An Essay by Eric Picard
In October of 2018 I was living on the West Coast, juggling a fairly complex life. I was working in Oakland, CA for Pandora (the Music Company, not the Jeweler), but officially living outside of Seattle, WA. I was commuting weekly. Also, in July we’d just purchased a house back in my hometown of Newport, Rhode Island. It was a beautiful old Victorian that needed some TLC. The idea was to have a foothold for a future return home, and a place to stay on visits in the meantime.
My wife, Erynn, was also working in San Francisco, but she had just gotten a job offer from a company based in Blacksburg, Virginia. We were contemplating living on separate coasts for a few years, which, as you can imagine, wasn’t exactly a thrilling prospect. But it was a good opportunity and we were ‘game,’ so in mid-October, I flew into Dulles to meet her, and we drove to Blacksburg to look at apartments and houses to rent for her new job. It was a nice weekend, and we had great weather. On Sunday, I had to fly back to Oakland for work, so we were driving back to Dulles.
Now, back in my 20s, I had done an amazing road trip with my close friend, former college professor, and mentor, Bart Parker. Bart taught photography at the University of Rhode Island, and he and his wife, Rita, were driving from Providence down to New Orleans for a conference that I was also attending. They invited me to drive down with them. I couldn’t pass that up.
So there I was, crammed into the back of Bart’s Nissan 300ZX — if you’ve ever been in one, you know the back seat is barely more than a suggestion — with a slowly disappearing pie on my lap because, well, it wouldn’t fit anywhere else. On the way down, Bart and Rita decided to do the Skyline Drive. For those who don’t know, the Skyline Drive is a stunning 105-mile two-lane road that runs along the top of a ridgeline of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the Shenandoah National Park. It was built as a WPA project during the Great Depression. Imagine that you’re winding along thousands of feet in the air, driving along a ridgeline with views in both directions for hundreds of miles. We had perfect weather, and I’ll never forget it.
Bart had died five years before this trip with Erynn, and I had such fond memories of that drive that I really wanted to share it with her. Erynn is one of the greatest road-trippers of all time, and I always wished she could’ve met Bart. Taking her on the Skyline Drive, even if only for a short stretch, felt like the next best thing. So, I asked her if she’d be up for a slight detour on our way back to Dulles. It was a beautiful day, much like the one I had experienced with Bart and Rita. She was reluctant at first, but we had the time, and so we did it.
Things went wrong right from the start, and I’ll take the blame for it. I was so excited to show Erynn this iconic drive and to relive my memories with Bart that I wasn’t paying attention to how she was feeling. She asked to stop for coffee, I pushed us to get onto the drive. She then asked to stop at a bakery we were driving past, I shrugged her suggestion off. In hindsight, I was a bit of a jerk about it. Thirty minutes into the drive, we were both sitting there in silence, regretting the whole thing. The views were spectacular, but inside the car, it was all stewing frustration. I was dejected, feeling like I was blowing this opportunity for connection and amazing memories.
The drive was stunning, a high ridgeline thousands of feet up with views off into the distance in both directions. But it didn’t matter. We were both in our own heads, not talking. We made a sharp turn and suddenly our phones started blowing up.
We’d had no cell service for a while, so when we finally got back into range, we both got dozens notifications of missed calls and voicemail messages. The first voicemail was from our daughter Elizabeth, who was taking a gap year, and had just moved into our Newport house with some friends. It went: “Hi guys, I don’t want to alarm you, but there’s been a small fire at the house. The Fire Department is here, and I think it’s all under control.”
Okay, no big deal, right? She sounded calm. I mean, “small fire,” “under control” — that sounds manageable. But then we listened to the next message: “Hi guys, the fire is a little worse than we thought. It’s really windy, and the fire department has evacuated us and is fighting the fire. Please call.”
Not so manageable anymore.
Then about a dozen messages that said: “Please call when you get this,” a call from one of our other daughters on the West Coast saying, “Call Elizabeth, there’s a fire at the house” and another from Elizabeth, “It’s getting bad.” We had no service again, and couldn’t call her, but we sent texts out to her and several friends in Newport. Then a text message came in from a friend that had video showing our house surrounded by fire trucks, with flames shooting fifty feet into the air.
We pulled over as soon as we got enough stable cell service to call Elizabeth. Thankfully, everyone was okay. The tenant’s cat was missing, but all the humans and my daughter’s cat were accounted for. Our house was in serious trouble. We told her we’d be there as soon as we could get there. It was around 3 PM, and nine hours later, we were in Newport. I’d canceled my flight back to Oakland, and since we couldn’t book another one to Providence, we just drove straight through.
As we drove up to the house, my first thought was, “Well, it doesn’t look so bad.” The facade was still standing, and from the street, it just looked a little messy. But then, as we got closer, I realized that the reflection of the moon was not a reflection — I could see the moon through the window of the third-floor gable. The entire third floor was gone behind that facade.
We rented a room for the night, and the next morning, at 7:30 AM, we were back at the house to assess the damage. I walked into the backyard and saw a firefighter standing there, staring up at the house. He looked familiar, and when I got closer, I realized it was Bobby Dufault, a guy I’d gone to school with.
He said, “Wait, this is your house?”
Turned out he’d been in charge of the scene the day before. We caught up for a minute, and then he told me what happened. The fire had started on the second-floor deck. Our third-floor tenant had been using a gas grill and left it unattended for a few minutes, just as a windstorm rolled in. The wind blew a jet of flame from the grill about fifteen feet into the side of the house, and that was all it took. <Note: don’t put grills on decks, I’ve done the research for you. It’s way riskier than you realized.> At one point Bobby said, “you’ve got the balloon construction” as if that was explanation enough. Like, “you’ve got the cancer” or “you’ve got the sugars.”
Then Bobby got emotional, which caught me off guard, he’s a big guy and a burly firefighter. “Your daughter,” he said, “she’s incredible. By the time I got there, she had already unloaded one fire extinguisher and sent a friend to grab another from the kitchen. She was finishing up with the second one when we got there. I’ve never seen someone handle an emergency with that kind of composure. She didn’t panic — she was totally calm.”
He teared up a little. “Honestly, I’d take her on one of my crews any day.”
I’ll admit, it was a proud moment, even in the midst of the chaos.
Bobby explained that while Elizabeth had almost put the fire out, the wind was relentless. The fire had gotten into the roof, and once it was in there, it spread too fast for anyone to stop it. The fire department had to pull everyone out, and the house was lost.
Standing there, looking at what was left, it was hard to process. The entire third floor was gone, most of the interior of the second floor was charred, and the first floor was waterlogged. There was a waterline about three feet high on the walls.
We eventually decided to try and save the house, which, in hindsight, was a mistake. It ended up costing us a lot more to rebuild than if we had just knocked it down and started from scratch. But at the time, it felt like the right thing to do. And we’re super proud of the work we did, and that we managed to resuscitate that house. I can tell you there were moments though, like one night standing in the basement with snow falling on our heads, where we had serious second thoughts.
After our tour of the house we did what one does after touring your destroyed house, we went to Home Depot to pick up some supplies. As we were walking through the aisles, Erynn spotted this massive plastic dragon on display. It was one of those animatronic ones that roared when you walked by. She looked at me and said, “We’re buying that dragon and putting it on the roof of the house.”
Who was I to argue? We bought the dragon, and when we got it home, we stuck it on the roof of the burned-out house. It became the talk of the neighborhood. We got in the paper and on the local news for the fire, and then we had it all again with the dragon. That’s when we started calling it “The Dragon House.”
As the months wore on, we used part of the insurance settlement to put a down payment on another house in Newport so we’d have a place to live while we rebuilt. Financially, it was good timing, but more importantly, it gave us a place to be during COVID. When the pandemic hit, we had somewhere to shelter, and some of our adult kids even moved back from the West Coast to ride out the lockdown with us. Three of our four kids now live in Newport, and they’re renting the other house from us at a slightly subsidized rate. In a way, that fire brought us all back together.
Looking back, it’s strange to say, but that fire — while devastating — ended up being one of the best things that ever happened to us. It forced us to make decisions we wouldn’t have otherwise made, and it brought our family closer than we could have imagined.
Oh, and a quick public service announcement: If you own your own house, make sure your homeowners insurance covers you for replacement value, not for the value of your mortgage. It doesn’t cost much more, and it would have been great if we’d had it when we had the fire. Learn from our mistakes.
Eric Picard 