A wiffle ball heaven rises from the ashes of Holiday Farm Fire

On a field, a memorial to a brother and renewal after devastation.

VIDA — It’s the bottom of the third inning at Vida Yards in a game between the Nash Browns and Homies. Hot dogs and burgers sizzle on the grill, kids are playing with chalk in foul territory and the Nash Browns are having a tough time with the Homies’ starting pitcher.

Vida Yards is a wiffle ball field that doesn’t use wiffle balls. They use a pickleball — it’s more like baseball that way, property owner Shaun Nugent tells me, with none of those wild breaking balls with four feet of bend. Instead, success on this mound 33 feet and 4 inches away from home plate is dictated on gas and accuracy, as pitchers are tasked with keeping the ball within a strike zone framed by a piece of plywood on a stake behind the plate.

The Homies took a 3-0 lead into the bottom of the third and have been painting the wood when a man in a red bandana, cargo shorts and a sleeveless tank top steps to the plate. The wind is blowing out to left field, which features a 35-foot steel foul pole 78 feet from home plate and a mountainous backdrop covered in hundreds of matchstick-tree remains from the 2020 Holiday Farm Fire.

A fastball whips off the outside corner of the wood for strike one.

There’s not a cloud in the sky. Games started at 9 a.m., run through 11 p.m. under the lights, and finish up with a championship game the next night. It’s the eighth time Nugent has hosted the tournament here on his property along the McKenzie River since 2017 — the field was unplayable in 2021 — and they all seem to have a similar rhythm. These early Saturday games are casual, with things ratcheting up in intensity as the weekend progresses.

“I like getting those at-bats where it’s like 2-2 and you get that baseball feel,” Shaun says. “One of the games last year, it’s 2-2 going into the ninth inning and I hit a walk-off home run and it’s the same thrill. You’ve hit a home run. Same with the pitching. It’s just so fast.”

Cargo Shorts has worked a 2-2 count and fouls off a low fastball when he gets a gift: a hanging offspeed pitch that sails in waist-high. With a short step and flick of the wrists, he whips his black spray-painted broomstick through the zone and makes solid contact. The Homies outfielder runs towards the warning track in left-center, leaps and watches the ball sail over the wall just left of a charred fence post and a sign that reads, “Vida Yards: Built in Loving Memory of Brother Tarik” with a large photo of a boy in a Colorado Rockies uniform swinging out of his cleats.

Cargo Shorts rounds the bases. The Nash Browns are back in it.

Nugent points to the post next to the memorial.

“All of this just torched. The house. The decks. Everything,” he says. “Everything up until that post. After the fire, when I saw that, it was like, ‘Ok, we have something to rebuild around.’”

Nugent figures he hasn’t seen Field of Dreams in more than 20 years.

Really, he hasn’t needed to.

If you build it, they will come. Right?

But what if you build it, they come, and then everything burns down? What do you do then?

That’s what Nugent faced in September 2020 when he received a video from a firefighter friend who had just passed by the Vida property. It was in the middle of the Holiday Farm Fire, which burned more than 173,393 acres outside of Eugene and stands as one of the most destructive in Oregon history. The video showed utter devastation. Smoke filled the air as a fire truck slowly rolled down Highway 126 and passed by Vida Yards.

The dugouts were gone. The scorer’s box was gone. So too was the storage shed, left field wall, grand stand, the family rental house and seemingly the entire mountainside. All that remained was a strip of outfield wall, beginning at the memorial, where the fire failed to catch.

Vida Yards before and after the fire.

Nugent first built this field to honor his late younger brother. Shaun and Tarik grew up on a 160-acre property in Marcola, where they cut down trees, made fences with chicken wire and kicked out bases in the dirt to create their own makeshift field as kids. They’d play for hours and talk about one day creating their own dream field with real fences and real poles.

The games shifted to the streets of Eugene when the family moved to the city, and Shaun would translate his skills to the full-sized diamond with a strong career at North Eugene and a 1999 state championship with the Eugene Challengers. He went to San Luis Obispo to play a year of college ball at Cuesta College before a back injury ended his competitive career.

Tarik died in a car accident in 2004, Shaun says. He was 20, and Shaun carried those memories of playing with his younger brother with him when he acquired the Vida property in 2006.

Before building a house, he built a field. Shaun and his friends, brothers Travis and Brandon Nance, created a field not too different from the type he grew up on with Tarik. They cut down some trees, put up some fencing and built a backstop that was serviceable enough for a few years until Shaun, who owns Signature Surfaces Northwest, was faced with a decision.

“When my wife was pregnant with our first child, which was like 2013, the field that we had built was rotting out and we had to get it redone,” he said. “And I was just kind of like, you know, now’s the time. We’re going to have a kid, I’m not going to have that much time again, like, should I just put $25,000 into a wiffle ball field?”

The build came in phases. First was a permanent fence, backstop and dugouts. Then came the rightfield treehouse bleachers, center field seats, a press box and lights.

“One of the scariest moments was when Shaun was putting the lights in the tree and the tree is just blowing in the wind and he’s up there just [winging it] basically,” Travis says.

By the time they were done, the Nugents had themselves a gem of a ball park, nestled along the McKenzie River. Its right-field pole jetted out along Highway 126 to the wonderment of passing by cars and its left-field wall looked out to the mountainside.

A barbecue and kitchen space were built behind the backstop. Framed photos of baseball legends hung in the dugouts and stands. It was the field of dreams, with less cornfields and more Douglas fir.

“As far as man-made wiffle ball fields, it had to have been the best in the country,” Travis says.

Then the dream turned into a nightmare.

“I remember that night. The first thing I did when I heard there were fires up Vida, I called Shaun. And he’s like, ‘It’s gone,’” Travis says. “The only part that didn’t burn down was that picture of his brother. I get chills even thinking about it.

“So it’s like, for sure, we were going to rebuild it.”

In the press box Shaun has a faulty radar gun pointed behind home plate and a microphone some of the kids have been using to give batter introductions. His team, The Redsides, plays their first game in about an hour, and now that he’s grilled, chalked the lines, raked the base paths, introduced himself to new players and stocked the fridge, he’s itching to play.

The Redsides won championships here in 2018, 2019 and 2020, and while their team of high school buddies are collectively getting into their 40s, Shaun likes their chances this year.

It’ll be a challenge, he says. They’re used to that by now.

It’s taken nearly five years to get Vida Yards back to where it once was. It was a process that took thousands of hours, from clearing out loads of dead trees and ripping out more than 100 burned posts set in concrete, to completely rebuilding the dugouts, shed stands and outfield fencing.

Some things are different: a field once shaded by dozens of trees now basks in the sunlight. Some things are better: the new left-field bleachers feature a grand staircase entrance that Shaun says he built with a nod to the old Civic Stadium.

“It’s better than it was before,” Travis says.

Some things are still ongoing: throughout the afternoon, a trio of kids have been sitting on a large beam in centerfield that will eventually become a four-sided clocktower. Shaun wants to add a wood-fired pizza oven and outdoor shower.

The large house, adjacent to the field and looking over the river, still needs finishing before the Nugents can fully reopen the property as a vacation rental. Before the fires, Shaun says the property was rented out nearly every weekend from spring through October. Now, they’re hoping to rent out the ballfield and campground to start recouping a bit of what they lost.

“It’s extracted a lot of resources — time, money — in getting it here,” he says. “I love to see it come back to life. It feels really nice to be at a point where there’s a shareable product — a rentable product. It’s safe now. We’ve gotten it to a place where people can use it and be here. It’s safe and usable and has value.”

Shaun has ditched his sweatshirt for a red-sleeved baseball shirt with “Redsides” on the front and a No. 7 “Nugent” on the back. He’s wearing high red socks, aviator sunglasses — needed now at Vida 2.0 — and a hat tucked snugly above his eyes. It’s about time to switch the sparkling waters for something stronger, ditch the wallflower reporter and start getting loose. He’ll soon put on a glove, take the field and step onto the mound — his happy place — with Tarik watching over behind him in the outfield.

“You look out in center field and I see my brother’s picture. I see a huge wall of wild cherry trees that didn’t burn. I see a 100-year-old tree that didn’t burn. It’s a combination of both seeing the loss and the rebirth at the same time,” Shaun says. “Everywhere you look, there’s this mass destruction from the wildfire, and you see new green shoots sprouting up from the ash.

“It’s both amazing and tragic at the same time.”

— Tyson Alger, The I-5 Corridor