After a combined nearly 70 years in fire service with few get-away vacations, the Fosters are ready to travel, and their smiles show it.
“A lot of travel,” said Ramona Fire Department District Chief/Cal Fire Battalion Chief Steve Foster, who is retiring April 6.
Steve came to the Ramona Fire Department at the beginning of 2014 as battalion chief and fire marshal and was promoted to chief Jan. 1, 2016.
“We pick up the fifth wheel the day after he is officially retired,” added wife Karen, already enjoying retirement after hanging up her gear last December from the Chula Vista Fire Department, where she was a fire inspector II/investigator.
The Ramona couple’s travels will not be limited to land. Karen got Steve to take a cruise a few years ago to Alaska and he loved it. They already have a cruise booked to the Eastern Caribbean for early next year.
“With our careers we didn’t do a lot of vacationing,” Karen noted.
The fire chief said he hasn’t been able to really enjoy a summer since he was 17 years old because of the fire season. And, being on call, he sometimes had to delay vacations.
“April 7 is the start of the rest of my life,” said the 51-year-old.
Steve got his first taste of fire service as a volunteer at age 17. After graduating from high school he went into the Marine Corps and was stationed at Camp Pendleton. When he got out, he became a full-time volunteer for Riverside County Fire Department and was paid for emergency firefighting with the hourly rate dependent on qualifications.
While a volunteer, he experienced his first wildfire.
“It’s an eye-opener. I remember it like it was today,” he said.
He, another volunteer, and a captain were protecting a log cabin in the mountains during a fire in Malibu around the mid-1980s, he said.
“So we sat on this house all night long. The next day you could hear the roar…I mean it sounds like a freight train…the ground sometimes will shake…and then you see this big giant glow coming at you,” Steve recalled.
He remembers spot fires popping up all around them from the pine needles on the ground — defensible space was not a big deal then, he noted.
Although there were fire crews from two other areas, they panicked and left, said Steve.
Trying to describe what he saw, Steve likened it to a 100- to 200-foot tidal wave.
“Just take the tidal wave away and put a ball of fire,” he said.
With embers coming down all around, Steve said the thought occurred, “how am I going to live through this,” but then training took over.
“You go into firefighting mode,” explained Karen.
Steve said he and the other two took hoses and guided the fire around the house and let it bypass. The cabin was saved and they survived.
The husband and wife met in 1985, when Karen, who had taken an emergency medical technician class, was in the volunteer program at the same station as Steve. She got her training by attending an academy and learning from the guys at the station, and said her years on a swim team gave her the upper body strength to lift and throw ladders. It was a time, however, when there weren’t many female firefighters.
That was especially evident when a year later Steve was offered a seasonal position with the Bureau of Land Management in Ely, Nev., and they married and moved to the former mining town.
They soon learned California was more progressive than Nevada when it came to female firefighters.
“Women were absolutely not even allowed,” said Steve.
Karen took a babysitting job while Steve sometimes found himself hundreds of miles out in the desert keeping 24-hour vigil at a fire incident scene to make sure it didn’t reignite. That scene could be a lone tree.
In 1987, the couple returned to California when Steve was hired as a seasonal firefighter by California Department of Forestry (CDF), now Cal Fire. When Karen was hired by CDF, the two often worked opposite shifts and only saw each other one day a week.
“We saw each other on fires occasionally but a lot of people didn’t know that we were married,” said Karen.
They continued to climb the fire service ladder. Steve’s resume includes fire inspector, fire prevention specialist, plan checker, fire apparatus engineer, captain, and fire chief. Their jobs took them to live in the Palm Springs area and in Northern California.
Their son, Stephen, born in 1992, is named for Steve’s great-great uncle, Stephen Collins Foster, composer of such songs as “Oh! Susanna” and “My Old Kentucky Home.”
In 2003, while the Cedar Fire was burning in San Diego County, Steve was on a strike team battling the Grand Prix fire in San Bernardino County. The Santa Ana winds would blow the fire into the mountains during the day, but in the evening the flames would blow back toward communities, he said, so they focused on structure protection.
Steve remembers one night waiting for the fire to come off a hill.
“So I’m laying down on the ground, trying to get a little bit of sleep … It was pretty nippy out that night and then all of a sudden it was warm. It was like boom! I woke right up and said here it comes.”
He had two new seasonal firefighters with him and could tell they were scared. Steve told them something he had been told: “Don’t worry, we’re not going to die. Today is not the day. If we’re going to die, I’ll let you know.” That calmed them down, he said, and when the fire came roaring down at the house with 50-to 60-mph winds, they managed to save it.
While Karen liked being a firefighter, she enjoyed being an inspector more.
“Every day you learn something new,” she said.
She also became an investigator and would sometimes get called out in the middle of the night after a fire.
With injuries and exposure to chemicals throughout their career, Karen, 53, said they didn’t want to wait too long to retire.
“I’ve had a lot of injuries in my career,” Steve said. That includes bolts, rods, and screws in his lower back from when a roof collapsed on him, an injury that gave him a drop foot.
“There’s a point in your life where you know it’s just time to walk away and enjoy life while you can, because you don’t know when it’s going to end,” said Steve.
“It’s a career we choose,” added Karen. “We couldn’t have asked for a better career.”
The Fosters have lived in Ramona for 12 years but plan to move soon to Spokane Valley in Washington, where some of their friends reside and where there is no state income tax. Steve, originally from upstate New York, misses the seasons, said Karen.
He is not likely to get bored in retirement, as he enjoys being a disc jockey, has a pilot’s license, does woodworking, and is interested in 3D printing.
Karen said she misses her work a bit, “but I’m looking forward to the next chapter in our life.”
