On his trips to town, he would sometimes tuck in his long gray beard when he worried it would make people suspicious of him - or on a windy day, when it would blow into his face. “When you take a vow of silence - and he was pretty much a monk - what’s around you is critters, and other people are not necessarily going to understand who you are and what you’re doing.” ![]() “His companions were the animals,” said his sister, Jill Jones. He delighted in feeding the California quail, peacocks, blue jays - and foxes in the evenings. Jones, an Army veteran, lived in Last Chance in a wood cabin the size of a garden shed. Jones alive - spent an entire night in a clearing dodging flying fireballs until dawn, when he walked across six miles of burning forest to safety.įor the last three decades, Mr. Another neighbor - the last man who spoke to Mr. Jones’s neighbors survived the fire by submerging himself in his backyard pond. It devastated a back-to-the-land community established in the early 1970s that with its annual barn dance and its vegetable patches fed by spring water seemed to hark back to an earlier era. The fire in Last Chance - one of hundreds of lightning-ignited fires that burned across Northern California and killed seven people - leveled all but a few of the 100 homes scattered along the six miles of Last Chance Road. Jones’s escape was thwarted by a firestorm that ran so hot that it vaporized the windows of the van, melted the wheels and stripped all color from the surrounding forests, leaving acres of trees protruding from the ash-covered ground like so many burned matchsticks. Along a narrow path at the edge of a steep ravine, rays of the sun pierced the smoky haze and shined on the scorched shell of the minivan that Mr. 18, smoke still poured from fissures in the sandy soil in the forests. Jones disappeared down a fiery road on the night of Aug. But the fire outmaneuvered him.Ī week after Mr. He had turned countless times to that same path, which leads to the Big Basin Redwoods State Park and its towering, 2,000-year-old trees. If anyone could outsmart a wildfire, friends thought it would be Mr. For decades he took a vow of silence, scrawling in notebooks or on a tiny chalkboard when he had something to say. ![]() He once spent a year living in the hollow base of a redwood tree. Even for Last Chance, a rugged community in the forests above the Pacific Ocean where residents mill their own lumber and grow their own food, Tad Jones was particularly ascetic.
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