The Almeda fire that roared through Talent and Phoenix on September 7 has devastated the lives of several Lithia Artisan members and their families. Along with our community at large, they’re reeling from the impact. To help those artists who’ve lost nearly everything, we’ll be telling their stories over the coming days while providing ways you can help them recover.
Derek, Leah, and their daughter, Tara.
A lifetime of gemstone and precious metal exploration, incinerated
As Derek Lusk headed home to Ashland on Interstate 5, an emergency text lit up his phone. Having just run an errand in Medford, he was approaching exit 19 at the north end of Ashland when nearly simultaneously, he spied a large smoke plume rising dead ahead. Traffic instantly ground to a halt just as he exited, and Derek found himself in a log jam with flames bursting out all around, the heat already intense.
Frighteningly, he had come to a halt alongside a Shell gas station with fire racing towards it. Dozens of emergency vehicles with their lights flashing and sirens screaming squirmed by the stalled traffic, amping up the panic factor.
Family dog, Chase, in his puppyhood, during a happier time.
Casting about for some protection in his pickup truck, Derek laid hands on a coat and gallon jug of drinking water, reckoning that they just might save him and Chase, the family dog, who was along for the ride. After tense minutes with Derek wondering if this was how it was all going to end, emergency personnel managed to get traffic unsnarled and moving.
Seemingly having escaped the existential threat of the brush fire, Derek began to calm down as he headed north on Route 99 toward Phoenix, and what he judged was safety.
No one could have foreseen the extent of destruction the Almeda Drive fire would produce in the next few hours.
Since the pandemic and its crushing financial impact on artists, Derek and his wife Leah Fairbanks, an acclaimed glass artist, had begun counting more on their gemstone shop in Phoenix to help shore up family finances. “Not a chance,” Derek thought as he weighed the odds of the fire reaching their shop. To get there, the fire would need to burn through an unimaginable number of homes and businesses.
More than just a rock shop, the space was a repository, documenting Derek’s lengthy and accomplished career as a miner, explorer and opal expert, fascinated by all things mineral. His exploits in the 1990s included the rediscovery of a lost opal mine first discovered by Tiffany’s in the 1880s. Later, he would mine gold and Oregon sunstones. Many irreplaceable specimens from these ventures were among the contents of the shop,
More recently, as Opal Illusions, Derek has exhibited his work at prominent gem and jewelry shows as well as Lithia Artisans Market. Because of the impact of Covid on on those efforts, he and Leah had recently broadened the shop’s appeal by offering antiques, memorabilia, and vinyl records.
All that remains of Derek and Leah’s shop is a smudge in the aerial photo.
When the Almeda conflagration ripped through Phoenix, everything was lost.
Derek explains that his gemstone inventory is inherently difficult to appraise and therefore wary insurance companies demand prohibitive premiums beyond his reach. The family’s potential financial path through the pandemic was uninsured. And now it is reduced to ashes.
The Almeda fire has laid waste to the hopes and dreams of Leah and Derek. You’ll find their gofundme page here and we hope you’re in a position to help.