Let’s talk about the fires.

01Nov07

I hate fires.

The smoke doesn’t just irritate my eyes and lungs, it gets deep in my bones, and HURTS.  When a house burns, it’s not just wood, it’s a lot of other shit that ain’t supposed to burn.  Skies are not supposed to be both black and orange at noon, and my body is outrageously sensitive to the toxins in the air.

Fairly early on in the fires I knew my house was going to be safe.  It burned toward me initially, then the winds shifted and the fire began moving in other directions.  Fire is a bizarre, unpredictable thing, but having a large swath of burned land between me and it is actually just about the safest you can be.  Plus I live in a part of town that’s full of exactly the sort of crazy people who wouldn’t evacuate, preferring to run around with garden hoses and watering trucks and crazy in their eyes.  I would never dream of asking anyone to stay behind, it’s stupid and that’s how people get themselves killed in these fires, and my house isn’t worth anybody’s life, but some people are just never going to be convinced to do otherwise, and many, many people in this town still have their houses because of these lunatics and if they must exist, you want them to exist next door.

The fire left me feeling very grateful, not just for the home that I am blessed to still have, but how many homes were offered to me, just in case, as soon as the fire broke out.  I am very nothomeless.  I was also grateful for the sweet little note from WendyKat that arrived just as I was loading all my pets into my car and driving them over to Bunny’s house because a). my next door neighbors had left and that made me lonely, b). I was having trouble sealing my house against the smoke and I didn’t want my pets, especially my birds breathing that and c). Bunny’s house just feels so much safer.

And as soon as I felt secure about my house burning, and had a backup team of friends willing to check on them and evacuate them if the highly unlikely happened, I was happy to get out of that icky, smokey city.  One hates to complain about ash that contains the remains of people’s homes and memories and yes, even the remains of people, but ash is incredibly annoying.  Not to mention how sick it makes me.  I spent a day of my vacation bedridden (and I don’t mean languidly resting, I mean vibrating in pain) and the other days moving like a 90 year old woman, I can only imagine how much sicker I would have been if I’d stayed.

Of course, with the respect for the power and unpredictability of fire that comes from living in this part of the world, I was still just a smidge worried about leaving.

But as I drove home the night before I left, I ended up driving behind a horse trailer headed in what could only be a homeward direction.

And I smiled, not just at how happy the horse looked, but at the thought that if they were taking horses home to areas near me, it really was going to be alright.

The next morning as I kissed Mau and Dulce’s faces goodbye, I felt another tiny stab of worry.  I would never forgive myself if something happened while I was too far away to save them.

And then, just then, I heard the familiar racket of our local parrots flying overhead, a noise that had been noticeably absent since the very start of it all.  The birds has been the first to leave, a fact that caused me my very first stab of worry, my first thought that this fire might be BAD.

But they were back.  That was good enough for me.

Filed under: Uncategorized   |  4 Comments