Mark McInnis lost everything he owns in the Holiday Farm Fire. Photo: Instagram/Andy Nelson
The American West is ablaze right now. Fires in California, Oregon, and Washington are blanketing vast areas with smoke, turning the skies an apocalyptic red, and torching communities. It can be easy, if you’re someone unaffected, to sit back and watch the devastation unfold on the news as though it’s merely some kind of disaster movie. Fires of this size and scope have a sense of unbelievability; an unrealistic quality that our minds have a hard time grasping. But for the hundreds of thousands affected, the destruction is far too real. And one such person is noted photographer Mark McInnis, who has been a cornerstone of surfing photography for a long, long time. A few days ago, McInnis lost his house and all of his belongings in Oregon’s Holiday Farm Fire. Now, Chris Burkard and Josh Mulcoy have set up a crowdfunding campaign to help him.
The Holiday Farm Fire, as of this writing, has destroyed over 500 homes and businesses. It’s burning east of Eugene along Highway 126, just west of McKenzie Bridge to Vida, and as of Wednesday morning, it’s some 170,000 acres in size, nearly six times the size of Eugene itself. Only 10 percent of the perimeter is contained, and since the fire is burning through dense understory and heavily timbered forests, the work for the 812 people fighting it is backbreaking. The estimated containment date is October 29.
If you follow surfing, it’s very likely you’ve laid eyes on McInnis’ images. We’ve had them here on this site many times, and each gallery outdoes the previous one. He’s also an extraordinarily nice human being.
“Friend and photographer, Mark McInnis, has brought joy to many with his images of distant waves and remote landscapes,” wrote Burkard. “He recently moved back to his home in the PNW only to have the recent Holiday Farm Fire completely decimate the community of Blue River, Oregon. And with it, his home.”
Like any photographer, McInnis has a wealth of images. Digital photographs on hard drives, film negatives, and a staggering amount of equipment. For the past year, in fact, he’s been working on storing those images in a separate location, but before he could finish, the fire hit.
“He was left with nothing,” Burkard continued. “His home, his digital photographs, film negatives, family heirlooms, clothes, and everything he owned is gone. We are talking well over six figures of loss. The harsh reality that Mark’s cameras and the entire library of images and backups were all set ablaze is a learning lesson for any creative person, especially when your livelihood depends on it.”
As someone who has lost everything in a fire, I can tell you from experience that it is, without a doubt, one of the hardest things to deal with. My home burned to the ground in the Woolsey Fire, and while now, a few years on, everything has worked out just fine, I still have moments where I think back to that little home and all of my worldly possessions reduced to a smoking pile of rubble. It doesn’t get easier, really, but it gets… quieter, somehow. Muffled, as though the settling ashes are dampening the sound of the devastation. But I can also tell you that without the help of my friends and a crowdfunding campaign they set up — without my knowledge and at first against my wishes — those first few months, where your whole life is upside down and you’re lost, devastated, and filled with an awful sense of unrelenting helplessness, losing my home would have been exponentially more difficult.
“I’ll be honest,” McInnis wrote on Instagram. “I don’t really like the thought of this. I much prefer to give than to take. And that is just the truth. This isn’t some bullshit spiel to convince you to support my rebuilding effort. It kind of makes me ill to think of asking for help. And I don’t know why. It’s a natural thing, I suppose, but it just feels weird, uncommon, and uncomfortable to me.”
Burkard and Mulcoy set up the crowdfunding campaign, despite McInnis’s reservations. “My hope is that we can give back to Mark to get him back on his feet and hopefully repay the joy that he has given all of us through his photographs,” Burkard wrote. “And, for the record, Mark refused to set this up himself. It took some harsh words from a friend for Mark to realize that we are grieving as he grieves and that the way we heal is to help. So while he may not ask for help, he genuinely needs it. Furthermore, in true McInnis fashion, Mark is insisting on donating 10 percent of all donations over the $30,000 mark to The Upper McKenzie and Volunteer Firefighter Relief Fund. Thank you in advance for supporting my great friend, a valued member of the photography community, and an inspiration to us all.”
If you’d like to help Mark McInnis, you can donate here.
