Anna Dethlefs

Leaving her home because of a wildfire while managing nine horses, 12 cows, 13 chickens, three goats, and two alpacas is not something junior Anna Dethlefs had ever imagined doing after school. Originally, she had planned on watching a movie with a friend.

But wildfires do not wait, and suddenly, Dethlefs was on her way to stay at her family’s second home in Happy Valley.

“My mom comes in, and she was like, ‘pack up, we’re leaving,’” Dethlefs said. “It was kind of just grab everything and leave now.”

Dethlefs didn’t even know what to pack. She remembered thinking, “I’ll just pretend that this is a sleepover,” she said. “[But] my mom was like, ‘grab everything like we’re not going to get the house again.’”

Dethlefs said that it took about an hour and a half for her family to pack everything and leave, but over the next few days, they returned to the house a few times for birth certificates, social security papers, photo albums, their other car, and other valuable items.

What was especially difficult to manage, Dethlefs said, was the animals. The Dethlefs family has two trailers, which could hold five of their horses. Then, some friends brought another trailer to get the rest of the horses. The alpacas also came with the family.

“We couldn’t take [the cows] with us,” Dethlefs said. The cows were let free because it was “too hard to tame them, [and there were] too many of them to move.” Because of this, her family opened the gates up, so if there was a fire on the property, the cows would have space to move.

Dethlefs said that she couldn’t see any fires from her house, but seeing the ash and smoke was enough. With half of their 140-acre property on level two evacuation notice and the other half on level three, they decided to leave.

“All of the ash looked like snow on the ground,” Dethlefs said. “The firefighters were going around and checking off all the places to make sure all of the people were out.”

Dethlefs said that a number of their friends brought bulldozers to create a firewall of dirt to keep the fires contained. She also said that there was one house down the street that caught on fire, but it happened so quickly that they didn’t get a warning.

“They just grabbed their animals, and then sat in the river in their backyard until the firefighters came to rescue them,” Dethlefs said. She said that it took two hours for the firefighters to rescue them safely.

Dethlefs got her driver’s license two weeks before evacuating, so she drove her mother’s Range Rover by herself. Her clothes were piled in the back, along with her cat. “I was not processing everything, and I was kind of just confused,” she said.

She hit traffic when she got to Harbour Bridge, which is an area that many families were evacuating through. As she drove, her sister Alicia was on the car’s Bluetooth phone, and Dethlefs was talking her through how to help their mom with the stress of everything that was going on.

In the meantime, Dethlefs’ father was in Pendleton for work, and since the reception was spotty there, he didn’t know about the evacuation until he had come back home.

When she got to the evacuation site, Dethlefs realized that she didn’t pack the things she needed to take a shower, because she originally thought she was going to return home the next day. “[But] then I went to the store that night and I was like, ‘well, I guess we’re not going to go home anytime soon.’”

Dethlefs was also sleeping on a pool floatie in a bedroom while she was evacuated, because there wasn’t a bed to sleep on.

Dethlefs said that because of the chaos between packing, evacuating, and eventually arriving at her family’s second home, nothing really hit her emotionally until two days into the evacuation.

“[At first,] I thought it was a joke,” Dethlefs said. “I was like, ‘man, everybody is just playing with me, we’re literally going to go back the next day, why is everyone freaking out?’”

But after that, Dethlefs said, her mom told her that “‘we’re not going to go back… I don’t know if we’re going to get the house again.’”

“I was kind of just sad because I love this place so much,” she said.

Despite all of this, Dethlefs also had classwork to complete during the two weeks that she was evacuated, and that was at the forefront of her mind at the time instead of her emotions. “I didn’t have much time to process my emotions because I was doing school,” Dethlefs said. “It was kind of one thing after the next, so I never had time to process it.”

Dethlefs and her family returned home two weeks ago on Thursday, after school ended. After counting all of the animals, and taking multiple trips back and forth, everyone made it home safely.

“We have to give [the horses] a few days, like maybe a week or two, so that their lungs can repair, so they don’t get hurt [from the smoke,]” Dethlefs said. “They were all kind of really sad.”

When she finally returned home, Dethlefs laid down in her bed for “the biggest nap in the whole world.”

“I am just really happy to be home,” she said. “It was a breath of relief.”