Pfeiffer Fire: Photographer Kodiak Greenwood loses house and $50,000 of gear, finds it inspiring.

Carmel Valley's Elayne Fitzpatrick sent out a poem through Big Sur's Pelican Network list serve to inspire artists pummeled by the fire drama this week.

"I'm sending this poem because it might help people who have lost homes in Big Sur to get through this horror," she writes. 

The poem appears below.

(For ongoing updates on the Pfeiffer Fire, visit www.mcweekly.com/bigsurfire.)

It carries particular resonance for me after talking with one of Big Sur's most preeminent artists, Kodiak Greenwood, yesterday, on his birthday.

He found out his Pfeiffer Ridge cabin was in the thick of the fire while he was collecting a piece of scanning equipment and visiting friends in Oregon. 

"I got a call at midnight from [a friend] on Apple Pie saying there was a fire on the ridge," he says. "I immediately drove 11 hours and 15 minutes straight home. Didn't sleep for 24 hours."

As he sifted through ash, he discovered his pieces of Big Sur jade and Native American bowls had cracked. That means that fire was insanely hot.

“There’s nothing left,” he says. "It burned like a furnace.”

He lost some $50,000 in equipment, but isn't so concerned with the Macintosh monitors, technical gear, professional lighting apparatus or even the "things they don't make anymore," he says—the 11-by-17 large format Chamanix camera, all its lenses, the 30 boxes of 4x5 polaroid negatives.

Or the dozens of arresting and award-winning photos he took of the 2008 Big Sur Basin Complex Fire—as he and lifelong friends illegally and heroically set a back burn to save Apple Pie Ridge and its collection of homes—that also went up in flames.

It's the heirlooms.

"I felt I could count on silver prints my dad gave to me—Edward Weston, Ansel Adams—to use in case of emergency; or the limited edition photo books from around the world, my little micro investment. Or my great grandmother's lithographs, hand charcoal sketches." 

Nevertheless, even that doesn't seem to haunt him for more than a second.

"The super power artist gene that seems to be in every generation of my family, it's alive," he says. "The fire can't take that away."

The burn, coming with his birthday, he continues, is a new beginning.

Take these thoughts into consideration:

• "My house just burned down, but I still love fire, even as I'm digging through ashes." 

• "A lot of clutter in your life can be a distraction. It clutters your mind."

• "I feel much more humble. I feel like being a nicer person. I really hope to see our community come together. It is a special thing [when it does]."

• "Physically, I'm not as sad as I thought I'd be. I feel a quietness inside I haven't felt before, where I'm just ready. Don't know what I'm ready for—and maybe it's just post traumatic stress disorder—but I'm ready."

Then there's this, which weaves beautifully into the spirit of the poem Fitzpatrick shared earlier today:

"I am still trying to become an artist," Greenwood says. "I might be well known in Big Sur, but I'm not world known, so I haven't reached that goal. Now I have no excuse. Now I don't have other stuff keeping me busy and distracted. I'm excited to be a photographer, and build my life around it more. It's the one thing I have I can go to now. Even though I lost most of equipment, [they're] just tools. Photography is in my head. Now more than ever, I'm excited." 

(Note: Greenwood is one of a growing number of those affected who have had friends set up crowd-funding sources. As this publishes, thousands of donors have contributed $16,255 on GoFundMe.)

Here's that poem, preceded by a note from Fitzgerald: 

This was written—and thrust into sculptor Gordon Newell’s pocket by an anonymous person—after Newell’s Sculpture Studio on Cannery Row had burned to the ground. It serves as a model for a "phoenix" attitude toward life.

THEY ARE THE CREATORS,

THE PEOPLE WHO GIVE THEIR SOULS;

THEY ARE THE ONES WHO GIVE BREATH, FORM, AND SHAPE

TO STONE AND IRON AND WOOD;

WHERE THEY ONCE WORKED IS NOW ASHES;

YOU WOULD THINK THAT THE ASHES WOULD TOUCH THEIR HEARTS,

AND IT HAS;

STANDING IN ASHES,

THEY LAUGH AND DRINK THE LIFE OF THE GRAPE;

THEY ARE ALIVE AND AGAIN THEY WILL CREATE!