A Haines man who says his five pets are his family returned to his burning cabin to save one of his cats after one of his dogs awoke him to danger late Sunday night.
Rusty Goodin’s possessions – minus a chainsaw and generator he rescued from encroaching flames – were destroyed, including all his savings from a job, which he kept in cash, photos, a grandfather’s rifle and a grandmother’s wedding ring.
“I’m grateful. I’m alive. My animals are alive. Everything I lost was just material stuff. It matters, but really it doesn’t matter,” Goodin said this week following the blaze that leveled his cabin at 6.5 Mile Haines Highway.
Goodin, a baker and chef at Bear-ritos, said he fell asleep on a couch in the living room of the three-room structure he described as a “shotgun shack.” Gus, his six-year-old mutt, woke him, he said.
“Gus was on top of me barking, and he never barks. The house was full of smoke. At first I thought the damper (on a woodstove) was stuck. Then I saw the bedroom wall on fire,” Goodin said in an interview Tuesday.
Goodin got Gus, a Labrador pup named Maynard, and an aging terrier named Cecil out of the building, along with Katherine, one of his two cats. He put the cat in a car and, capitalizing on something he’d once heard, used an expired cell phone to dial 911. (The emergency call works on cell phones even when minutes are depleted, he said.)
But his efforts still left his aging cat, Princess, trapped in a feeding loft in the bedroom where the fire started, Goodin said. “I went and got her because my animals are my kids. I’ve had (Princess) for 10 years.”
Goodin said he wrapped himself in a wet sleeping bag and entered the building, found the cat, then smashed out a bedroom window to escape the blaze. “There was a swish and everything was on fire. I guess it was because of the draft (from breaking the window). The fire was like a tunnel, a sideways tornado of flames.”
By that time, he said, bullets stored in the house started exploding. “I was standing out in the highway naked when the fire department and the police got there. I don’t remember a whole lot. I felt like I was in a movie. It was very surreal.”
The cause of the fire is unknown. When it started up, Goodin had fires going in two woodstoves, a store-bought steel one in the bedroom that he’d bought a year ago, with a smokestack that was only three days old, and a barrel stove in the living room.
The bedroom stove was tight and was a safe distance from burnables, he said.
Police responded to the scene at 11:15 p.m., with firefighters just behind. “It was fully involved when we got called out,” said fireman Al Badgley. “It wasn’t like there was hardly anything left when we started putting water on it. It was so hot and went up so fast.”
The fire may have spread when ashes dropped from a stove to the floor below, Badgley said. With estimated fire damage up to about $65,000 from two woodstove-related fires in the past month alone, Badgley said his department will look to increase public awareness about woodstove safety.
Four fire trucks and an ambulance were dispatched to the fire.
Goodin said people have since given him clothes and dog food. “I’m not really sure what I’m going to do now. I’m not leaving Haines. I may put up a wall tent.”
Goodin said he’d worked the past three years combining two small cabins into a single home. He put in new floors and walls and recently added a cedar interior to the place known to locals as “Strawberry Shorty’s” and “Shack-Ri-La.” “Three days ago I put the last board up.”
And after four years in Haines, Goodin said he was prepared for winter, having put aside firewood and home-canned food like moose, fish and jams. A five-gallon bucket filled partially with pie cherries was one item that remained intact among the charred remains this week.
Goodin settled here four years ago when his car broke down on Chirstmas Day and people took him in, including making him dinner. The generosity of residents toward him since the fire is one reason he’s staying, he said. “I know we bicker and I know we argue, but we don’t give up on our people, either,” he said.