The Great ’09 Strawberry Massacre
When Evacuating from a Fire
Turns Into a Remake of Monty Python
by Tessa Reeg | July 17, 2025
Read more of our Fire Resiliency feature here.
Being a born and raised Santa Barbaran, I’ve always been all too aware of the threat of wildfires, but luckily, my family and I have only ever had to evacuate from one: the 2009 Jesusita Fire, which ended up burning around 8,700 acres and destroying 80 homes. My parents and I were fortunate that our San Roque house was not among them, but with the fire creeping down the hillside and firefighters needing the streets clear for them to get where they needed to go, our neighborhood was given the order to evacuate.
I was about a week shy of my 13th birthday, anxious as hell about what was going on, but I trusted my parents’ judgment to relocate. I grabbed a duffel bag and shoved in my favorite books and my favorite Breyer horses — the essentials, of course. Who needs clothes?
My biggest priority was our menagerie of animals. Dodger, our something-something-terrier mix, was the easiest; sweet-natured and easygoing, he was only too happy to be going for a car ride and an adventure, and he was packed in his crate in the back of my mom’s Subaru. The cats were a challenge — my cat Jesse, a notoriously opinionated orange tabby whose favorite method of communication was a loud, hearty scream, was not happy to be unceremoniously shoved into a carrier, and he made sure we knew about it. I ran all around the house and yard and even up the street looking for Raven, our shy black cat who was a notorious wanderer. I came up empty-handed, and while we were forced to leave without him, we got notified not long afterward that he had been picked up by animal services patrolling the area for lost and scared pets and was safe and sound at the shelter awaiting our return. I can’t express enough appreciation for the people who work so hard to look out for the animals in emergency situations!
Our rabbits, Bandit and Trixie, a bonded pair who were as adorably affectionate with each other as a long-married retired couple, were easy enough to crate and transport, but it was hot for May, and we would be in the car for who knows how long — I worried about their exposure to heat. Rabbits are highly sensitive to heat; temperatures above 80 degrees can greatly increase their risk of heat stroke. Normally, my family would make what we called “bunny air-conditioning”: two-liter soda bottles refilled with water and frozen — we’d put the bottles in the rabbits’ hutch or pen so they could lie against them and cool themselves down in the summer. But this early in the year, we didn’t have any bottles already prepared. No need to bother my parents, though; I’d handle this.
I threw open the freezer door and grabbed the first thing I saw that would work: a big, unopened bag of frozen strawberries. I put the bag in Bandit and Trixie’s crate for them, and off our family drove to Dos Pueblos High School, where other evacuees were staying.
While my mom and I camped out in the gym among all the other evacuees, my dad, being a very light sleeper, preferred to stay in the car with the critters. Jesse loathed being imprisoned and loudly voiced his displeasure — all night long. Dodger, who was deaf and always easygoing, slept soundly — but snored constantly. Bandit and Trixie, unbothered by the yowling cat, merely rustled around in their carrier and chewed their hay. The rabbits were the star campers … or so my dad thought.
At some point in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, he checked on the animals in the back of the car. Jesse was still meowing (hoarse, but still pissed off), Dodger was asleep (still snoring), and the rabbits, in the light of a flashlight, were soaked in red.
Dad frantically fumbled for the latch on their cage, grabbed a towel to — he thought — staunch the wounds before they bled out in the back of the car, and reached into the carrier before seeing the ripped-open plastic bag and smelling and feeling the gooey, sticky mess of thawed strawberries that the bunnies had decided to tear into for a gleeful midnight feast.
Luckily, all was well. The carrier had contained most (but not all) of the strawberry mess; Bandit and Trixie were unharmed and very pleased with themselves; Dad, while sleepless, was at least very relieved that there had not been a gruesome, bloody emergency at an ungodly hour of the night; and Mom, Dad, and I have all gotten plenty of laughs out of that story over the years!
We still can’t figure out how the hell Bandit and Trixie managed to rip open the bag violently enough to get strawberry stains into the cloth ceiling of the Subaru. To this day, the stains remain, a reminder of how you can always find something to laugh at even in the midst of a crisis. When life sends you a wildfire, prepare and look out for one another. But when life gives you strawberries, take a note from my rabbits — feast!
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