REDWOOD VALLEY, Calif. _ I drove as far as I could on Sweetland Road, a private dirt lane up a mountain in Redwood Valley northeast of Ukiah.
When I came upon two incinerated vehicles _ Jon and Sara Shepherd's cars _ I got out and walked the rest of the way to the smoldering remains of the home the Shepherds built two years ago a mile and a half from the main road in this sparsely populated part of Mendocino County.
After all the catastrophic fire scenes last week in Northern California _ the scorched neighborhoods, the blackened fields, the desperate evacuees _ I was still stunned by how unspeakably sad it was to come upon a perfectly intact black San Francisco Giants cap, sitting in the middle of the road.
It belonged to 14-year-old Kai Shepherd, who burned to death in this spot, yards from his home, early Monday morning.
As the Shepherds _ Kai, his parents and older sister _ frantically tried to drive to safety, their cars caught fire halfway down the mountain, forcing them to flee on foot.
It is hard to imagine their terror. Hurricane-force winds pushed a wall of fire, smoke and burning embers up their hill in a matter of minutes. On foot and unprotected, the four were soon overcome.
Kai's mother, Sara, and sister, Kressa, were saved by a neighbor, Paul Hanssen, who had survived the firestorm by locking himself in a metal trailer that he'd pushed against rocks on his property.
About 5:30 Monday morning, after Hanssen emerged, he heard the cries of the two women, both severely burned and clinging to life. They had been on the ground, incapacitated, for hours. He asked where Kai and his father were. "They both said they didn't know," Hanssen told me.
Hanssen called 911. Another miracle: He got through.
"He got water for them from their water heater, and squeezed it into their mouths with a towel," said Mindi Ramos, Sara's sister. "He held them when they got cold. He assured them that help was coming. Kressa told him, 'I just want to go to the hospital now.'"
Just before help arrived, Hanssen thought he heard rescuers' radios, so he ran down the road. It was then that he found Kai's body, against an embankment, about 50 feet from his mother and sister.
Paramedics had only one stretcher, which prolonged the rescue. "As soon as they got there," Ramos said, "my sister lost her grip on reality."
After the first stretcher crew took Sara, Hanssen said, "one of the guys had the presence [of mind] to spread the same towel I had been using, to feed them water, on the boy."
Later, he and another neighbor, Efren Turner, walked back up the hill and put a sheet over Kai's body.
"We paused a moment with our hands on him, speaking solemnly, and praying for him," Hanssen said. "We didn't feel right leaving him alone on the road up there. But the coroner/sheriff was there to get him within an hour."
No one knew what had happened to Kai's father. Jon had become separated from his family. When Sara and the kids ran uphill toward their home, he had run down toward the main road, collapsing before he got there.
Because he was closest to the main road, paramedics had found him first.
