SUPERIOR • On the afternoon of Jan. 17, parents Kelly Watt and Philip Rosenberg-Watt found themselves packing.

Again.

Three years ago, it was to escape the most destructive wildfire in Colorado history. The one that took 1,084 homes, including their own. Today, it is to escape plummeting temperatures that are forecast to stay below freezing for the next 90 hours.

This was no place for their kids, just 5 and 2, to wait out a polar vortex. “This” being the custom RV they have now been living in for nine months. The one parked in front of Lot 103, which until Dec. 30, 2021, held space for their forever home in what used to be called “Original Superior.”

Their home, like their lives, now both seem to be forever “under construction.”

For the couple, the hardest part of this whole ordeal has not been the severe weather. Not the construction delays. Not the near-total drain of their once carefully planned savings. Not the breathlessly ill-timed elimination of Philip’s job as a software engineer. Not even making do in this cramped RV that they have managed to make feel like a home — their fourth since the fire — by plopping a Charlie Brown-sized Christmas tree on top of the tiny dining table and plastering just about every inch of wall space with family photos and their children’s artwork.

The hardest part is whenever some well-meaning person asks, “So … how do you like your new house?”

“Because they just assume there is a new house,” Kelly said. “After all, it’s been three years.”

But no, there is no new house. And there won’t be for another nine months at least. 

The couple, bundled up this day in layered winter clothing, have agreed to update their story and offer first-hand perspective, lessons, maybe even some words of hope for those affected by the apocalyptic Greater Los Angeles wildfires, which have now consumed an estimated 12,000 structures. As if their journey is by now a closed book rather than what it actually is — a lingering open wound.

“It’s hard,” said Kelly. “People want there to be this definite ending, and there’s never going to be a definite ending for us. Not even when we move into the new house. Not ever.”

They sit together in their 400-square-foot RV taking questions already knowing the answers you want to hear. That everything turned out OK for them. That they have grown as people, and as a couple, through this adversity. That adding young William — the first Marshall baby conceived and born after the disaster — has put everything else in its neat and proper perspective.

That’s not what they say.

When you ask, “How’s it going?” they pause and lock weary eyes as if to silently ask one another, “Do we tell him the truth?”

They don’t bother to wipe away welled tears, each instead focusing intently on the other with the unmistakable look of displaced people who have been on a very long journey that, no matter how far it has taken them, has not yet taken them nearly far enough.

Kelly opts for the truth.

“Everything is terrible,” she says.

“If you want a tidy, happy ending to your story,” she adds carefully, “maybe you should come back in the fall.”

Step by tiny step

The Rosenberg-Watt family, like so many others, lost everything in the Marshall fire except for each other and whatever they could throw together in 40 minutes of frantic packing — like the ashes of the family dog who had died a few months before.

Three years later — three years under a mountain of paperwork involving insurance, design planning, inspections and building permits — they no longer see life in absolutes but rather in tiny, incremental steps.

Colorado theater family sifts for meaning in ashes of Marshall fire

The next incremental step is today’s move out of the RV and into the rented basement of another Marshall family that has completed its rebuild. In March, they hope to move into the new ADU on their property. That’s a two-story garage that will house an apartment they plan to rent out as a means of recuperating some of their lost savings. Phil hopes they can take occupancy of their main home by September. That is, if everything goes right.

Today, it is not. Phil has just discovered that his builders have built his walls 3 inches too high, rendering an entire nearby stack of ceiling studs useless.

From the start, the Rosenberg-Watts have chosen to take the hard way back. The Robert Frost, less-traveled path. They are one of only two families in their immediate vicinity who chose to rebuild — and return to living there. The rest have sold and moved on. The neighbors across the street rebuilt, but they never got to move in because the wife passed away last spring. Now, it’s a rental.

News reports say about 70% of the Marshall homes have been rebuilt. Those are mostly houses that followed conventional, easy-to-replicate construction models. But if this next home is really meant to be the Rosenberg-Watts’ forever home, they decided it must be custom-built to accommodate both their greatest dreams and most understandable fears. Kelly speaks of curbless showers, while the ever-pragmatic Phil speaks of fire-resistant insulation.

Which also means more waiting. And more money.

So, what does the term “forever home” even mean to Phil now?

“It means: ‘Take me out by my feet,’” he said.

Phil and Kelly know that, at least before Dec. 30, 2021, they’ve had it better than most. Phil was a highly recruited engineer who made a good living as a software engineer at CableLab, a broadband development company in Louisville that laid off 10% of its workforce a year ago. Out-of-pocket costs associated with the fire have left the couple with about $500,000 less in accumulated retirement assets than they had before. They have now invested everything they have — including their time, ambitions and money — into these half-built columns of stacked concrete blocks.’

Not to mention their mental health.

Imagine spending more than three years of your life with one nagging question constantly running through your mind: “What haven’t we thought of yet?” One service SafeCo does not offer is insurance against fear.

On the bright side, when the new house is finished, they will own it outright, Phil said. “Meaning our assets have been transferred from a liquid asset class to bricks and wood and floors and glass.”

Which can burn to the ground, too. The only way to guarantee this new home won’t burn is to build foot-thick concrete walls and include no windows.

Phil is compromising on the windows. (There will be some. And they will be heat-resistant.) Not on the concrete. If there is another fire, his family’s most precious possessions and documents will be secured in a fireproof room. Their new home is being built with fire-hardening material that has proven to save homes.

“We were told that of all the Marshall homes built before 2008, about 18% survived,” said Kelly, whose previous home was built in the 1900s. “But for homes built after 2008, it was 51%. So, that stuff really does work. But I can’t ever say anything is guaranteed ever again.”

And here’s the terrifying intangible: If history repeats itself, Kelly said, no matter how many precautions they take now in the construction of their new home, “You’re only as good as the house that’s built next to you.”

A family addition

Anniversaries can be hard on the Rosenberg-Watt family. The promise of an impending new year will never mean quite the same thing again. But they got a pass from the sadness of that big first fire anniversary in 2022, when son William joined big-brother Alexander on Christmas Eve. William was the world’s most wonderful baby, said Kelly, now flashing happier tears.

“I feel like he was such a balm for us that whole first year after the fire,” she said.

“We got to take him home on the first anniversary of the fire, which was a wonderful distraction. But he had to come home on oxygen, and it seems like he was on it forever. There were so many things happening around that first anniversary, but I got to opt out of all of it and just focus on our new baby, which was nice.”

The couple were watching the news in August 2023, when the Hawaii wildfires destroyed more than 2,200 structures and caused about $5.5 billion in damages on Maui. They were watching again on Jan. 7, when the fires erupted in California.

Ask them what it was like to see all that unfold, and their quiet stoicism returns. Phil, who lived in L.A. for four years earning his master’s degree at the University of Southern California, had a dream that night telling him he should go to L.A. and help people there get through the bureaucratic maze of recovery that he now knows so well.

But what would he tell them? What is their way through this?

“Do your grieving and then move on,” he said. “It’s going to be much harder for you to do what you need to do if you haven’t appropriately grieved for all that you have lost first. The other stuff will wait.”

Kelly has joined the Marshall Together movement, a group of impacted community members who are collectively supporting neighbors to heal and rebuild. They were themselves initially mentored by survivors of other huge, disruptive fires in California and elsewhere going back as far as 1990. Now, it is their turn to mentor.

“I think I have a better sense of what those folks are going through when it’s something that no one else can really fully understand,” she said. “But I don’t even know what advice I would give those people because if they look at our situation, they will just know that they could be us in three years. That kind of speaks for itself — and not necessarily in the most positive way.”

Back in the months immediately after the fire, the Rosenberg-Watts and other families were nearly overwhelmed by donations, random acts of kindness and other reaffirmations of our common humanity. But as might be expected, recent examples have become further in-between.

“There have been moments,” Kelly said.

She pointed to the fancy double-stroller by the front door. It was being offered by a man on Craigslist, who asked potential buyers to suggest a price. Kelly wrote back saying, “We lost our home in the Marshall fire and we just had our second kid — would you take this much?” The man wrote back saying she could have it for free.

“When I picked it up, I just bawled my eyes out,” she said with a laugh. “He was probably happy to get it out of his garage, but those things mean a lot — especially when it’s people you don’t know at all and aren’t connected to the fire in any way.”

What does home even mean?

No matter how pedantic the question, I had to ask this family whose home has remained so tantalizingly out of reach for three years what all this has done to their concept of home. It’s tidy to say the lesson here is that home is not a physical place. That home is not where you happen to live so much as what lives inside you. When Kelly says, “Well, home is where my family is,” she means it. When Phil says, “Home is where you choose to be,” he means it, too. 

But, to heck with that. After living in a propane-fueled RV at the start of a Colorado winter, home means walls. It means having natural gas, not electric space heaters every few feet. It means a place to spread out. It means your 5-year-old can sleep with more than a few feet of head space.

“I remember early on, someone was saying it could take three years for us to be back in our own house,” Kelly said. “And I kept thinking, ‘Wait. Alexander will be in kindergarten in three years. And now, he is. It’s just surreal to think about because he was 2 when the fire happened. That’s a lot of life for him. That’s most of his life.”

This most recent anniversary was hard on the couple because high winds had forebodingly returned to Boulder County and the couple were apart. Kelly had taken the kids to visit her father in Illinois, while Phil continued to supervise the construction back home. 

Phil used his alone time to write down what he was struggling to say out loud. He found himself imagining an alternate reality. One where he still has his house and his father’s tuxedo and the furniture his grandfather had as a child.

“We still have the money we had saved toward our ambitious life goals,” he wrote. “I still have my job, and I’m happily unaware of how insurance settlements work.”

In this alternate reality, Phil has a lower tolerance for hardship. He’s less cynical. He wrestles with wonderfully insignificant problems, like whether to convert the guest room into his son’s bedroom, and, if so, where will guests now stay? In this reality, he vows to replace the stupid carpeted flooring with something cleaner and more durable. He and his wife expend way too much of their energy discussing paint colors.

Sometimes, at night, Phil lies in bed and allows himself to really wonder how things might have been if …

“But then I remember that this is where I am, and who I am, and what I am, and how I am,” he said. He reminds himself like a mantra: “You still have your health.”

“Thank goodness no one was hurt.”

“It’s just stuff.”

“But you don’t know,” he said. “And I hope you never have to.”