‘The whole sky was on fire’: Fort Worth friends heartbroken, homeless amid Ruidoso blaze

For nine years, two Fort Worth musicians lived as neighbors and old friends in God’s country amid a thick pine forest in the mountain resort town of Ruidoso, New Mexico.

Then the fires came.

On Monday, they lost their homes, their life possessions and their love for mountain life.

By late in the week, guitarist Joe Corpening was living in his car outside the only gas station in a nearby town. Fellow bluesman Dave Millsap, once the lead guitarist for Chuck Berry and Delbert McClinton, and his wife, Carol Boggs, were sleeping in a 1950s motel 80 miles away.

“Somebody at Walmart asked, ‘What do you need?’ and my eyes welled up,” Millsap, 68, said by phone Thursday from his room in Alamogordo.

“I realized — I don’t have anything. I have my wife and my car and my two cats. That’s all. Everything else is just rubble.”

Corpening lived side-by-side next to Millsap and Boggs in Alpine Cellars Village, north of Ruidoso in the path of the killer South Fork fire.

They were among an estimated 500 residents who lost homes both large and small in fires that wrapped around Ruidoso on three sides and burned 24,000 acres.

“It looked like the whole sky was on fire,” Corpening said by phone.

He answered the call in his car at a Capitan, New Mexico, gas station with “a phone signal, internet, everything you need.”

Corpening, 69, moved from Fort Worth to Ruidoso in 2012, leaving the traffic of South Hulen Street for mountain life in a city he used to visit at the height of its 1980s heyday as a horse racing and casino town.

MIllsap had grown up camping summers at Red River in northern New Mexico. When he and Boggs visited Corpening in 2015, she saw that the house next door was for sale.

Nothing is left but one pickup — oddly almost untouched — and a small figurine of St. Francis, the Roman Catholic patron saint of animals.

“I used to hand-feed my foxes and my elk, my deer, 10-11 turkeys every day,” Dave Millsap said. “I’m hoping he protected my little animals.”

Both described similar experiences on Monday.

First, Millsap heard a fire scanner call about smoke. From his deck, he could see a little wisp over the ridge.

By noon, Corpening saw the smoke growing brighter. Carol came by on her way out and shouted, “We gotta get out of here.”

Millsap planned to stay. But Boggs and a firefighter friend begged him to leave.

“As I was leaving, I looked up at the sky and it was just all fire — I could hear homes exploding — it was awful,” he said.

They eventually found shelter in different towns and moved to stay ahead of the fire.

Corpening said he’s insured and is just waiting to get back into the village.

Then he’s moving home to Fort Worth.

“I will not rebuild,” he said.

“The trees are gone. And Ruidoso is all AirBnBs anyway. I’ve just kind of had my fill of it.”

Surviving a forest fire is not like surviving a hurricane or tornado, he said.

The fire stays.

“It’s so mountainous up here, it’ll just burn for days. The crews will all leave and months will go by. Then here comes the fire again.”

Millsap and Boggs also have some insurance. A relative’s GoFundMe.com campaign has raised more than $20,000 for their stopgap expenses.

Millsap wants to stay in Ruidoso, where he plays regularly in clubs and at festivals.

But he and Boggs won’t live in the woods.

“These incredible fans are so kind to me,” he said. “I just don’t want to ever evacuate from fire again.”

If they build another house, he said, “it’s going to be out away somewhere, in a tiny house surrounded by gravel.

“Nobody wants to burn up in a fire.”

It was God’s country.

Before it turned into an inferno.