An 85-year-old Big Sur lifer and mother of 30 (including 27 foster kids) faces down the Pfeiffer Fire.

There’s a picture that ran on the cover of the Weekly’s 2013-2014 Senior Resource Guide that (in my studied opinion) is one of the most perfect shots Weekly photographer Nic Coury has taken.

Its perfection rests in the fact that, in looking at the photo of Penny Vieregge – decked out in a denim dress, chunky jade necklaces dangling and legs tucked under her, one foot resting casually on a colorful embroidered pillow – you know exactly who she is.

Behind her slipcovered armchair, battered shelves are stacked to almost overflowing. There are books upon books, open magazines, records and knickknacks (the value of which seem to be totally sentimental) and other mementos of a life so rich and well-lived they tell a tale of their own. Look at the shelves over her right shoulder and there’s a smattering of dust. I love anyone who doesn’t dust regularly – it’s a signal they have better things to do. Like read all those books.

From what I know of her, from the mini-profile written for the senior guide by Sara Rubin and from stories told by her granddaughter, Weekly ad exec Chelsea Davey, Vieregge has always had far better things to do. She’s lived in a kit house, a log cabin-style house, in Sycamore Canyon for more than 40 years. She was a volunteer emergency medical tech for 30 years; she founded the Big Sur cliff rescue unit and resigned only a few years ago when she realized her fellow EMTs were paying too much attention to her well-being, and not enough to training or the rescue at hand. It’s in Sycamore Canyon that Vieregge and her husband raised three children and (wait for it) an astounding 27 foster children. She still grows much of her own food. She celebrated her 85th birthday earlier this month with a bash thrown for her at the Big Sur Grange.

And when the Pfeiffer Fire roared to life in the early morning of Dec. 16, sending her daughter, son and Davey scrambling to Sycamore Canyon to get Vieregge out, Vieregge wasn’t there. She was at the Esalen Institute – not for a birthday celebration and not for relaxation.

It was more of a personal test.

The long-time volunteer preschool teacher, at Esalen and Captain Cooper School, had been invited to lecture at a university. Her specialty: teaching basic hygiene practices (like how to properly put on a band-aid) to young children and teaching preschoolers to cope with disaster. She wrote a book about it, The Owwie Book, to teach children about various owwies and how to take care of themselves and each other in scary situations.

Vieregge figured if she could make it through a week at Esalen, she was strong and healthy enough to make the trip to teach others about coping.

But the fire broke out and her family scrambled. They packed loads of photos and treasured family memories out. There is the box they refer to as “the Chinese chest,” that contains a great-great grandmother’s high school graduation dress, complete with full petticoats and whalebone corseting. There’s the hat a great-grandfather, whose ashes are buried on the Sycamore Canyon property, wore while serving in the U.S. Navy.

But they didn’t know about the box, an 8-inch-by-6-inch box, that contains handwritten correspondence dating back five generations. Vieregge asked after it, but by then, the road was closed.

On Tuesday morning, an exhausted Davey wept in my office as she talked to her mother, who was in Big Sur with a trailer and trying to move friends’ livestock and animals away from danger. So many had lost so much, Davey says, and they hadn’t lost anything, not yet.

“I love you. Please be safe,” she told her mother. Davey told me she knew she shouldn’t be crying. But the one thing that seems to be instilled in Big Sur residents is a deep sense of place, and a connectivity found in few other places. Tears for your friends and neighbors in this situation are unavoidable.

The fire hadn’t reached Sycamore Canyon. And hopefully it never will.

And hopefully, Penny Vieregge will take that trip and return to life as she knew it before the flames. There are many owwies that need her healing touch right about now.