Raw, Bright, Strange, New

 

 

A massive clap of thunder shook the house, woke us all up at around 3am, loud enough I got out of bed to see if lightning had hit a nearby tree. Two hours later, for the first time, I heard the Hi-Lo siren, a slowed down version of the traditional European siren: high pitch, low pitch, on and on. A sheriff’s car was slowly making it’s way down our country road.

Phone calls. Texts. IMMEDIATE EVACUATION ORDER. “It’s at Jones Bar.” “It’s down by the river.” “It’s on Owl Creek Road.” “Just go!”

We weren’t properly prepared. I suppose almost no one is. Dazed by the siren in the still-dark morning, my wife headed straight for the door, no purse or phone or change of clothing. One son packed only his basketball shoes, another grabbed his sketchbooks. My mother pulled down one small bag after another, filled them with what I can only assume was 75% of her closet and dresser, then lined them up to be loaded into the car.

They left. I stayed behind, finding a crate for the cat, packing pet bowls, food, and medicine, grabbing a photo album. I took pictures of every room, pulled down one small painting, looked for birth certificates. I was unwilling to leave. I couldn’t see flames, wasn’t even clear where the fire was. What’s the hurry, I thought. I have plenty of time.

Suddenly remembering I hadn’t dealt with insurance for my brand new tractor, I called the agency up, casually laughing and mentioning that I needed to get that policy going soon. Like, today? I went outside to do something about it, my precious tractor, the tractor I’d wanted since I was 6 years old, delivered just a week ago, on which I’d not yet even made a payment.

While the planes and helicopters fought the fire down the canyon, I tried to water the soil around it. It was late summer, so the well ran dry, needed resetting, ran dry again. The tractor sat less than forty yards from our front door, beautiful orange like the smoke-shrouded sun above, forlorn in an empty field.

The planes came closer, then circled directly above me, skimmed the tops of trees, engines roaring so loud I could hear it in my chest. Surging with adrenaline, I drove the truck, fully packed, up the road to get a better view. I even tried to capture a video of the exact moment a bomber dropped a cloud of pink fire retardant on a neighbor’s house. Or course this wasn’t a movie, wasn’t filtered, edited, wrapped in a neat package. I could see the flames on the other side of the road. Thick smoke billowed and swirled from the tops of burning trees.

My heart raced. Captivated by the drama and danger, by the planes racing against time and destruction, I moved the truck to the northwest corner of my land, even closer to the fire, and sat watching flames grind through the trees and brush toward me. Stripped of it’s tasks and considerations, here before me was real life, raw, bright, strange, new.

Almost accidentally, out of the corner of my eye, I saw flames now burning in the dry grass on the other side of the truck. Winds pushed embers through the sky. Orange fingers of flame reached forward in all directions. And yet, and yet, and yet—I could not leave. I moved again to the driveway, truck loaded, engine running. I watched the flames cross onto my land, all along the fence line to the west, watched them leap from oak to oak, consume an entire pine tree in seconds, like a bomb.

With a sudden ache of grief and shock, I realized that I was going to lose the house, and everything in it. A huge wave of loss crashed into my body. This is actually it, I thought, nauseated. My luck’s run out. I’ll be the guy pulling melted spoons from charred wreckage, or standing in the blackened center of nothing left.

Flame slid across the low grasses, inexorable. I imagined some scenario in which I leap-frogged both truck and tractor, moving one forward, then running back to the next, little chunks of ground gained each time, down the road to safety. I left the truck running and ran toward the flames. What was I thinking? I wasn’t thinking.

The fire was just five feet from the tractor when I got there. In that instant, I forgot my plan to leave. Instead, motivated entirely by immediate need, I dropped the scraper box and began dragging forward to create a line of bare dirt, to somehow slow the flames. I stopped, looked up for a moment.

That’s when I first saw it. The entire southern boundary of the land was on fire. Embers had flown 200 yards through the air. Flames licked tree trunks, took down native shrubs in flaring, explosive instants. All the time I’d sat in the driveway on the north side of the house, anxiously studying the flames grinding through the landscape to the west of me, I hadn’t once considered fire from any other direction. While I’d processed the inevitable loss of every single thing I owned, silent flames crawled up behind me. Across the meadow, just 20 feet from the wooden stairs, from my son’s bedroom, a lilac bush went up in flames.

In an instant, I turned the tractor around. I was frantic. To get to the fire, I had to drive all the way around the house. Just as I arrived, the flames caught a patch of tall dry grasses, on a slope too steep to mow. I had no idea what to do next, so I started digging at the flames, tamping them down with the bucket, pushing soil forward.

All time stilled to that moment.

A minute later, a single firefighter arrived with a handheld tank and started spraying the forward flanks of flame. Shortly after, a couple of wildland crews pulled up. Short tough trucks, three people in each, carrying just 500 gallons of water. The crews started dragging hoses and scraping the ground around the house with fire rakes. One crew worked to save the barn, unsuccessfully, while the other began spraying the bases of trees, where the flames seemed to cluster, to gather resources.

Then there was fire everywhere, finding every opportunity to move. Winds came up and pushed fast flames through the north side, then the west. The southern meadow sparked again. At times the air itself seemed to burn. Crisscrossing the land, I dragged the scraper, dug soil, pushed charred brush and logs away from structures. The well head burned, the land line melted. Cell service was nonexistent. An hour in, I stopped to refuel the tractor, and realized the truck was still running, the animals still waiting, scared, desperately thirsty.

The fire crews came and went, simultaneously battling fires at 15 other houses, along the freeway, making a stand at a road 2 miles away, beyond which lay a housing development. They would suddenly, almost magically appear just when a massive tree was igniting, or, at 5am, when the flames crept toward my propane tank, battling them into semi-submission before moving on again.

Night fell. The flames got lower and slower, less intense. Fire fighters call this ‘laying down.’ It crawled through the creek gully, leaving smoking black land and isolated flames from burning tree roots buried in soil, like campfires on a Civil War battlefield. The fuel around my house was all burned out, so I went to a neighbor’s and drove in circles through the darkness, trying to cut some sort of fire line around his cabin, to stop the flames from marching west toward other houses.

When I returned, woozy, dehydrated, lungs filled with smoke, two massive bulldozers crawled across the land, otherworldly, unstoppable, big as dinosaurs, bright spotlights cutting through thick smoke. They were following the black, cutting along the edge of the fire so as to create a line between the still glowing hot spots and the unburned land. I went inside, drank three warm beers, lay on the carpet where the air was least smoky. I catnapped, rose and worked, catnapped some more.

In the end, I lost the barn, a couple of sheds, the well head, all of the fruit trees, the hedgerow, 2000 feet of irrigation lines, and much of the beautiful forest surrounding our house. Five neighbors lost their homes, four others suffered damage. We were lucky – we still have a house. We still have photo albums and refrigerator magnets, hand-written journals and couch cushions, one hundred-year-old chess pieces and a new TV. We still have the consequential and the banal, the precious and the forgotten.

And I still have the tractor, a little blistered, no longer so shiny. Like a fool, I had run out to save it. With that curious luck sometimes gifted to fools, I’d saved the house, too. I blame the tractor. I praise the tractor.

 

©Scott V. Young