‘It Looked Like an Atomic Bomb’: Surveying the Bootleg Fire’s Devastation

BEATTY, Ore. — Marc Valens washed his hands in the rubble of what was once his home, in the bowl where he used to make salad. There was something almost normal about it all: the clink and clank of lids and pots as he stood at the still-intact sink and stove.

But any sense of normalcy was an illusion. Much of his home and belongings were gone, swallowed up by the largest wildfire currently burning in America, the Bootleg Fire in southern Oregon.

The frame of a chair sat amid the ash where the living room used to be. Except for the tall spire of the tan-rock chimney, the outdoor sink and stove and a few other things, there was little else. The rest was rubble and ash — even the aluminum rims of his car melted, leaving a silver puddle in the dirt.

“It looked like an atomic bomb,” said Valens, 72.

The Bootleg Fire has consumed a wide swath of southern Oregon forest — 413,000 acres, an area the size of Portland, Seattle, Sacramento, California, and New York City combined. It has burned since July 6 and remains only 53% contained. The fire, the third-largest blaze in Oregon since 1900, has mostly burned in a remote, sparsely populated area in and near the Fremont-Winema National Forest. Only 161 homes have been destroyed, a low number for a wildfire that immense.

But for Valens and others who have lost their homes, destruction is destruction, regardless of the scale.

On a recent afternoon, Valens walked slowly with his hands clasped behind his back, assessing what remained with his wife, Anne Golden. He kicked aside some of the wreckage on a charred sled.

“I think it’s still usable,” he said.

Valens has been sleeping in a tent near the rubble, returning home as soon as evacuation orders were lifted. The outhouse burned, so a neighbor brought him a new one. His brother brought him a small trailer.

“Now I can shower,” Valens explained.

Valens and Golden lived in the house at Moondance Ranch for 50 years, a short drive from Beatty, an unincorporated town about 40 miles north of the California state line. They divided their time there and at their second home in the city of Ashland. He is a retired lawyer who spent a lifetime specializing in environmental and Native American cases. She works as a business consultant and serves on the board of a local hospital.

“This is my hippie van,” Valens said as he toured his property, pointing to the burned-out hulk of his 1960s Chevrolet camper van. “When I turned 21, I took a year driving across the West Coast, Canada, down through New England to the Blue Ridge Mountains.”

Up close amid the rubble, there was no pattern or logic to what survived and what did not. The picnic table on a patch of grass emerged unharmed, pristinely and surreally spared from the flames. On the fireplace was a small ceramic souvenir — a miniature bus with a demon on top.

“That was a little ceramic I brought back from Mexico on one of my trips,” Valens said. “That little devil survived.”

Earlier this summer, heat waves gripped the Pacific Northwest. In Portland, temperatures reached as high as 116 degrees, and a majority of the state has been primed to burn while undergoing severe drought. The past few weeks have felt especially chaotic, as climate change has helped make extreme weather and extreme disaster commonplace in the region.

“West of the Mississippi we have droughts, fires and smoke, and east of the Mississippi there’s flooding,” Golden said. “It’s biblical. It just feels like the plague and everything else.”

In the aftermath of the fire, Valens and Golden are uncertain whether they and others who lost their homes will receive any state or federal aid. In a meeting with President Joe Biden and a group of governors on Friday, Gov. Kate Brown of Oregon asked the president for flexibility in using federal disaster-relief money in sparsely populated areas, which are currently ineligible for Federal Emergency Management Agency funding, a spokesman said.

Valens said fire insurance had been difficult to obtain for him and other homeowners in the area. “We couldn’t get nearly as much insurance as we wanted,” he said, adding that he was able to insure only about 20% of his ranch months before the fire.

In 2019, Valens was diagnosed with a rare form of prostate cancer. As he toured the wreckage, he paused to sit down several times, the cocktail of drugs helping to keep the cancer in remission making him tired at times. He was quiet and contemplative.

“The lesson I learned with cancer is that it’s a waste of time worrying about what you should have done,” he said. “And that’s where we are with the fire. What do we have now? What resources are left?”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .