ORDWAY — Over the past decade, Gillian Hoggard has offered a bed, a warm shower and cold drinks to a steady stream of bicyclists traveling the coast-to-coast Trans-America Trail route, declining any money they tried to press upon her.
“You can pay me back by giving to someone else when you have a chance,” she would say.
When she gave her pay-it-forward speech to cyclists, she never thought she — along with dozens of other fire victims — would be on the receiving end as volunteer work crews began to arrive in Ordway to help rebuild what an April 15 fire took away.
The massive wind-whipped blaze charred more than 14 square miles in and around Ord way. Two volunteer firefighters, Terry DeVore and John Schwartz, died responding to the fire.
The men were Hoggard’s colleagues at the nearby Arkansas Valley Correctional Facility, where she is a guard.
The fire burned 24 homes and more than 100 buildings.
Hoggard lost her four-bedroom home, two barns, a chicken coop and a garage. Her livestock — poultry, goats and horses — survived, though Hoggard nearly did not.
That afternoon, after hastily stashing her prized photograph collection in her oven for safekeeping, she used a garden hose and shovel to make firebreaks.
But the punishing wind blew burning debris everywhere. By the time her friend Ordway Mayor Randy Haynes yanked her into his waiting car, they were almost trapped by encroaching flames.
“I hadn’t realized how big it was,” she said.
The fire made national headlines, catching the notice of TransAmerica cycling veterans, who within hours began sending e-mails, making phone calls and mailing cards and checks.
Tall and self-reliant, with her hair worn in an unapologetic mullet, Hoggard spent 10 years living on a sailboat with her two sons before following her longtime boyfriend to Ordway in 1996.
Many of her benefactors had never met Hoggard and knew her only as the 2006 recipient of the Trail Angel Award, an honor bestowed by Adventure Cycling Association, the nation’s largest bicycle travel organization.
This past weekend, some of those cyclists — among them Craig Sternagel and Sharon Beals, who flew to Colorado from their home in Washington state — descended upon Hoggard’s charred property to help replant the garden that once was an oasis of flowers and 1,000 cottonwoods, fruit trees and evergreens.
“Her place had a shield of green around it,” said Sternagel, who had heard stories about Hoggard long before pedaling to her front door last summer. “It was a contrast to all the bare prairie we’d seen in Kansas and eastern Colorado.”
Other groups are helping Hoggard too, including some state prison inmates who sent cash donations to a community fund for fire victims.
The congregations of Ordway’s four churches rallied money, food, household goods and clothing for victims who, like Hoggard, lost everything in the flames.
On the Sunday after the fire, Hoggard spent most of the morning going from church to church, personally thanking the members.
“There’s a lot going on right now,” said Stuart Booth, pastor at Ordway’s River of Life Fellowship and community case manager for the fire victims.
“Within these next three weeks, we’ve got a bunch of crews coming in to start building fences, clean up debris, cut down burned trees, build sheds,” he said.
“Gillian’s like a lot of these ranchers, by nature very independent,” Booth said. “It’s hard for them to ask for help, even when they’ve lost everything.”
A Mennonite group helped haul load after load of twisted debris from Hoggard’s land.
Last week, Kremmling Cares Crusades, a nondenominational group, helped raise a barn and repair fencing.
“I’ll tell you this: It’s far easier for me to give people help than to accept assistance,” Hoggard said. “Being temporarily disabled is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. And I’ve lived on a boat, in tents, on beaches, all over Europe, Asia, the Pacific islands.”
Slowly, the skeletons of new buildings rise on Hoggard’s charred land. Among the support beams are smoke-blackened telephone poles, “casualties of the fire themselves,” Hoggard observed, permanent reminders of the epic fire.
“You do need souvenirs,” she said wryly. “I ended up, you know, walking away in flip-flops, shorts and a T-shirt. I do mean to keep my flip-flops till the end of my days.”
When the insurance money finally comes through, Hoggard already has a modular home to put on a new foundation. She won’t let herself think of the contrast between its bare walls and the walls of her old house that were peppered with snapshots of family, friends and cyclists.
“A house you can replace,” Hoggard says. “But if I talk about the photos of my kids, and the things the cyclists sent me, the art from the inmates, all the sentimental stuff you can’t replace — well, I avoid talking about that.”
To help, send donations to Ordway Community Fund, in care of First National Bank, Ordway, CO 81063
Claire Martin: 303-954-1477 and cmartin@denverpost.com
