A Premonition Led Her to Prepare for the Camp Fire

PARADISE, California — The fence outside Mary Rae Nieland’s home features a large, silvery curiosity that resembles an amoeba with a squiggly tail.

People mistake it for yard art. It’s not. It’s all that remains of two snowmobiles burned on her property last year in the worst wildfire ever to tear through California.

Nieland, 68, lives in a 1940s farmhouse on an acre and a quarter studded with red oaks and Ponderosa pine. She keeps fruit trees and nut trees, and her flower garden — azaleas, camellias and roses — is a riot of color.

In every direction, in places where neighbors lived, there are empty lots. At a lot across the street, there’s a giant heap of sawed logs, awaiting a trip to the mill.

But Nieland’s home still stands. It was spared. She had a premonition that a wildfire was coming, so she took precautions.

Her antiques business in Paradise also survived, though it was damaged by smoke and soot. Attic Treasures is a 10,000-square-foot emporium where vendors sell vintage jewelry, collectibles, furniture, saddlery — things from antique toys to horse blankets.

The store reopened in January, after it was cleaned up and mopped up and electricity and water were restored.

Post-traumatic stress

Nieland herself survived a harrowing escape from burning Paradise, and her health suffered. “I’m really good now,” she says. “All the trauma is behind me.”

For months after the Camp Fire, her hands trembled. She would try to make a phone call but forget a familiar number. “Fire amnesia,” she calls the mental fog, remembering, “I couldn’t think straight for five or six months — I felt like I had Alzheimer’s.”

A recurring nightmare made sleep fitful: She was lost in a strange place, trying to get home.

The summer and early-autumn days that preceded the inferno had been very warm. It barely rained. Canyons around Paradise were overgrown and tinder-dry.

Every summer the state’s stubborn drought or near-drought conditions had Nieland fearful of a fire and asking herself, Will it be this year or next year?

“This is going to sound weird,” she says, seated on a bench outside her store. “I just knew the fire was coming months before it came. I was obsessed with it. So I started preparing.”

Leading up to the cataclysm, the electrical utility warned that power would be cut off if winds were high. The alert prompted Nieland to pick up the pace of watering down her home and orchard. She had three truckloads of decorative rock placed around her home, to create a buffer zone to ward off flames and radiant heat.

She ran sprinklers so often that, for a couple of months, her monthly water bill soared as high as $190, up from about $65.