Oakland Hills Firestorm, 19 years ago

I will never forget that day.

It was a Sunday 19 years ago today, and my friend Anna and I had a date to go wine tasting in the Napa Valley. I lived in one of those beautiful old Craftsman homes at 2439 Russell Street in Berkeley at the time, just a quarter mile west from the Claremont Hotel, which would ultimately be threatened then spared in the firestorm to come. Anna lived in Orinda, just over the hill, and was coming to pick me up.

As I stepped onto the porch to wait for her, I heard the dry autumn leaves rustling in the big old elm trees in the front and felt how unusually warm it already was for 10 a.m. "This is fire weather," I thought.

The coming fire would go on to kill 25 people and injure 150 others. 1,520 acres would burn, including 3,354 single-family dwellings and 437 apartment and condominium units. Some estimate the economic loss at $1.5 billion, and beautiful old homes with stucco character from the turn of the century would forever be gone, replaced by ugly McMansions. The Insurance Information Institute called it the most destructive urban conflagration in U.S. history.

Unbeknownst to me, as I stood waiting for Anna, the fire had already started the day before high above me in the Berkeley Hills near the Caldecott Tunnel. Firefighters thought they had brought the 5-acre blaze under control, but it was already re-igniting as a brush fire, thanks to what the media would later call Diablo Winds.

Even before Anna and I arrived in the Napa Valley around eleven, the fire had already spread and overwhelmed local and regional firefighting teams. By noon, still unbeknownst to us, the fire was up on the Hiller Highlands and sweeping down into some of the most beautiful old mansions and homes of the Berkeley Hills, destroying many of them yet picking and choosing here and there to leave a solitary home standing amongst charred rubble and lonely black chimneys. Frantic people were fleeing downhill on congested roads, some losing their lives along the way, and others trapped in their homes, unable to get out.


One of the weirdest things of all about that day is that we heard absolutely nothing about the firestorm during the hours we spent winetasting! There were no TVs in any of the wineries we visited, no one was tuned in to any radio news, and of course this was before the Internet, laptops, iPads and cell phone texting. And while we also visited a so-called psychic that afternoon for readings about our respective love lives, she did not mention anything about the firestorm.

Literally, we did not know about the fire until we were driving home and I spotted the enormous plume of smoke hanging over what looked like the Concord area, near Mt. Diablo. By this time, the fire had jumped across both Highways 24 (an eight-lane freeway) and 13 (a four-lane freeway) in Berkeley and was blazing across the Rockridge Oakland Hills area. But we still could not see it.

"That looks like a really bad fire near Concord," I said to Anna.

"No, that's fog," said Anna, who was an argumentative sort.

"I'm quite certain it's a fire," I insisted. It didn't look like fog at all.

"It's fog," she countered.

I knew she was wrong. But nothing could have prepared me for what we both saw when we rounded a curve on Interstate 80 which revealed to us for the first time the full-on urban blaze. From that perspective, it looked as if the entire city of Oakland and much of the Berkeley Hills was on fire, including my own neighborhood! I could see the majestic old Claremont Hotel, tiny and white in the distance, etched against a yellow-orange wall of fierce fire.

I, who never panic, felt immediate, helpless, racing panic. "Oh my God, the city is on fire!" I exclaimed. "Has my house burned? Oh my God, hurry!"

"Calm down," said Anna, always a stupid thing to say to someone who is upset.

But who could be calm in such circumstances? I was near tears. It was as if Anna had no feeling for what we were seeing, but I knew in an instant that it was a disaster of epic proportions unfolding before our very eyes. I was stunned that we'd gone through the whole day without hearing about it.

Helpless and frantic, I wished I could eject myself from Anna's car and the too-congested traffic and fly instantly to the scene. We couldn't go fast enough. Getting off the I-80 at Ashby, every light seemed to be a red one. I wanted to tell her to hurry, hurry, but I willed myself to be silent, since she was clearly so contemptuous of emotional expression.


My house had burned down, I thought. I was certain my house had burned down. It sure looked that way. How will it feel to lose everything, I wondered. Immediately I thought of my photos. This was before digital, of course, so my photos were neatly organized in boxes, along with framed childhood photos of me with my father - precious beyond replacement - and of my mother and sisters and others I love.

"Calm down," Anna repeated, driving serenely. Was she intentionally driving more slowly? I wondered if she was as infuriatingly insensitive as she seemed, or if she was just one of those people who remains eerily controlled in terribly frightening circumstances. She left the emotion for me to act out.

After what seemed like an eternity, we made it to Russell Street. I can't begin to explain my relief upon seeing that my house had not burned down. But we could see the wall of fire behind the Claremont Hotel just a quarter mile up the street, with giant eucalyptus trees etched behind the iconic 1915 structure outlined by the fire. Dozens of neighbors stood in the street staring, stunned, mesmerized. It seemed impossible that it hadn't actually burned down, given the inferno at its door.

"What happened?" I said rather stupidly to a neighbor as I emerged from Anna's car.

"This has been going on all day," he replied. "Where have you been?"

"Napa Valley," I said sheepishly. "We didn't hear anything about it. Is the Claremont going to burn?"

"The winds shifted, otherwise this all would have burned," he said, sweeping his arm to indicate the whole neighborhood.

And so we stood there, Anna and I, fascinated and numbed. The implications of the firestorm - which is a fire so intense it generates its own winds - seemed finally to have sunk in for my intransigent friend, especially when she called home and discovered the roads over the hills were all closed and she'd have to stay with me for the night. Together, we watched the news from my cozy suite of rented rooms, the air around us thick with smoke and hard to breathe. By 9 p.m. that night, the wind unexpectedly stopped and firefighters had a chance to begin to prevail.

In the morning, it was I who was calm, and Anna who began to cry about what we'd seen and what had happened before we parted ways. Somehow I got to work at Pettit & Martin in San Francisco that morning - whether by BART or carpool I can't recall - all around me on the way was the haunting smell of smoke, death and destruction which would linger for weeks. The familiar hills were a blackened mass of shocking ruin.

At work, colleagues who lived in the East Bay shared war stories. One attorney lost his home in the Hiller Highlands (a year later, in the 1992 lay-offs, he would lose his job). Another lost his neighborhood, with his own home freakishly spared amongst the devastation. "It would have been better if it burned," he commented wryly.

For my part, I could not imagine a more immense gratitude. The home where I lived had not burned to the ground, and my possessions endured. At the same time, I had that eerie, poignant feeling - as I'd had just two years before in the Loma Prieta Earthquake - how one can lose everything at any time, how precarious it all is, how illusory our sense of security, and yet how precious our lives.

I began unloading possessions after that - bit by bit, I stopped being a consumer and began simplifying my life to what I really only need. And sometimes, I often think if it came to it, I could make do with just my backpack and a good book.

Loving my sister Cynthia

The funny thing about premonitions is you don’t really know when they will come true – or if they ever will. But somehow you have an eerie sense that it’s just a matter of time. And then when one does come true, the unexpected gift can be in learning just how much you love someone.

Today, I am grateful that I followed an instinct to come to the family home in Los Angeles for the Memorial Day weekend. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have been present when a recurring premonition I’ve had about my sister, Cynthia, came true.

An attorney who helps place foster children in permanent adoptive homes, my sister is a long distance marathon runner with a strong, vital heart. But lately, I’ve had this sense that one of her morning runs would come to an abrupt halt due to an issue with her heart.

This premonition may have just been an idea that came from as logical a place as knowing that our mother has had heart issues all her life, so there’s a genetic basis. Or it may have stemmed from numerous stories of runners who suffer sudden cardiac death, as with a former colleague at Pettit & Martin who was also a fit long distance runner. Or maybe it’s from believing that my sister sometimes pushes herself in ways that seem too far to me.

The doctors at St. Joseph’s Hospital know it was a supraventricular tachycardia – her heart was racing at 279 beats per minute when it should be between 60 and 80 – and are running comprehensive tests to pinpoint the precise cause and treat it so she can resume her active life as a runner.

And Cynthia is still trying to wrap her arms around the fact that she very nearly lost her life in cardiac arrest. She keeps returning to the moment at the Harvard-Westlake track, after she’d exercised up and down on the stairs, when she felt shortness of breath and pains in her chest. A trainer who happened to be nearby admiringly asked how many times she’d gone up and down those stairs, but she said actually she wasn’t feeling so well, and could he help. His name was Mike, and he was the one who called the family home to alert us to an emergency. When another runner came by to take my sister’s pulse, only to find it was racing unnaturally, while my sister was having more and more difficulty breathing, Mike said, “I’m calling 911.”

Cynthia says the first responders saved her life. They were there in 30 seconds. It took three times in the ambulance before they slowed the racing of her heart while communicating with medics in ER. “That’s when I knew it was bad,” she told me from her hospital bed.

Meanwhile, I was sitting with my feet in a pedicure tub down the street when our mother called my cell phone to say she’d gotten a strange message from someone named Mike. “I think something’s happened to Cindy,” she yelped.

Immediately that sense of a premonition unfolding kicked in, along with the queer calm I always possess in a crisis. I told my mother to remain calm until I could extricate myself from the pedicure and get home to make calls. When I did, Mike – a stranger who was our sole source of information– answered his phone to provide efficient details of what had happened at the track, but he didn’t know where they’d taken her because he wasn’t family. When I called 911 and provided her name, they were able to track her to St. Joseph’s and we drove immediately to the emergency room.

I may always be the strong, calm one in a crisis, but when I saw my sister on the gurney in ER, looking up with her tan, thin face and a brave smile, as a medic named Melissa held her hand, the tears just started rolling down my face and I was powerless to control them.

“Ah, don’t cry,” she said to me while reaching for my hand to squeeze. The shocking reality of what had happened to her hadn’t yet kicked in, but I knew right then I’d very nearly lost her and my heart was overflowing with gratitude that I hadn’t. Memorial Day will now always have a special significance as the day I didn’t lose the sister I’ll always love a little more than before.

Fifty is the New 30

“Like the morning sun you come and like the wind you go - ain’t no time to hate.”
- Grateful Dead lyrics, “Uncle John’s Band”



Fifty is the new 30, said my local best friend, Stacey Powells, who helped organize a party for me at Rafters in Mammoth on Wednesday. She is also responsible for the Princess cup pictured above. Since I met her in June, 2008, she has taken to calling me "Princess Catherine." I really have no idea why since she is the Leo.

Stacey turned 50 last July but almost didn’t make it because of a diagnosis of cancer the prior year.

“I feel very lucky to have been on the planet for 50 years,” she told me. “Being 50 is the new 30 for me. I take every day that I wake up above ground as a blessing.”

Though I didn’t have a mid-life crisis at 40 and the idea of having one at 30 is ridiculous, I admit I began freaking out a bit after turning 49 last Valentine’s Day and it’s been an angst-ridden, tick-tock roller coaster ride ever since.

For it is impossible at the half-century mark not to look in equal measure at a past lived with few regrets and a future yet to be shaped, and to know that unless I live to be 101 like my beloved great-grandmother, I am more than halfway through this amazing adventure called life.

On the other hand, my life could have been taken 17 years ago when, on July 1, 1993, a lone gunman armed with automatic assault weapons entered the law offices where I worked in San Francisco and took the lives of eight people and then his own.

As fate would have it, I wasn’t on any of the floors where the shootings took place that afternoon. But a 30-year-old law intern from Colorado, David Sutcliffe, with whom I’d ridden on the elevator after lunch, was killed - just an hour after telling me how he looked forward to exploring the beautiful city during his summer stay.

That massacre – something none of us woke up considering as a possibility for the day – was a critical awakening for all who survived. None woke up thinking, “I might die today.”

So when the SWAT teams liberated us from our hiding places and police completed their interviews, we headed out of the offices where we embraced everyone we knew with feelings in our hearts that I can’t put a word to today.

“If you have any dreams, wrap your arms around them now. Don’t waste time,” said one attorney who eulogized his friend John Scully, 28, during the private memorial organized by the firm.

In time, the surge of collective emotionalism dimmed, but the meaning we would take from the senseless acts of violence that day would endure – to live life mindfully and gratefully, to practice kindness, to follow your bliss.

“We don’t all get that kind of a life lesson,” my mother says today. “Life is so precious.”

The following year, I backpacked over Paiute Pass into spectacular Humphreys Basin for several days. Even though the grueling plunge down Pine Pass on the way out nearly destroyed my knees, my dream of finding a way to live in the Eastern Sierra was planted then.

But first, I left the legal field and pursued my long-standing dream of being a writer. Then both came true two years ago when I moved to Mammoth.

Now, as I look forward to celebrating my birthday with mother, sisters and friends at my favorite desert inn near Joshua Tree, I’ve reached an equanimity about this half-century milestone. Every day above ground has long been a blessing, and I have committed to remaining young at heart and enjoying all the summers of my life.

“Fifty is the new whatever you want it to be,” Stacey wrote in her birthday card for me.

A slightly revised version of this story ran in my "Cat's Clause" column in the Mammoth Times on Feb. 12.

***

And now for some photos from the party.

Here's everyone. And my apologies to some folks who didn't wind up on the invite list. And Anita Hatter is forgiven for bailing at the last minute. From the left: Sue Morning, Randee Levin, Lara Kirkner, Jarrett Smith (in purple), Tiffany Henschel, Lynne Blanche (February 11 birthday, and giver of my fabulous fur hat), Neal (Randee's husband), Dan and Stacey hidden behind me, Andy Rostar, Erick Sugimura, Wendi Grasseschi.


Here I am with Sue Morning, who celebrated her birthday on January 29 so I made her wear the tiara Stacey got for me. Sue is one of Mammoth's best photographers and has a heart of gold.


Some of my Mammoth Times colleagues (with Tiffany taking the photo): Andy Rostar's hand holding champagne on far left, Erick Sugimura (an excellent copy editor and the patience to tolerate even my silliest jokes), Sue on the phone (always needed by someone in her family), and me looking a bit hammered though I really wasn't. Champagne courtesy of Rafters' owner Jim Demetriades, who brought over yummy Italian pink bubbly. Thank you, Jim!


And here's Andy, production manager for the Times and a terrific colleague. He is also a fellow Deadhead and, along with Tiffany, gave me my very first loaded iPod. Wow!

Sunrise at home, late December, 2009

This photo does something for my soul. And when I wake up in the morning and turn my head towards the window after first opening my eyes, and this is what I see, I am so grateful!

Woman Fights Back After 2002 Assault on Mammoth Mountain

Would-be rapist gets 23 years

By Catherine Billey
Mammoth Times Staff Writer

This story ran on the front page of the January 8, 2010, Mammoth Times and on the back page of its sister paper, the Inyo Register, on January 9, 2010

It was the cry for help heard by two skiers on Mammoth Mountain’s White Bark Ridge that saved Cecile Zimmermann’s life on Jan. 20, 2002 after she was injected with an overdose of the tranquilizer ketamine from behind by would-be rapist, Steven William Neff.

“What he didn’t count on was that she would fight and some skiers would come to her rescue so he had to snowboard away,” explained Detective Jesse Gorham of the Mammoth Lakes Police Department in a recent interview. He handled the long-running investigation after Sgt. Karen Smart’s initial intake.

“I have no doubt that if he had raped her and no one had come along she would have been found dead in the trees.”

As it was, Zimmermann – who is today pursuing a dual master’s degree in Communications and Business Administration at Johns Hopkins University – nearly died of respiratory and cardiac failure after her rescue on the slopes.

“Had it not been for Mammoth’s emergency workers, she would have expired,” Gorham said. “They used a breathing apparatus on her. She was on it at the hospital before the drug metabolized out of her body and she regained her ability to breathe.”

While would-be rapist Neff fled that January day to what he likely believed was obscurity, Zimmermann’s lightning instinct before she lost consciousness ensured that a piece of evidence – a ski glove – was left behind that would ultimately link him via DNA to future sex crimes and facilitate his conviction and sentencing last November to 23 years in prison.

“What happened was I saw the syringe in his hand, so I realized he wasn’t wearing the glove,” Zimmermann said in a Jan. 5 phone interview from Washington, D.C. “When he was about to reach for the glove, I stepped on it and held on to it until the paramedics got there. At that point, I was passed out.”

She recalls that something ferocious kicked in when she saw her attacker reach for the glove. “I think it was just one of those things where I thought, ‘you did something to me, now I’m going to keep your glove.”’

Zimmermann is what Gorham describes as “a righteous victim.” “I’m very proud of Ceci. She’s an inspirational lady. She’s a neat person.”

Zimmermann explained that she is “glad” it happened to her rather than someone else. “Because I wouldn’t want anyone else to go through this. Who knows what he would have done to someone else? Maybe it was my reaction that scared him off,” she said.

Her intentional taking of the glove, along with MLPD sleuth work, eventually connected Neff to a string of felony sex crimes in the Santa Barbara area. The MLPD assisted the Santa Barbara Police and Sheriff’s Departments and arrested Neff on March 2, 2007.

Today, Gorham is proud of the MLPD’s role in putting Neff behind bars. “Essentially, it’s a story about a lot of diligent police work,” he said.

“The glove was almost miraculous in a sense because we didn’t normally get DNA out of gloves in 2002. But I said I wanted the thing sent to Fresno for DNA analysis, and lo and behold, we got DNA out of it.”

It didn’t match anything in the DNA registry in 2002, however, so it went into CODIS, the criminal offender DNA database, and the Mammoth case went cold.

Four years later, however, on Dec. 5, 2006, Gorham received a notification letter of a match from CODIS, linking Neff to the DNA sample from the glove.

With that hit, the case was reopened and Gorham began working with Marty Ensign and later Jaycee Hunter, both of the Santa Barbara police. “I said I want everything on Neff,” Gorham explained.

Neff sold sports supplements from his base in Santa Barbara and often came up to Mammoth for snowboarding. He liked to hang out with college kids, according to Gorham. “He was not a bad looking guy, very athletic, kind of a Ted Bundy type.”

But Gorham had to establish Neff’s physical presence in Mammoth along with the glove on the weekend of the Zimmermann assault. He got that through a search warrant on Neff’s credit cards and utilizing what he describes as Mammoth Mountain’s excellent database to cross check his VISA card.

“He purchased a meal at Mammoth Mountain and a lift ticket. Then he also had to purchase some gas down at Giggle Springs in Bishop, all from the 19th through 21st of 2002,” Gorham said. “I clamped it on both sides of a vise.”

Gorham also has words of praise for Santa Barbara prosecutor Ron Zonen, who had to coordinate numerous witnesses in the case from a woman in France to an ex-girlfriend in Germany to Zimmermann and another woman in Washington State. “He did an absolutely phenomenal job,” Gorham said.

Two of Neff’s felony sex crimes put him behind bars, though it was a burglary that tripped the DNA sample.

Gorham said he sensed from the start that what happened to Zimmermann on Mammoth Mountain wasn’t an isolated case. “I thought it was serial even before we knew it because it was so bizarre,” he explained.

With the involvement of the Santa Barbara District Attorney’s offices, all agencies pooled their resources to obtain an arrest warrant for Neff. By that time, the Mammoth case could not be prosecuted as the statute of limitations had expired, but Zimmermann was called to testify as a material witness in both trials.

“I’m very happy with the conviction,” she said. “I’ve never wished ill on anyone, but I just don’t think there is any rehabilitating for this person.”

The trauma wound up being a life-changing event for Zimmermann, now 41. “I pretty much flat lined,” she recalls of that January day. “It gave me a different perspective on people and life.”

But she refuses to let someone like Neff make her “wary of friendly people.” It could have happened even if she had been skiing side by side with friends rather than alone below Chair 12, she added. “No one expects any of this.”

Realizing she had been very lucky not only in surviving the assault but throughout her entire life, she hastened back to school to complete her undergraduate education and take advantage of her second chance.

“I wanted to do something that would better myself and others in the future. Up to that point in my life, I felt that I had accomplished everything,” she said.

She met someone in foster care that inspired her on her current path. “ I just didn’t want to take anything for granted at that point,” she said. “My long term goal at this time is to start a nonprofit organization for kids who are aging out of the foster care system.”

She admitted she has not been back to Mammoth Mountain since the assault. “But honestly, I haven’t had the time,” she added. “I will once I’m done with school. I’ll come back there and get back on the horse, as they say.”