When the fire sparked I was far away
It started at the bottom of the hill, a place you’ve heard before in the background of this show. A day’s walk from my house, and my desk. But the wind was characteristically blowing downhill, from west to east. No cause for serious alarm.
When I checked in the morning though, it had moved against the wind, up Slide mountain. The red line on the government map crept toward my spot, all my stuff. I checked over and over again as the fire continued it’s slow march, ticking off groves and forests I knew from walking trips into the valley, now presumably ashen.
I was gone, so I had my computer, a weeks worth of clothes, boots, everything I needed for immediate living, but everything else was now in the path of flame. The neighborhood was evacuated, meat rotted in the powered-down chest freezers, and we’d get occasional bursts of smokey updates from a couple of neighbors who refused the evacuation orders.
On the third day, Several houses had already burned in the valley, and the line was a half a mile from my front door, where it would surely run right over, up through throat forest. Thick dead wood and the late summer mules ears were dry as paper. That’s when the wind picked up.
Every night I would lay down to sleep and I’d see something else in the house that I’d lose if it burnt. At first it was just stuff. Speakers, mics, furniture, tools. I’d think of how to get a new social security card. But then, it was my grandpa’s jacket. My partner’s letters. Journals, signed books, projects, and the Wind archives. All the interviews I’ve ever done, and the third hard drive I’ve been meaning to load them on and store at another location, sitting empty in a drawer. And then of course the desk, the pathways, and meadows, the willows around the fountain of youth, the arborglyphs i knew by name, all of it.
On an evening announcement, the fire behavior analyst said we could see a many mile run that next day. They released a map that showed the woods surrounding our neighborhood going up before breakfast, before it shot something like 7 miles far to the north. Just a possibility — but still. The weather service issued the most severe of fire warnings — extreme winds and bone dry humidity. And the fire crews worked through the night, cutting lines by machine and hand, creating a gap to try and hold the fire in its boundaries.
That day I flew home. I got to the airport early so I could grab a window seat on the west side, and I could see where they were holding it, and the airplane was thrown around by the violent winds. I waited in the valley and fell asleep, distracting myself with Television not beamed from the top of Slide — those towers were all down. But I had seen this show before — fire lines overrun, huge flares of ember rise and sail into dry woods far downwind.
And then in the morning, I read the news.
The fire lines held through the night.
And the next morning, the same.
And then the wind died down
and that was that.
• •
It was as if I split off into the one alternate universe where the fire somehow stopped. Where not just my stuff, but my interviews, the aspen groves and the 80 year old carvings, the view from my living room, all lived. Blackened woods stood just a half mile from my house, bizarrely outlining my typical walking boundaries, but the places I knew best were untouched.. Today, I traverse, for the first time here, the land of the burnt. And then I exit into the sparred pines and continue.
