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CRESCENT CITY, Calif. — It’s a sunny day and the Pacific beckons.

Auralise and Wrenna have spent the first part of the morning clambering over furniture and toys in the living room of their cozy two-bedroom house. The little girls are still going full-tilt and as usual their parents Alfie and Sarah match their energy — or do a good job trying.

The 4-year-old big sister, Auralise, skips ahead down their winding driveway. She stops well before the road, and the Pecson family crosses together onto a beach strewn with driftwood. Just offshore, a surfer and a sport-kayaker catch the waves.

This is a sparkling extension of their living room playland and Wrenna, almost 2, follows her sister onto logs doubling as balance beams. Soon they’re squealing and flying through the air in tandem, courtesy of Mom and Dad’s swinging arms.

The girls have spent their entire lives near the sea, and their parents met while paddling with West Maui canoe crews.

They are home.

Sort of.

The ocean is about 25 degrees colder than what they’re used to. So is the air. The surfer and kayaker out there are wearing wetsuits.

And when someone tells Auralise he used to live in Hawaii just like her, she responds with a question:

“Did your house burn down too?”

Same Ocean, Different World

Thousands of Lahaina residents who lost their homes and hometown to the flames of August are dealing with unfathomable new circumstances of life.

Alfie and Sarah Pecson find themselves in the far-Northern California town of Crescent City, 2,400 miles from the ruins of everything they owned.

They touch the same body of water and both were once fishing villages with rich native histories. But Lahaina and Crescent City share little else — other than the Pecson family.

Lahaina is hot and dry, Crescent City cold and wet.

Lahaina was flush with tourists drawn to its seaside restaurants, shops and galleries. Crescent City would love to attract more visitors to its remote perch between the redwoods and a craggy coastline.

Alfie was in the glass-tinting business in Lahaina, but Crescent City comes naturally shaded by frequent clouds. Sarah was a thriving artist selling her jewelry and paintings, but now she has no inventory.

He grew up in San Diego, she in Marin County north of the Bay Area. But make no mistake. When their Wahikuli neighborhood was incinerated as the Lahaina fire neared its finish line, they lost their forever home — a unique house from the 1960s designed by a noted artist of the era.

Yet in many ways, they are among the more fortunate of Lahaina’s refugees. Rather than moving from one makeshift living arrangement to another, they’ve been literally airlifted out of the disaster zone and wrapped in the arms of people who consider them family.

This is a story of small town charity, lifelong friendships, grievous loss and island-to-mainland aloha. It’s about people getting what they deserve after getting what they very much didn’t deserve.

It ends with uncertainty, as most Lahaina stories do for now: Alfie and Sarah don’t know when or if they’ll return to Maui.

It begins in a train station in Florence, Italy.

Eternal Friendship Of ‘The Italy Girls’

The station is jammed, and Marisa Caldwell doubts she’ll find the precocious young woman she’s met only once. That was back in Santa Barbara, when Sarah Williams announces to a group of Italy-bound college students that she’ll be starting her journey in Florence in case anyone wants to meet up before heading to their study program in Siena.

Sarah even gives out her phone number, so Marisa calls her and learns they’ll be departing Florence on the same day. But this is 2004 and neither carries a cell phone in the station.

Suddenly there she is, an American with a giant backpack speaking English as she struggles to buy a train ticket.

There’s no quicker way for two people to bond than to be the English-only speakers in an Italian train car. Other passengers are amused that these Americans are so concerned about missing their stop. “Siena, Siena,” some of them shout when the train slows.

Sarah and Marisa get on a bus without tickets and get kicked off. They wander the streets in the rain looking for a hotel.

They are soon inseparable. Along with a couple of other friends, they explore a different part of Italy every weekend.

“We always call each other the Italy girls,” Sarah says.

When Marisa’s parents and two brothers fly to Italy for a visit, they’ve heard all about Sarah and she’s invited to join the weeklong excursion because, Marisa says, “she was just already part of the family.”

That never changes. Marisa marries and eventually moves back to far-Northern California. Sarah, meanwhile, isn’t forgetting a lifelong dream of living in Hawaii forged from frequent childhood visits to Maui.

“She just always would bring it up when she was between boyfriends or between cities or between jobs,” Marisa says.

When Sarah finally makes the move in 2014, they vow to visit each other annually and keep the promise.

Later Marisa’s entire family will fly to Sarah’s wedding in upcountry Maui. Marisa and her husband Skeeter will become the godparents of Auralise and Wrenna.

“Some people don’t get friends like that in their lifetime,” Sarah says.

A Model Marriage In A Showcase Home

Sarah’s time on Maui nearly ends as soon as it begins, but looking back she thinks fate was kind.

She moves into a Lahaina apartment and is driving to a job interview on the Honoapiilani Highway when she’s hit by a drunken driver. She wakes up in a hospital with a broken knee but soon her mother is on the case, bringing her back to California for two months of healing while helping to pay her rent in Lahaina.

When Sarah returns she gets a job on a tour boat, but the physical demands prove more than she can handle with a bad knee. She waitresses for a while, then returns to her first love — art. She paints acrylic scenes on wood and makes earrings by day, and sells leis on Front Street at night until the art sales alone are sufficient.

“Nobody has ever seen a house like this before. Neither have I, and it was out of my league.”

Alfie Pecson

“I feel like had I not had the knee injury, I would have probably been doing a very physical job working on a boat. There would be little time for art.”

A former co-worker on the boat encourages Sarah to try six-person canoe paddling. When she does, she’s taken with the smile of an accomplished paddler. He’s clearly taken with her as well, because he starts leaving flowers on her parked truck.

Alfie Pecson has lived off and on in West Maui since 2009 and he’s already been paddling competitively for several years — his crew won a state championship. When he meets Sarah in 2015, their mutual interest in the activity is only the beginning of their collaborations.

He helps her with the art business, building bigger earring displays but also advising her on how to market and sell her work.

They seem well-matched in their exuberance and cerebral physicality, but Alfie has a practical side that complements Sarah’s passion for art. By the time they meet he’s worked in construction and hotel management.

Soon he’s also pouring his energy into a new project: Putting his own stamp on a one-of-a-kind house designed by noted impressionistic artist Tadashi Sato, who created the 36-foot circular mosaic in the rotunda of the State Capitol.

, a real estate website that calls itself an “online celebration of Hawaii’s unique form of Modernism,” describes the 1960s structure with 18-foot ceilings as an “array of rectangular forms, with terraced rock walls meandering up to the rear of the property where (Sato’s) former art studio now sits.”

Alfie and Sarah buy it in 2016.

“Nobody has ever seen a house like this before,” Alfie says. “Neither have I, and it was out of my league.”

He’s wrong on that last point. Eventually, most of its furniture is handmade by Alfie. He puts in a climbing wall and oak floors.

“It was prime,” he says. “All the projects were done with premium stuff.”

Alfie and Sarah get married in 2018 just a few weeks after briefly evacuating when a fire burns 21 Lahaina residences. In 2020, Alfie goes to work with a friend in the custom tinting business.

The house project takes a new twist: making it kid-friendly for Auralise, born in 2020, and Wrenna, born in 2022.

Alfie finally feels like he’s pretty much finished with the house — he might even retire soon other than helping with Sarah’s art business.

“It was pretty self-sustaining. I had an abundant food feed around the property. I had birds, chickens, vegetables, fruits, solar, everything.”

His last project is to install a Tesla Powerwall, which uses solar energy to charge large batteries that keep the juice flowing all day and night.

He’s into preparedness.

Everything Changes

Sure enough, last Aug. 8, just a few days after he finishes that task, the power is out all over Lahaina, but not at the Pecson house where Sarah and Alfie go through their morning rituals with the girls despite a freakish wind howling outside.

There’s no cellphone service, but Alfie catches snippets of information on social media. He knows about the early brush fire east of town that supposedly is extinguished, and is surprised to see smoke in that direction mid-afternoon.

They rent out a separate small house on a slope in back to a friend. Alfie goes to its second-floor lanai for a better view of the still-black smoke.

“I’m also watching the reaction of my neighbors. I’ve got those who were hanging out, enjoying the day off drinking and barbecuing. And then some are on their roofs, concerned as heck.”

Alfie hoses off his own roof and turns on the sprinkler system for a cycle. The neighborhood fills up with cars as people arrive from other parts of town assuming Wahikuli is a haven. Explosive “puffs of sound” are distant at first. It’s getting prematurely dark despite the growing southeast glow.

When an evacuation order sounds from a police cruiser, a three-vehicle caravan soon departs. There is no panic. Sarah drives a minivan with the girls, Alfie a truck and their tenant, Desiree, her own truck. They have a few vital documents, food, water, some clothes and bedding, their cat Poki, a generator and little else. They’ll regret not bringing more but “we all thought we were coming back,” Alfie says.

The days that follow unfold in a blur:

They spend the first night in their vehicles parked on the grounds of the Royal Lahaina Resort. At one point Alfie tries to drive back to Wahikuli but the road is blocked. In the morning light, he gets “a smidgeon” of a cellphone signal. He catches aerial footage of the devastation, then reaches a neighbor who confirms the worst. The flames reached their house after midnight — long hours after Front Street burned. 

They sleep the next two nights on a ballroom floor at the hotel, then drive north to a friend’s house above Kaanapali. There’s no electricity but their generator at least powers the refrigerator. Then a new fire prompts an evacuation order here, and they’re caravaning north again.

A couple of paddling friends open their Kapalua home to the refugees. The power has just come back on here, providing a fragment of normalcy. They stay for several days contemplating their next move.

Alfie returns to Lahaina to see what became of their home. He brings bags, “but there’s absolutely nothing I could salvage.” The only exceptions are out front: a second pickup inexplicably undamaged and Desiree’s frightened, injured cat Lilyfay still sheltering beneath it. 

‘Not Even A Discussion’

In the 13 days they remain on Maui after the fire, the family is deluged with donations and offers of help from fellow islanders. But the offer they can’t refuse comes from across the sea.

On Aug. 9, Marisa is in Southern California with her husband Skeeter and three daughters for the oldest girl’s birthday. They see the fire news shortly after waking up. Marisa tries texting Sarah. No answer. She reaches Sarah’s mother, who’d heard from her shortly before they evacuated, but nothing since.

It’s a tough day to celebrate Cecelia’s birthday and Marisa keeps checking her phone. At 3 p.m. Sarah’s mother calls with the news: the Pecsons are alive, unhurt and homeless.

“I burst into tears at Universal Studios,” Marisa says.

It’ll be another day before the friends can talk directly, but when they do, California comes up almost immediately.

Marisa’s family wastes no time mobilizing. Her parents, Kevin Caldwell and Donna Sund, are physicians who live in an oceanside house in Crescent City. They own a smaller house in back that has just been vacated by one of their sons and his wife who stayed there while their own home was being built.

In the past, Sarah and Alfie have actually lodged in the “Back House” themselves while visiting Marisa. The best friends’ frequent meet-ups often turn into big gatherings involving Marisa’s parents and brothers — they’ve all followed Sarah’s fortunes since the Italy trip two decades past. Now they are unanimous: Of course the Pecsons belong in Crescent City.

“Once we realized they were safe but their house was gone, everyone just simultaneously said they’ve got to move here,” says Kevin, Marisa’s father. “It was just like not even a discussion.”

It says something about this family that such a gesture of generosity seems matter-of-fact, like anyone would do it.

“I just feel like people are good,” says Marisa, a school psychologist. “Especially in times of tragedy, that’s when you see the best in people.”

Her mother Donna echoes the sentiment: “This is what we’ve always done. Somebody needs a place to stay. The house is available. It’s yours.”

Alfie and Sarah are simply overwhelmed. He calls it “kinaole,” the Hawaiian concept of doing the right thing at the right time for the right reason.

But Kevin does admit that “much of the world isn’t that way.” That’s why he does what he does when the Pecsons arrive on the one commuter airline flight a day into the Crescent City airport.

After an emotional greeting in the tiny terminal, a caravan of cars begins the five-minute drive to the Back House. It’s deep-cleaned, repainted and furnished with toys and everything else a family with nothing would need.

Kevin and Alfie are in a car that is being loaned to the Pecsons, complete with child seats for the girls. He pulls over near the airport exit and says, “Alfie, I want to give you a reality check here. This is real. We have a house. It’s for you. There’s no money, there’s no charges. Everything’s paid for and it’s yours forever. That’s really what’s happening here.”

One Unfortunate Certainty

By the time they fly into Crescent City just before Halloween, the Pecsons have taken a reunion tour of California, reconnecting with Sarah’s mother in Marin and Alfie’s family in San Diego.

But this is when they start to exhale and settle in. The transition seems easiest for the girls, especially since they frequently get to play with other children in the family — Marisa’s three daughters live about 10 miles away and Auralise calls them “my girls.” 

“Our kids, they need some normalcy,” Sarah says. “They need that sense of home.”

“I’m so grateful our evacuation wasn’t traumatic for the girls. I’m so grateful we weren’t running for our lives.”

Sarah Pecson

She says she almost feels guilty about missing the home she lost, because so many other Lahaina residents have lost more.

“I’m so grateful our evacuation wasn’t traumatic for the girls. I’m so grateful we weren’t running for our lives.”

Blessed youth allows Auralise and Wrenna to focus on what is in front of them. It’s left to their parents to think about what they left behind.

Immersed in mothering, Sarah has no time to create new art. When that does happen, she figures she’ll sell it online.

Alfie has the equivalent of a part-time job dealing with their Lahaina issues from afar. The insurance company provided a significant loss-of-use stipend up front, but now wants documentation of the possessions that burned. He scours their pre-fire digital photos, room by room, for images of those possessions.

Then there’s the mortgage company to deal with. The forbearance period is just about to end, presumably meaning monthly payments must resume.

He keeps track of unfolding developments in West Maui, but not too closely.

“I’m kind of using my friends who are there, boots on the ground type of thing, who willingly want to drive by the property and take video and just say, ‘Alf, what do you want me to do?’ They just know that I’ve got my family and I would do the exact same thing for them.”

The government-funded debris removal has just begun on the site, even though Alfie signed off on having the work done months ago.

Alfie and Sarah realize it will be several years before they can possibly rebuild in Wahikuli — and their daughters already consider Crescent City home.

“We’ll figure that out, I guess, which is weird to say, because I don’t like that,” Sarah says. “I like to have a plan.”

Then she states the one unfortunate certainty.

“We can’t go back to the same Lahaina we knew and we loved.”