Mark Livingston, 68, remembers how, a couple years back, a cat showed up at his rustic Felton house in the thick of the Santa Cruz Mountains.
It seemed like the cat was homeless, so he took her in. He named her Charkie.
She was tentative at first, but eventually she warmed up to the union electrician, who’d helped get the lights on at Silicon Valley offices for IBM, Amdahl and Apple.
“It took about a month,” he said. “After we became friends, it slept on my chest every night.”
On June 30, as a fire was having its way with the redwood tongue and groove, and trying to gnaw its way through the cement Hardie board siding, Livingston found his other cat, Zebra, dead by the back door.
But he still held out hope Charkie might be alive.
That hope was dashed when, in the proceeding hours after the fire departments were finished mopping up, he found her under a set of stairs with her tongue hanging out.
“That was a real tearjerker for me to go through,” said Livingston, adding he understands Charkie was probably trying her best to escape the inferno. “The whole house was destroyed by smoke damage.”
He’s been in quite the funk ever since.
“I’m pulling out of depression,” he said. “It was almost haunting me.”
But Livingston has plenty to be thankful for. For example, his fiancée Mary MacGregor had quickly raced the dogs off the property—though she was injured in the process.
And the off-the-grid home’s solar power station—located adjacent to the main residence—was mostly undamaged.
“Penny by penny, I’ll rebuild what I can, when I can,” he said. “I’m going to need help.”
Livingston didn’t have home insurance, which he says was related to a massive rate increase connected to defensible space issues (he was no longer able to name the provider, noting all his papers burned up).
The first thing he’ll have to do is tear out as much of the incinerated materials as possible.
“Construction costs have sure risen a lot,” he said, noting a new roof will likely run him $10,000. “Everything I’m purchasing is expensive stuff.”
Livingston had originally been renting next door when he got the chance to buy into the property in 1986, which was owned by a minister from Mount Hermon who’d retired and moved to Tennessee.
“It was originally just a treehouse,” he said, recalling how he installed new windows and doors, reroofed it, and laid the foundation. “Three years I worked on it.”
It took him a while to get insurance and to sort out the code violations with the County, which he says cost about $15,000, including penalties and interest.
“In 1998, I installed a solar system and got off the grid—disconnected from PG&E entirely,” he said. “In that 26 years, I have never lost my power.”
And while he’ll be able to reconnect the power, he’ll have to build nearly everything else from scratch. He’s seeking donations in the form of building materials of all kinds.
Livingston is thankful for the more than $10,000 that people have already donated to the GoFundMe his son Orion set up for him. (To donate to the fundraiser, visit gofund.me/56832d8c.)
“It’s a blessing from God,” he said. “I just really appreciate the compassion, love and help. But still, it’s just a drop in the bucket of what I’m going to have to go through to get this thing done.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story identified Orion incorrectly. The Banner regrets the error.
