GREENFIELD – After decades of living with the increasing threat of forest fires lighting the horizon of their California ranch property, Terry and Wendy Kennedy took refuge in their former home in Franklin County.
The Kennedys bought a house on Vernon Street in Greenfield for about $ 275,000 after seeing the house listed on Facebook Marketplace during their overland trip to Massachusetts. Wendy said they originally expected they would have to rent temporarily, but they took the opportunity to buy the house when they saw it and pointed to the current state of competition in the nationwide housing market.
“We only moved in a week ago,” said Terry, who was sitting in the kitchen of her mostly unfurnished house.
Much of their belongings are still with moving companies, the couple said. Construction workers and landscapers went in and out of the house doing the finishing touches while Terry and Wendy sat in their kitchen reading photos on their iPhone of the numerous forest fires they witnessed on the west coast since the early 1990s.
Wendy and Terry are both licensed psychologists. Terry lived in Colrain in the 1970s and 1980s, and Wendy grew up in Peabody. She attended Fitchburg State University and “kept moving west” before ending up in Franklin County. Terry, who studied psychology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the 1970s, said he was “really interested in consciousness work,” and that interest is part of what moved him to move to Mendocino County, California.
“I read this interview in New Age Magazine from Boston, and it was with this Jungian psychoanalyst in California that people were training,” he recalls, referring to one of the two major psychotherapy schools named after the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. were named. “So I went out to study with him.”
Both Wendy and Terry were licensed in California and set up private practices. Wendy is a licensed marriage and family therapist while Terry is a clinical social worker. Both are now licensed in Massachusetts and hope to open their own practices again if they can find suitable office space.
They lived on a 40-acre ranch in Willits, a town in Mendocino County, California. Even though she didn’t farm, Wendy said her 7-year-old Pomeranian Mia loved the place.
“It was wonderful. … Mendocino County is like a resort district, but now the environment has collapsed, ”said Terry. “It’s all dried up. The lakes have dried up, the rivers have become a trickle. We had fire so close to our house that hot ash fell on the roof. We had fires five miles away. ”
During their stay in California, the couple was evacuated several times due to forest fires. They said they drove in the middle of the day with their headlights on to retreat through blackened clouds of smoke. Twice, once in 2019, they were evacuated to sleep on the sofa in Terry’s office in Ukiah, California.
Wendy remembered driving around the neighborhoods and seeing the aftermath of fires and how some homes were destroyed while neighboring homes were barely touched by the flames. They had noted a deterioration in fire conditions in recent years as heat waves, droughts, and dry thunderstorms increase with climate change beyond other human causes.
Last week, a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a scientific body convened by the United Nations, sounded like a “red code for humanity” stating that humans are “clearly” responsible for the effects of climate change. Two weeks ago, the local Franklin County Fire Department warned residents that the haze and faint smell of smoke in the air were due to the jet stream that carried smoke from the wildfires in western and Canada.
The Kennedys cited the 2018 “campfire” which was reportedly lit by equipment from Pacific Gas & Electric, burning much of Paradise, California, and killing 85 people. It is considered to be one of the deadliest and most devastating forest fires in California history. As recently as this month, the Dixie Fire burned more than 480,000 acres and more than 400 residential and commercial buildings in Greenville, California. It is now considered to be the second most destructive fire in California history. The fire is again believed to have been caused by Pacific Gas & Electric equipment.
Terry shared pictures of “Fires in the Sky” when a flame burned from her property in California over mountains on the horizon in October 2017 and pictures the next day after the fire burned down the mountainside and through the neighboring town of Redwood Valley. The Redwood Valley Fire destroyed more than 36,000 acres in Mendocino County and destroyed more than 540 homes and buildings.
“People died, people fled their homes in the middle of the night,” Terry said. “I still treat people with PTSD who have lost their homes and their neighbors. This is one of my specialties, post-traumatic stress disorder. Lots of people got it from these fires. ”
Wendy said she and Terry not only wanted to escape the threat of forest fires, but also wanted to move because of the noticeable changes in seasonal weather patterns.
“Last year there were six months of summer and six months of winter, with no spring and no autumn,” she says.
While their daughter Azura still lives in Venice, California, the Kennedys said they also moved back to Franklin County to live closer to Terry’s oldest daughter from a previous marriage, Dawn, who also lives in Greenfield.
The Kennedys still have some renovation work to do on their home on Vernon Street, but after just a week they said they are “loving village life again” and enjoying being within walking distance of downtown.
Zack DeLuca can be reached at [email protected] or 413-930-4579.
