Julia Kim Smith

juliakimsmith.com | @juliakimsmith

All too familiar: Julia Kim Smith documents her family’s evacuation in 2017 through text chains and home security footage.

The Evacuation

On October 9, 2017, my parents in Santa Rosa, California were awoken in the middle of the night by pounding on their front door. It was their neighbor, warning them that there was a fast- moving fire coming their way, and they needed to evacuate immediately. Mom and Dad evacuated to my sister and brother-in-law’s house, and, a few hours later, all four of them evacuated to an evacuation center. They did not think much of the fire and thought they would be back in their homes the next day so packed only the bare minimum of essentials–my sister packed a three-pound bag of peppermint patties and dog kibble, her idea of the “essentials.” They later learned that my parents’ house and neighborhood had burned to the ground in the Tubbs Fire. My sister and brother-in-law’s house was badly smoke-damaged and toxic but miraculously still standing while their neighbors’ homes had burned. It would be months before they could re-occupy their home.

I experienced the Tubbs Fire from a distance, from the east coast where I live in Baltimore. I tried to grasp the enormity of the disaster through texts from my sister in the middle of the night, through scrolling news and Twitter feeds, studying fire incident and evacuation maps and satellite photos of the burned neighborhoods, and viewing my parents’ home security camera video. The Evacuation is documentation, a play script transcribed from their home security camera video, of the night my parents evacuated. The dialogue in The Evacuation is fittingly disjointed because the security camera was motion-activated. Perhaps The Evacuation is a way for me, on the other side of the country, to experience some of what my family experienced and lost that night.

My parents were relatively fortunate; they survived. The night of the fire, their neighbor pounded on their door until they woke up; they called my sister who lived only five-minutes away; my-brother-in-law came to their house and helped them evacuate in less than an hour, which was fortunate because in less than an hour from the initial security video image, they lost electrical power. We think their house probably burned down around 3am, about an hour after they evacuated. My mom put the Tubbs Fire and its aftermath in perspective for us. She said, “It was better than the war. Nobody helped us during the war. So many people helped us during the fire.”

Sometime after the Tubbs Fire, I signed up for Nixle alerts for Sonoma County, Indianapolis, Chicago–wherever we had family–and packed a go bag for my family in Baltimore. We would probably never need it, but I felt better knowing that it was there. I had forgotten about the bag until the start of the 2020 pandemic when I thought to open it and discovered ten 3M N95 masks and a bottle of Purell. I felt like I had struck gold.

Perhaps the people who live through calamities, like natural disasters, wars, diasporas, pandemics, would rather forget, but I want to know: What did they do? How did they survive? What do they do? How do they survive?