After two wildfire evacuations in less than a year, residents of Arroyo Seco expect a rough year.

With her 14-year-old chihuahua mix, Houdini, riding shotgun in her periwinkle pickup truck, Dee Heckman navigates Carmel Valley Road’s winding turns with torque, zipping under the canopy of live oaks and through the valley’s dry, chaparral environment. Heckman, 54, is traveling from radiation treatment in Monterey back to her home in Arroyo Seco, where she has lived since 1990.

She pulls off to the side of the road to grab dog treats, a requirement for this three-hour round trip. Heckman opens the bed of her truck to reveal a tightly packed array of bare necessities, from bath towels to camping equipment and medication. Heckman and Houdini are just coming off a disappearing act of their own: a four-day evacuation from the Willow Fire, which has burned just under 3,000 acres near the juncture of the Willow Creek and Arroyo Seco tributaries.

“I also usually grab a painting or picture from every room, my will and paperwork that says I own the house,” Heckman says, who was also forced to evacuate for eight days during the Dolan Fire in August 2020. “Oh, and I always take my tent. That way if I have to come back here and live without a house, I have a tent.”

The Willow Fire, Monterey County’s first major wildfire in 2021, ignited on Thursday, June 17. Heckman and her neighbors were ordered to evacuate the following evening – the second such order in 10 months. Until the 2020 Dolan Fire, a fire had not forced an evacuation of the area since 2016’s catastrophic Soberanes Fire.

As fire season is just revving up, Heckman says she is going to keep some items in her truck, with others boxed up near her door.

“I don’t remember fires being all that much of a problem in the early 1990s,” Heckman says. “Now, you’ve got the fear and knowledge of the Santa Rosa fires and the fire in Paradise where entire communities just went up in a puff of smoke. I never heard of those kinds of things happening before recent memory.”

Evacuation orders do not mean all people leave. Cherokee Nucci, 70, lives just down the dirt path from Heckman. When the U.S. Forest Service ordered one for the Willow Fire, Nucci stuck it out in the cabin her family has owned since 1951, just as she did during the Dolan Fire. She says her logic “might not make sense to a regular person” but she refuses to abandon her family’s home or the feral cat she feeds.

“I think I will choose to stay every time,” Nucci says. “We’re probably going to have another fire this year. Eventually there’s going to be a fire that gets our houses. But leaving your home is like leaving your parents in the ICU. When you’re there, you’re with them and you know. Once you leave all you’re doing is thinking about them.”

Now 87-percent contained, the wildfire smoke has cleared but down the road from Heckman and Nucci, U.S. Forest Service vehicles roar in and out of the still-closed Arroyo Seco Campground, the fire’s main access point. The National Weather Service has ruled out lightning as a cause, which remains under investigation.