Fire Reflections

This is a ribbon that the sheriff ties to your front door (or front gate, or front yard tree) when you have been ordered to evacuate because a fire has broken out in your area. If you get a ribbon like this and stay home, the sheriff will not help you if the fire gets close to you. You were warned. After our recent fire, I saw ribbons like this up and down the street that is right above my home. I didn’t realize that folks so close to me were ordered to leave. It probably meant we should have left, too.

First, the good news: CalFire knocked out our recent fire quickly, keeping it to less than 30 acres with no structures destroyed.

Now, the less good news: You never know when a wildfire is going to break out in these parts.

I never dreamed that two weeks ago Saturday would be a fire day for me. Until it was. There are levels of luck with these fires. The luckiest? If you happen to be home when the fire breaks out, as I was that Saturday. Because then you can pack your car, at least a little, as you watch the planes fly overhead and hear the firetrucks rumble up the road, and you can wait to see if you will be under a voluntary evacuation order, or a mandatory one, or maybe none at all. If you are home, you can grab things: clothes, toiletries, keepsakes, photographs.

But if a fire breaks out when you are not home? That changes everything. If you are at work or grocery shopping, as has happened to me in the past, you check the news apps to try and figure out how big the fire is, if it is growing quickly, and whether you can make a run home. The last time we had a fire near us, it started near the freeway, so the authorities ended up closing the freeway. I was able to get home before they did, so I was able to grab my laptop and pack the car. But my next door neighbor? They closed the road before she got home from work. She had another neighbor stop by her home to pick up her computer.

If you can only have a neighbor grab one thing as they are evacuating? You choose wisely. All of my good neighbors have keys to my house now, just in case. But the things that I would have them grab, without question? Biscuit, my sweet dog. His leash is by the front door. And my fat cat. His carrier lives outside the front door in fire season.

We had a little rain this last week, a good soaking. But still, fire season is not over.

So until it is?

Every day, there are things I take with me when I leave the house.

Every day between now and cooler temperatures, between now and the rains, I put my laptop bag in the car and take it with me to work. It holds my laptop and charger, my journal, a book where I record a sentence everyday, one that I’ve been writing in for years. I also bring my “Go Bag,” the bag that contains my passport and important papers. I left some items in my car that I brought out when I thought we might have to evacuate. They will stay there until the end of fire season: a quilt my grandma made, a quilt that friends made me from scraps of skirts and dresses that my Mom sewed for me years ago.

One of my friends told me that his friends who lost their homes in a nearby fire a few years ago are fine now. Sure, they would have preferred not to have lost their houses and belongings, but they survived and are living good lives. There are news reports every fire season about folks who are told to evacuate who decide to stay behind, because they have water tanks or plans, and think they can hold back the flames. I don’t think I would do that. I love my house, but I love my life more. I know a family who lost their home in the fire that destroyed the town of Paradise a few years back, who said that their friends who didn’t lose their houses almost wished that they had. Because of the cleanup around them, and smoke damage: it almost would have been easier to have started over.

Watch Duty is the app that alerts me to when a fire has broken out in my county. It has a particular sound, different from all the other apps on my phone. Most of the time, I have my phone turned to silent because that is how a massage therapist lives, but on a recent afternoon, my Watch Duty app buzzed (again).

Instantly, my anxiety soared.

I saw, right away, that the fire was in a different part of the county, nowhere near my home. I breathed a sigh of relief that it wasn’t my fire this time, while at the same time worrying about the people who lived near that fire. The app informed me a few minutes later that that fire was under control, so that was good news.

But can the sound of an app trigger a sort of PTSD reaction?

I think maybe. It is the sound of fire season. There is no escaping it, and there will be no escaping it. Not until the rains come.