“It’s good to be back home,” Mike Hogan says as he looks around his still charred property near Clear Lake.
It’s been 12 months since the Gray fire tore through the area and destroyed Hogan’s world, burning his home to the ground.
The tremendous physical loss also took a medical toll.
“Doctors said the stroke was probably from the stress of the fire and losing everything,” Mike says.
Mike’s recovery from his stroke continues, along with his recovery from the fire.
“I used to have a beautiful yard. It’s coming back pretty well though,” he notes while looking at all that was, but also all he knows will eventually be.
“I’ll get there,” he says in a positive tone. “Starting over. Today’s my 64th birthday and you got to start over at 64? It’s rough.”
Like so many in the Medical Lake community, Mike’s rough road to rebuilding runs through a building on West Lake Street in town which serves as the office of non-profit Reimagine Medical Lake and its President, Gerri Johnson.
“It does take work, but we are very resilient people,” Johnson says as she sits at a conference table inside her office.
Now in their tenth year of operating, Reimagine Medical Lake’s main goal has usually been promoting the town with festivals, parades and farmers markets – the fun things. However on August 18, 2023, as the Gray Fire ripped through town, the focus shifted.
“After the Gray Road Fire, they (residents) started coming and asking, just more than anything, to be a good neighbor. To be a friend they could count on and so that’s what we’ve been doing,” Johnson says.
And that’s been the backbone of Reimagine’s mission over the past year. Fire relief and recovery were written into their bylaws, to make sure through tragedy, their neighbors would have the essentials.
“We were sending them out the door with 4-6 bags of clothes. We were making sure they had food and water,” Johnson recalls of making sure the little things were taken care of for those seeking help. “Replacing every single item in your home. I don’t know if any one of us can wrap our minds around how expensive that is.”
Thanks to a $150,000 donation from Walmart, Reimagine Medical Lake has been able to provide things most people might not think of when recovering from such a disaster. Things like eyeglasses and gas cards for commuting back and forth between their new home and their old home as rebuilding takes place.
In some cases, being that good neighbor simply meant first convincing someone they are worthy of help.
“They’re quickly saying, ‘I’m sure there is someone who needs it more than I do’,” Johnson recalls before offering her usual response. “It doesn’t matter that your saying someone else needs it more, you’re that person today and I know you. You’re going to get back to that place, but today, it’s you.”
It’s a valid response, but for some, like Jan Preeo, asking for help is not something she’s been accustomed to in her nearly 80 years.
“I’ve been a giver all my life. I was a nurse. I was the giver,” Jan says sitting on the patio of her new apartment. “I’ve always been very dependent, but that fire made me dependent.”
The Gray Fire took most everything from her on August 18th. She saved what she could.
“A little bit of everything but not enough of anything,” Jan sums it up.
Perhaps most importantly, Jan was able to save her dog, Buddy, who along with Jan is now learning to life the apartment lifestyle rather than rebuilding her home.
“I haven’t been in a an apartment since I was 20 years old,” Jan smiles. “I kind of like it, actually.”
She calls current situation her “new season”. Jan’s not buried in the past now, but is and has been buried in piles of paperwork from insurance companies.
“I’m not a computer person,” Jan admits. “They kept saying ‘send it via email’. That was horrible for me because I didn’t know how to do that.”
So, Jan reached out to Gerri and Reimagine Medical Lake.
“She became like a town magnet,” Jan described.
“She (Jan) kept coming in and saying ‘I just can’t do this’,” Gerri says. “I was asking, ‘What is it that you need to do?’ (and she’d say) Fill out forms.”
Without hesitation, Gerri grabbed her iPad and got to work with Jan.
“It doesn’t seem like it’s much of anything, but it’s everything,” Jan said, her eyes welling up a bit. “All that paper work, it drowned me. And she helped me. Sorry that makes me teary. She was so good to me.”
Jan added she’s received assistance from multiple organizations in the aftermath of the fire, including the Salvation Army who are also helping Mike Hogan put a railing on the deck at his new home, but whether it was patiently filling out paperwork or recommending the local library as an additional resource, Gerri and Reimagine Medical Lake have been by her side the entire time.
It’s just what you do when someone in your town asks for help Gerri believes.
“I don’t know if I have the resources, but I want to shake every tree,” Gerri says of her efforts. “I might not have the answer but I would go try to see what we could do until we found an answer.”
Spend some time in Medical Lake today and you can feel that strengthen sense of community.
“We’re kind of a bonded group now. Whether you had a fire or you didn’t,” Jan states before offering up why she believes most people stayed after the fire. “Their people are here. The love is here. It just will be forever, I think.”
Medical Lake. The people. The town. Their bonds – forged by fire, thanks to organizations like Reimagine Medical Lake, now the epitome of small town tough.
“I think we can achieve a lot when we work together,” Gerri proudly says. “I often say, ‘It’s better together’.”
Mike Hogan echoes the mantra.
“I’m very blessed,” he says. “(I’m) doing my best for what I have, right?”
Mike’s property may look a little different than it did a year ago, but much like the community affected by the Gray Road Fire, Mike’s is a home surrounded by and built on second chances.
“You might notice some X’s on some trees there,” Mike says pointing to three or four burned and blackened pine trees that were once slated to come down. “Then I had second thoughts because there’s still green on top. So I didn’t want them to come down. I wanted to give them a chance.”
