a vintage shop down the street, I felt the first aftershock, which created the effect of an antique chandelier. I’ve never had a major earthquake and wondered what we should do. I was struck by the indifference of the owner.

“Oh, that’s a shake. Maybe we should go out,” Haute Hoarder owner Heather Herrick said, taking a break from cleaning shards of glass.

But by the end of my first day there, I realized I was overwhelmed by the aftershock. I was exhausted at one of the few hotels in town that had electricity restored but was still without water. I was just too tired to care for a slight sway in the middle of the night. I let the tremor rock me to sleep.

I am always amazed at people who are willing to let journalists into their lives on the worst of days. People were without sleep, electricity or water. They couldn’t stay warm or charge their phones. They didn’t know if the insurance would cover the damage. Motorists lined up to buy gas out of panic. All grocery stores are closed.

Yet no one turned me away or reprimanded me for my intrusiveness, even when I was questioning people who had been rendered homeless in an instant. Someone was always leading me to someone else.

“Is that Mackenzie from the Los Angeles Times?” Read a text. It was Kevin McNeice, a friend of Herrick’s, who told him I was in town, and wanted to show me his house which had been broken into three pieces, caught on fire and condemned by local officials. He lost most of his belongings and was staying in a hotel. Free.

As he put it: “Riding on the tail of the vineyard.” He wanted to share his story.

A family who had been sleeping in their car introduced me to their pit bull, Sarah, when I ran into them at a pop-up food bank. A woman who went to the fire department started crying as she told me someone had offered to buy her family a hotel room for the night.

Volunteer firefighters and food bank workers gathered. It made me think of that quote attributed to Mr. Rogers which doubles as good reporting advice. In times of disaster, he said, “look for helpers. You will always find people to help.”

::

The hardest-hit parts of Humboldt County, including the towns of Scotia, Ferndale and Rio Del, looked a lot like where I grew up.

In West Virginia, we don’t have earthquakes, but we do have floods. In place of the old lumber company towns, we have the remnants of the once thriving coal mining industry.

Both places have immense natural beauty and are home to people who struggle with poverty but take pride in where they are. They are truly intimidating places of strangers but amazingly welcoming.

In this part of California, like West Virginia, communities are knit in part because they believe no one will come to their aid. I felt relative frustration at feeling ignored and misunderstood.

But I knew I wasn’t one of them. I was there for only two days. All I could do was listen. I’ve always asked about more than an earthquake: what does this place usually look like? What do people get wrong with?

“Densely populated areas tend to speak for all of us,” McNessie told me. “The Bay Area, Los Angeles, Sacramento—they’re going to become the face of what you think of California, but here behind the curtain of the redwoods, we have different needs.”

Whether they miss a few dishes or entire homes, people tend to stay positive. This wasn’t their first earthquake, and it probably won’t be the last.

“It’s not easy living here,” said Rio Del resident John Ireland. “When something bad happens, people come together. You get to see the best sides of people.”

It was not an easy place to submit a news story. I did not have the ability to charge my laptop. Mobile service is spotty on a good day. When the sun set, the already sleepy city of Fortuna was silent, pitch black and difficult to navigate.

Lacking a reliable internet connection, I had to submit a story the old-fashioned way, calling from my car to a co-writer who transcribed and delivered my notes. You submitted another story from McDonald’s in Eureka. (WiFi is great.) On the way home Wednesday night, I stopped in the dark and foggy Lake County and pleaded with the hotel’s initially reluctant owners to let me use the Internet despite not being a guest. (Shout out to the Lodge at Blue Lakes.)

When I returned to Sacramento, where I usually cover state government and politics, I was grateful to see a part of California that reminded me of my hometown some 2,500 miles away.

I was thinking of the Scotia Lodge, which is 100 years old and fairly undamaged by the earthquake, even when the destruction was evident all around it. The owners of the inn rushed to receive the displaced. By the end of the week, they’re back in business, and the rooms are filled with fee-paying tourists and community members who stay for free, with nowhere else to go.

Aaron Sweet, the lodge’s chief executive, told me of a visiting family from Europe who were so upset by the earthquake that they fled Scotia in a hurry. When a gas station would not accept their international credit card, a local resident stepped in to pay and refused to take cash in return.

“I think in times of tragedy, Humboldt and all these small, country towns all over the place, just get together and say, ‘Let’s figure this out,'” Soot said.

On Facebook, the lodge told concerned locals that the place was still standing.

“This is not the first, nor the last, time Mother Nature will test this old girl,” the post reads.

The solid and welcoming historic building was an amazing sight. But it gave me a painfully familiar feeling.

———

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