We Are Remarkable Creatures: A Burn Scar Update
For westerners, watching the fires burn through Los Angeles in the middle of winter feels like deja vu. It was only four years ago that the Marshall Fire raged through the town of Louisville, outside Boulder, Colorado. That fire is now considered the most costly fire in Colorado history. But that deja vu is especially acute for those who survived the Marshall Fire. Like Ariel Lavery’s family. Modern West fans might recognize that name. Ariel guest produced a four part Modern West season called The Burn Scar back in 2023 all about how her family lost their beloved home in that fire.
We thought it might be a good idea to catch up with Ariel and get an update on how her family – and community – is recovering from the Marshall Fire. And see if she has any advice for the rest of us who are fearing that one of these urban fires could strike our town or city next.
You might recall that Ariel and her husband and kids all lived in Kentucky when we last heard from her. Well, a lot has changed in Ariel’s life.
Ariel Lavery: About a year ago, I saw a job opportunity pop up at KUNC for a producer, reporter position for this daily news show they have called In the NoCo, something I have never done. I've never done anything like this before, but I thought, why not? I'm going to go for it. There is this possibility that we could find housing in Colorado, living in my mom and dad's. Newly built house.( If you've listened to the podcast, you know that story.) So I went for it, I really didn't think I was going to even get an interview. But I ended up getting hired to come on as the producer for this show. So, we are currently living in the house that my parents rebuilt. My mom is the only one living there right now because my dad is still in nursing care.
But yeah, we're running a five family household there now with three adults and two kids. Oh, and two a dog, so I guess that makes it a seven family household technically.
Melodie Edwards: That's awesome. I'm so glad to hear that you guys we're able to successfully rebuild your house and move into a multi-generational home. That was definitely one of the themes of the podcast series. So cool to hear. I thought I would also reach out to you and talk to you because right now we are really seeing how the city of L.A. is just reeling from a situation that was so similar to what Louisville went through with the Marshall fire back in 2021. It was also an urban fire in the middle of winter. So I just wonder how your family reacted to that as that was playing out in the news?
AL: I did watch my mom watching these fires on the news. She has CNN playing a lot these days, and she couldn't turn it off, she admitted. She hated to see this, but she couldn't turn her eyes away from the screen. I think she was kind of hanging on to every moment of coverage that she could get, and, I mean, it was sad for me to watch because I know that she was reliving a lot of her anxieties and her trauma in that. But I also know that this is, I guess in a way, her way of processing. She was commiserating from afar with this community. We would talk about it over the counter, in the kitchen, just how tragic it was.
ME: Here in Wyoming, we had a really horrendous fire season, which nowadays it's not even sticking to a season , as you witnessed, as you experienced, and as we're seeing in L. A. The crazy thing about our fire season in Wyoming was that it wasn't like forest fires. This was grass fires. It was impacting people's private property and ranches, and it was just enormous acreage. So it just feels like everybody in the West is really having a new relationship to fire. Since you finished making the Burn Scar, how has your relationship to fire has been evolving?
AL: Well, I'll start with a moment that I remember. I had this aha moment when we were back in Kentucky, and we had a huge backyard that was full of grass. It was a great place for the kids to run around, and we had fires back there all the time because we had tons of trees, and we needed to burn the branches to get rid of them because the city only did branch pickup once a year. So, we ended up having a lot of bonfires in our backyard. I remember after the Marshall Fire, feeling this kind of obsession with the fire, like wanting to understand it. One night we were having one of our many bonfires, roasting hot dogs over the fire, and I realized I was having this kind of obsession with fire where I was wanting to make more of them. I was wanting to learn how to cook over campfires. I was wanting to try to heat our house with fire more. I can't explain why I would want more fire in my life after something like the Marshall Fire happened. But yeah, I definitely noted that in myself. Since then, definitely with my job, I've noticed that I am maybe the person to go talk to when it comes to experience with wildfires or urban fires.
I will tell a story about the other day, my family, the kids, and me and Chris were hiking along the Front Range. It's this beautiful hike that starts near Eldorado Canyon, near Eldorado Springs, and just kind of goes along the Front Range towards Boulder through this old homestead acreage, and there's all these gnarly bushes everywhere that I was really enjoying. They don't have any leaves or anything on them right now. But I told Chris, ‘I really like the way these bushes look,’ and he said, ‘Yeah, the only thing that I can see these days is a bunch of kindling.’
I see that too. I think that has changed our experience of being here in Colorado in the wintertime where there's a bunch of foliage that's asleep, stuff that doesn't have leaves on it. It just looks a lot more like kindling, like something that could potentially go up in flames rather than something that's just dormant for the winter.
And then, near the end of that hike, we were further up towards the mountains, and we started getting these crazy gusts of wind. We still get crazy gusts of wind in the new house because, as I mentioned in the podcast, that is the toe of the mesa where the wind is at its strongest when it's pushing back up the mesa. But we were getting this crazy gust of wind along that trail, and I just remember thinking, ‘Man, how scary would it be if we were out here in this remote area, nobody's around, and suddenly we realized there was a fire in front of us, that the wind was blowing towards us. There would be nothing we could do.’ We could run. But that thought really scared me. And I don't think that's the last time I'm going to have that thought or that experience. I think that's just something that is kind of part of this new awareness.
ME: What do you feel like your advice is? The way that we might need to be thinking about fire, reporting on it? How do we need to be telling those stories in new ways?
AL: I do think that it's a little more incumbent on us to make sure that we're reporting on the aftermath of the fires. Like what is the full scope of what happens to a landscape, to an urban landscape, to the buildings that are in the fires, to the water? There have been some really interesting studies that have come out in this area because of the Marshall Fire, about what happens to the local waterways, what happens to the soils. There have been studies out of CU Boulder that have confirmed that smoke damage to houses that survived is probably enough to give reason to not live in those houses anymore.
I think it's really important that we shine a light on what we're learning out of this, right? There's an interesting new company that I've reported on out of Greeley that is making 3D printed concrete homes. Those homes are not yet super affordable, but this company's goal is to make them affordable, to make neighborhoods out of these 3D printed concrete homes. Those homes could potentially be some of the most fire safe homes you could find if they start to populate Colorado and push into other areas of the West. That's the kind of ingenuity that we should be focusing on and making sure that people are aware of so that we can plan to move into a future where fire is just more a part of our lives.
ME: What are you seeing in terms of how your community is coming to terms with what happened?
AL: I think people in Louisville, they really came together after the fire. You really saw this community outreach. You saw, certainly in my neighborhood, a coming together of people in a way that I'm not sure had really happened before. People actively scheduled events where the whole neighborhood was invited to attend. Since we've been back, since we moved in, neighbors are scheduling parties and inviting each other over and I think that is one of the most important things that this community has learned is just how much it matters to stay connected with each other.
The tough thing about what this has done to an affluent community like Louisville is I think it's actually pushed it into a less affordable range. The houses have gotten bigger. Louisville I know really does want to diversify the housing here and there's lots of conversations in the City Council to try to get more affordable housing units, condos, townhomes, those types of things. But it's tricky when you have a community in a city of people who are still hurting.
I won't say that there's like an identity crisis or anything like that for Louisville. I think Louisville has had a lot of strength, and people have bounced right back. But it is funny because you hear the name Louisville, Colorado and Marshall Fire all the time now. It's just on people's minds. People know what that means. They might not know anything about Louisville except that there was one of the first biggest urban wildfires that existed in the West.
ME: Do you feel like they're doing enough to make sure that this doesn't happen again? You mentioned that it is scary to live in that particular geographic location that it could happen again. Do you feel like they're doing enough and asking hard enough questions?
AL: I do. I definitely think they're doing enough. I've seen the city of Louisville do some really exciting things, like grazing cattle and goats around areas. They've also been educating the public. I've attended outdoor seminars where city workers will go. Anybody's invited and they'll tell you why the cattle are there, how they help the vegetation, and the nuanced details of the species of grass and the length of the grass that they're looking to achieve and how that helps with their fire mitigation efforts.
They're also mowing more. I've seen mowers everywhere. You know, that's just a necessity these days, I think. And the City of Boulder, the City and County of Boulder have made a lot of efforts also, mostly in mountain communities still, to make sure that homeowners are following mitigation efforts.
I also saw a really good conversation with the Boulder Fire Chief recently in the Boulder Reporting Lab. He actually went out to L.A. to help with some of the firefighting efforts out there and he just had some really good reflection points that we have to figure out how to design communities that live with fire. He was driving home this point that, ‘You can't put the Navy in front of a hurricane and expect the Navy to stop the hurricane.’ It's the same thing for a firefighting crew. We have to build communities that are resilient, and it might hurt a little bit if a wildfire comes through again, but we can we can build them back
That was one of the biggest complaints of a lot of residents is they did not get evacuation notices, so the city of Boulder and Boulder County have set out these alerts. They've been doing a really good job with getting that message out about how to sign up for alerts, how to make sure that you're signed up for the alerts. So I've made sure that I'm signed up on my phone.
ME: From what you learned through the course of living through this and reporting on it, why is it that we are having more urban fires and in wintertime? What's going on? Should we be prepared that this could happen to other communities? And what advice might you have, just off the top of your head, maybe some simple things – you mentioned making sure that you're getting alerts, things like that – that you might offer folks.
AL: The growing seasons are getting longer, they're getting wetter, and this is because of the drives of climate change, these atmospheric rivers that are traveling through more frequently, and less snowpack. That means more rain. So we're seeing these longer greener growing seasons. But that also means that there's potential for drier winters and more kindling that's around because things have grown more during the summer. So drier winters plus more kindling equals likelihood of fires going up. So there's that.
People in the West, especially, you just see more and more development pushing into more wildland areas. I think there's more urban wildland interface, and people who live at that interface need to be extremely aware of what the dangers are. And I think it's incumbent upon them to do the best they can to mitigate their properties to protect their neighbors and themselves.
You want to be aware of where your loved ones are. Be aware of, if it's a red flag day, know where everybody is, know where your animals are. Know where your important documents are. Put them near the front of the house. If you have to run out of the house, make sure your important documents are in a fire safe that you can take with you. Because, like I heard from some of my neighbors, the fire safe survived, the documents inside did not.
Yeah, make sure that you have that emergency go kit ready to go. Especially on these days and in these months where we might be seeing more problematic weather. We forget that we need to really pay attention the way that people paid attention to the weather a hundred years ago. We may not live in an agrarian society anymore where our livelihoods are dependent upon how much rain we get, but we are more and more living in urban populations that could be reliant on that in an opposite way.
ME: Your kids are getting a little older and they moved from the place where they were born to live with their grandmother in a house that was built in an emergency after it was burned down. How do you tell that story to them and what, how do you talk about fire with your children as they get older?
AL: I'm always inclined to go overboard, right? I'm the alarmist when it comes to telling everybody about climate change and what we need to do to keep ourselves safe. So for me, I think I need to be aware of that in myself and kind of pull back and make sure that they're still able to enjoy the things around them and make sure that we're talking about why we're here, why we left Kentucky. It was really hard for my oldest to not be in the house that she was in for the first six years of her life. We've talked about it a lot, and we've processed it a lot, and my husband is really good at trying to get us to process things rather than be alarmist about things.
I think that's really important. I think about how it's important to not get totally attached and wrapped up in, ‘This is my one and only house, and it's always going to be this way, and nothing's ever going to change.’
It's funny, on the way to this interview today, I was thinking about the main character Lauren in The Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler's well-known sci-fi novel, and the religion that she came up with, which basically just says that everything is always changing all the time. I think that's the way that I've been trying to raise my girls, is to understand that everything changes all the time. It's not about holding onto things, even though they want to hold on to everything. They don't want to give up any of their stuffies. They don't want to ever give away any toys or anything. But to be able to let go of things is, I think, a really important skill to develop.
For me too – I'm still trying to figure out how to let go to the idea of homeownership. I mean, that's a hard thing to let go of as an American.
ME: You've given up on the idea of owning a home in the future? Can you talk a little bit about that?
AL: I can't say I've totally given up on it. Chris and I still fantasize about buying the perfect house in Colorado. It's extremely expensive here, and I don't know how we would do it. It would probably look more like a condo or a townhome. But we were all fed this narrative that home ownership is the be-all-end-all of what it means to be an American, and once you have your home, you have your life, you have yourself, you have achieved your goals. So it's hard to figure out how to identify differently from that.
ME: Are there other aspects of your experience, since the making of the Burn Scar, that you'd want to share with our listeners?
AL: Yeah, I think that one thing – especially if you've been impacted by the L. A. fires or any fires recently – if you're looking for solace and you're looking for that meaning, I think one thing that I want to say is that there are opportunities. They exist in the shadows, but there are opportunities that can come out of these events. Our brains are suddenly forced to think about things in a completely different way. You're not going to go about your day-to-day in the same way after your house burns down or your neighbor's house burns down or even the town over has an event like this. Your world is going to be upside down. But this is what human beings evolved to do was to adapt. We are remarkable at adapting. We are remarkable creatures, and I think you can open yourself up to learning and understanding and maybe moving forward through this experience. I do not think I would have looked to apply for a job at KUN C had it not been for this fire. So we would not be where we are had it not been for this fire. We probably never would have returned to Colorado and, it might sound bold for me to say that having these good things happen to me and having a neighborhood that's being rebuilt, but I guess that's what it is. That's what I want to try to offer to people is to let the creative mind try to come through this in some way, to find those opportunities.
