Three fires in Monterey County have moved fast. But while people wait for news on their homes, time moves slow.

There’s like a couple of minutes of half sleep every morning where I forget that almost everyone I know and love is waiting to find out if their home is gone before my brain wakes up. – Twitter account of a South Salinas resident, Aug. 20.

“We have a fire.”

Words matter to Mary De Groat.

An author and director of development and marketing for the Read to Me Project, a literacy nonprofit that provides training and classroom-based lending libraries of books to older elementary school students to read aloud to younger students (or to take home and read to younger siblings), De Groat had left her Sky Ranch home and headed to Monterey for a doctor’s appointment on Tuesday, Aug. 18.

Like many others, she had been working from home since the start of the pandemic, rarely leaving the mountain to do anything. But she was in her doctor’s office when her cell phone rang – normally, she wouldn’t have answered, she says.

“I was inspired to answer, but it was weird because my husband would be the only one to call,” she says. And it was her husband, Justin Thornburg, saying those words: “We have a fire.”

“I said, OK, get the dogs, get the cat and if you can, grab my laptop. I was going to dash home, and by the time I got to Carmel Valley Village, the road was closed,” she says. “It was a mandatory get out now.”

What followed was an agonizing wait – “moments of terror,” De Groat calls them – in which she couldn’t contact her husband and didn’t know if he was alive. She waited in the parking lot of The Running Iron, hoping and praying, and finally her phone rang. Thornburg had been forced to evacuate the long way, via Tassajara Road, and had no cell connection as he made his way out.

That wasn’t even the real drama, De Groat says. That came later, after they landed in a studio apartment of some friends two miles east of the village. (They would eventually have to flee from there as well, as sweeping evacuation orders came down.)

“The real drama was when we were still in the village, getting calls from neighbors saying, ‘Your house is gone,’ then another saying, ‘Your house is OK.’ It was up and down and up and down,” she says. “In addition to not knowing if my husband had gotten out, it was a terrible emotional rollercoaster.”

Enter neighbor Thomas Heinemann (see story, p. 8) who stayed on the mountain, bouncing from one property to another, feeding and watering various animals and taking pictures to send to the people who had evacuated.

And as De Groat found out, her garage was gone, a guest cottage on her property was gone but her main house, though damaged, still stands.

On Monday morning, Heinemann used a gallon of sour milk he found in De Groat’s powerless refrigerator to extinguish a hot spot on the property.

“I’m not 100-percent celebrating yet, because anything can still happen,” she says. But for now, she has her husband, their dogs, their cat and her laptop. She’s waiting for the all-clear to come in so she can return to the mountain and see what else of her old life remains.

IT’S BEEN A CHAOTIC 11 DAYS AND COUNTING SINCE THE RIVER FIRE EXPLODED TO LIFE in the pre-dawn hours of Aug. 16 at the tip of a lightning bolt. And it’s been a chaotic nine days and counting since the Carmel Fire began its roar through Sky Ranch and Cachagua – its exact origin currently deemed suspicious – just two days later, on Aug. 18.

Combined with the Dolan Fire in Big Sur, which likely resulted from arson, and also started on Aug. 18, Monterey County is seemingly burning from one end to the other. Thousands of people were ordered out of their homes in the Indian Springs and Las Palmas developments, and other neighborhoods along River Road thanks to the River Fire.

Over the weekend, they were joined by some 20,000 others ordered out of vast sections of Carmel Valley, Corral de Tierra and San Benancio.

Computer consultant Michael Wecker, a Cachagua resident since 1999 and formerly a 10-year volunteer with the Cachagua Fire Protection District, knows he won’t receive the same news as De Groat. A neighbor sent pictures of what was once the home he shared with his wife, sign language teacher and interpreter Sabine Grinstein-Wecker, and their daughter, Maia.

Wecker had almost landed at a client’s location in Salinas when his phone started blowing up Aug. 18 with texts and alerts – fire was coming for them, it was coming fast and it was time to get out. Wecker called his wife, and she got herself and their daughter to safety at her mother’s house in Carmel Valley. Wecker passed them on the way in – he stopped at his house, grabbed Sabine’s wedding ring, prescription medications and about 20 percent of the photos they had.

“Tanker 944 was orbiting overhead,” Wecker says, referring to the Boeing 747 firefighting plane that can carry more than 19,000 gallons of fire retardant or water to drop from the sky and onto the flames. “I could have fit more stuff in my car, but all my training said to get the fuck out.”

In some ways, he’s a little more philosophical about this fire, because it’s part of a larger event. He recalls an early instance from his time with Cachagua Fire, in which a “crazy guy who collected roadkill and made art out of it” made good on his threat to “burn the fuckers out,” and started a fire in the area.

He recalls watching Terry Bishop, a famed local heavy equipment operator whom Wecker calls “the lord high god dozer operator,” as he whipped a trailer a mile up a steep grade and went to work stopping that fire.

“If Terry were home, we might have had the same result this time,” Wecker muses. Bishop, though, was already out fighting the River Fire.

Wecker is also philosophical about what he and his family lost, and about rebuilding. On the former, he knows a bunch of stuff he didn’t want or need is gone. But also gone are a vast number of musical instruments – his great-grandmother’s piano, five drum sets, keyboards and electronics kits.

“In some ways, it’s a clean slate, because I had three generations of family stuff,” he says. “It’s liberating because the only reason I had a lot of it was because of history, not because I chose it.”

What brought him to his knees: When photographer Michael Troutman sent him a picture of a tree on the Weckers’ property, a fire-scarred grandaddy tree with a knot in it that approximates the shrieking face in the Edvard Munch painting “The Scream.”

The tree was still standing and the knot was still shrieking.

It might have survived yet another Cachagua fire.