A fundraiser aiming to help out long-time members of the Marshall community whose home was destroyed in the Camp Fire has achieved over half of its $20,000 goal. Vicky MacDiarmid and Willy Hammond, who lived on the Mendoza ranch in Marshall for decades, moved to Magalia last December in order to retire in a more affordable area and to help care for Mr. Hammond’s aging mother, who lived in Paradise. Their home—as well as the home of Mr. Hammond’s mother—was destroyed in the fire, which was finally contained earlier this week. The house in Magalia was the first that the couple had ever purchased. “There was no time to get much of anything, they pretty much left with the clothes on their back,” Rozalynd Merrill, who lived next-door to the couple in Marshall, said. “It was very harrowing.” On the GoFundMe page, she detailed Ms. MacDiarmid and Mr. Hammond’s harrowing escape: driving on a road bordered by fire, in a line of traffic from which some never made it out alive. Ms. Merrill created the fundraising page the day after she heard about the fire. She described the pair as “kindhearted, loving people”; Willy worked as a carpenter in town, and Ms. MacDiarmid was involved in various community services organizations in West Marin and worked at the Tomales Food Bank. “They’re wonderful people, and they just moved up there less than a year ago and bought a place up there to be closer to Willy’s mother, and it’s all gone,” said Paul Reffell, a friend. “They are much beloved and much missed around here. They were going to have this wonderful retirement life, and it was all taken away. Luckily, they got out.” Ms. Merrill said that when people live in remote places, “the community tends to be closer because we rely on each other. We don’t have the goods and services at our fingertips like other communities do. Things come up, emergencies, whatever, and we’ve all learned that we need to be there for one another. So when something like this comes up for one of our people, we band together to help them.”