River Fire Water Smoke

Last week, I woke up one morning with a strange ringing in my head. I wrote about it here: Tinnitus. The next morning when I woke up, the unsettling ringing was gone, and my tinnitus was back to normal, which is sometimes annoying but generally manageable. I was so grateful. It made me realize how often I fail to appreciate the beautiful ordinariness of my life.

So any day you wake up without a strange ringing in your head? It’s a good day.

I have something to add to that this week.

Any day you wake up and your house is standing, even if it’s messy and cluttered and could use a kitchen remodel, even if the cat keeps peeing in the laundry room and is getting old and dropping random poop patties around the house?

Even with all that? It is a darned good day.

We know we live in fire country. We have go-bags packed.

Last Wednesday, a fire started, not far from here. They named it the “River Fire.” I first saw the smoke as I was driving home from town, after going to my weekly centering prayer circle, followed by a little work and a trip to the grocery store.  I was in a jolly mood, feeling pretty good about all that I had accomplished that day. And then? There was smoke. And a little panic.

When you first see the plumes, it’s nearly impossible to figure out where the smoke is coming from.  The smoke can be a hundred miles away, but if the wind is blowing toward you, it can look like it’s right next door.

As I drove up the highway, at first, I worried that the plume might be coming from the neighborhood where I grew up. Nope. Maybe Meadow Vista, the town where I went to elementary school? Not there. As I made my way up the freeway, the plume got bigger, and bigger, and soon it was clear: it was close to Colfax, a small town just down the hill from us.

The smoke was there, and it was growing fast.

There is a website that we check here when fires break out, or when there is any pressing local news. It is Yubanet. I am grateful for their commitment to quickly and accurately relay information. For the next few hours, most of us were glued to the site, compulsively refreshing our feeds to check for new information.

The news wasn’t good. In a matter of hours, the fire went from five, to fifty, to one hundred, to one thousand acres.  There were spot fires near Rollins Lake Dam, where we regularly walk and enjoy the water and beaches.  Major roads were closed. Enormous aircraft that looked as big as passenger planes flew above, dumping fire retardant and water.

Our home was above the fire, several zones above the voluntary evacuation zones. Still, though. Flames like these are unsettling. After I got home, I took my massage table out of the trunk of the car where it normally lives and packed a few things that couldn’t be replaced: quilts my grandmother made, dolls that belonged to my Mom, my children’s baby handprints. It wasn’t a lot, and there was no immediate concern, but it felt like the smart thing to do. Because all of us have realized that summer fires here are unpredictable, and given the right (wrong?) conditions, they can spread quickly. You can go from not being in an evacuation zone to being told to “get out now!” in a matter of minutes. We live up the canyon from where the fire started. It didn’t seem impossible that the fire could grow to reach us, especially since there were numerous spot fires breaking out upriver from the main blaze.

As it turns out, it didn’t reach us. It was something of a miracle that most of the fire’s growth happened soon after it broke out Wednesday afternoon. Strong winds were predicted overnight that never materialized. The fire grew Thursday, but never exploded like we feared. It didn’t become a fire like the Dixie fire, which destroyed an entire town this week and has burned more than 450,000 acres. Today, on Saturday as I write this (checking yubanet.com again), our River Fire burned through 2600 acres but is 48 percent contained. Most evacuation orders, including all of the voluntary ones, have been lifted.

I know (I think we all know) that life can change so very quickly. That you can wake up on a Wednesday morning and have plans for the day. Maybe at 1 pm you go to the kitchen to make a bologna sandwich and you listen to the radio like you always do and there’s troubling news like there always is. Maybe it’s Covid and the Delta variant and you think about the people you love who won’t get vaccinated because of so many reasons that you don’t understand. Or maybe you are thinking about homelessness or global warming or what to wear or the upcoming recall election and you swore Trump would never get elected and you are pretty sure Governor Newsom won’t get recalled, but maybe you are wrong and that would be terrible.

At 2 pm, you see a wisp of smoke out the kitchen window, but before you have time to process that, your phone starts pinging and there is an evacuation order that screams, “Get out now!” So you put your dogs in the car and your cat and you see flames roaring onto your property, some of them 50 feet high, and you drive like hell to get out of there. And that is all. You don’t have time to think. You barely have time to grab the go-bag. There is no trunk packing, no memorabilia saving. There is nothing but go. Go as quickly as you can, and don’t look back.

We lost more than 60 homes this week.  Our River fire didn’t spread very far, but it demolished the homes of people we know, beautiful places with organic gardens and lifetimes of memories. The victims are teachers and coaches, retired folks, moms and dads and teenagers.

There is nothing left.

The sky here has been smoky, the air quality yesterday registering as possibly “some of the worst in the world,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle.  It’s not our fire that is causing the smoke, though. More likely, it’s that Dixie Fire or some combination of the seven other major fires burning around the state.  This smoke is tricky. I keep looking out the window and for an instant think that maybe the sky is grey with rain clouds, that there might be rain and hope coming our way, and cooler temperatures, and maybe autumn and sweaters. Not yet. We still have months of fire season to go. And a long time until the rains come.