Tending to Endings (sixty-one)
“What fire?” I ask Patty.
I am at my computer where I’ve been all afternoon. Patty’s voice over the phone sounds concerned.
“Richard just got home and says there’s a fire by your trails.”
I stand to look out my office window and see billowy smoke just over the ridge. The ridge where Patty and I hike each week and I walk every day, a brisk two minutes from my backdoor. In between those two points, grows sagebrush, some native grass, and lots and lots of cheatgrass, all of it crackling and dry. It is October 6 and the wildflowers have long withered. I cannot remember the last rain.
I remind myself things on the horizon often look closer than they are. I open the slider from our living room and walk out back, Patty’s voice still up to my ear. The winds are erratic, the kind that sends tumbleweed tumbling; the kind that breathe flames to life. It is hard to tell what way the fire is moving.
“It doesn’t look good,” I say, “I’m going to try and get more info.”
I have one of those 21st century moments where I’m googling on my cell phone for information about the smoke I see with my eyes. I find nothing. I hear sirens. My heart rate quickens.
It’s never time to panic, some inner voice says. Think. Pray. Water.
I dial John while heading to the garage.“Call me when you get this,” I tell his voice mail, “There’s a fire in the foothills.”
John is playing tennis on the other side of town, his phone in his truck. I will continue to try to reach him every five minutes.
I go to metal box in the garage that contains the automatic sprinkler controls, aware of things I should pay better attention to, like when John shows me how to reset the sprinkler system in case I ever need to when he’s not home. I see an array of buttons and knobs. I flip switches, and turn dials until I hear the familiar whoosh running through the lines and the start of the rotation.
I walk to the backyard and crank open the faucets on the house, flop hoses as close to the stupid junipers as I can get them. We are grateful to Beryl and Otto who built this house in 1980 and cared for it until we got here a little more than three years ago. The house is sturdy and came with fruit trees in the back and tall pines on the western edge of the yard.
But the junipers—which will take heavy equipment to yank from the soil—are not on my gratitude list. We’ve been meaning get rid of them ever since we moved in because they are scraggly and overgrown and, as the fire-wise websites inform us, they are among the least fire-resistant plants due to their lacy leaf structure and volatile oils.
I walk into the house and I grab my computer and John’s and set them in my car. I pack passports and car titles and the wills John I just signed. It turns out in a crisis, I’m not sentimental–I do not pack photo albums or my mother’s tea set–but I know how much I despise bureaucratic paperwork, and I don’t want to redo it.
I back the car out of the garage and turn it around for a quick exit, toss keys on the seat. Patty has pulled in the drive and is asking what she can do. We walk to the backyard and she picks up the hose and sprays the junipers, the dry grass.
My neighbors, Rob and Daryl are next door in their garden. Rob, walks over.
“What are we doing?” I ask as though there is a joint plan.
“If the flames come over the ridge, we’re going to leave.” They have dogs and two daughters and turkeys and hens that lay eggs in our yard. “Mike says, for now the winds are in our favor.” Mike another neighbor, has worked for the Bureau of Land Management.
“The winds feel all over the place,” I say.
“Right!?” Rob nods, “And you and I both know this is a tinder box back here.”
Finally I hear a helicopter overhead and look up to see it pulling the tiny bucket of water towards piles of smoke and flame. A police SUV makes its way up the wide trail past our backyard and the officer tells hikers and bikers to leave the area. It has been about twenty minutes and the calvary has arrived. I notice how small they seem up against the long giant cloud of smoke and the vast expanse of brown hillside.
I see the glow of orange flame licking the ridge.
We might be homeless, I say to myself. Though the word, doesn’t quite sit right. We might lose our house. That is true. And I have the twin sensation knowing how awful this is and how lucky I am at the very same time.
I walk back in. This time I grab underwear, sweat pants, tee-shirts, my contact solution and glasses. If I have to stay at someone else’s house, I at least want to have clean underwear and clear vision.
John has finished tennis, seen my twenty-three missed calls. I tell him over the phone that I have turned on the sprinklers and Patty is here helping water. I have packed our computers and paperwork. I ask what else.
“It sounds like you have done all the right things,” he says. “I’m on my way.” He assures me it will take time even if the flames come over the ridge. I don’t quite believe him.
“Anything else you want me to pack in the car?”
“No.” he says, and then, “Did you get my guitar?”
I walk back in the house. The wood from the piano flashes at me from the living room, the piano my sons learned to play on. Out of the corner of my eye I see the tiles John’s daughter fired in her kiln and that our kids set into the kitchen wall during our last Thanksgiving together, pre-Covid. The year we dined on Indian take-out while the grout dried.
I see now, but I cannot afford to think of all we will have to grieve. I walk out the front door lay John’s guitar in its black case across the backseat of my Subaru.
By the time John gets home, there are bulldozers on the ridge and the plume of smoke is making its way northeast of us towards other homes. A stray spark from the smoldering embers could still set fire to the hillside, but our house is no longer in the direct line and at least four city fire departments have arrived.
By 8 o’clock we are without electricity but feeling out of danger for ourselves. We worry about neighbors to our east who have had to evacuate. John and I play Scrabble by flashlight. We realize the network news has aired when friends from all over the Boise Valley text me to see if we and our house are ok.
By ten pm the flames are out and all the residents are able to return home.
This was not the first time I packed a bag to leave home with my heart racing and fear for my well being. The other is a story I don’t tell often or even think of much anymore. But it came forward during those moments I spent packing and illuminated things I don’t think I saw decades ago, when I left my first marriage and before I had children. And of course this is very pared down version of a complicated story:
While in my twenties living in San Diego, I was driving home from my new teaching job one afternoon trying to figure out if my husband really might kill me or if I was overreacting. A thought came that was more like the bright flash before a migraine than an everyday thought: I’m wondering if my husband might kill me. That’s not normal.
When I got home, I called my mom in Chicago from the back bedroom, whispering into the phone even though I was the only one home. My mom asked only one question. Did I have somewhere I could stay that night? This surprised me. I hadn’t told them much. It was a marriage after all. I thought there would be more questions. She told me to grab only what I needed and leave. I took random clothes and my wallet and headed to a friends.
For a few months I did not have a stable address. The threats and stalking continued for some time, and for years I remained on hight alert and half afraid. But I had so many friends willing to give me a guest room. I had access to counseling. I had parents in Chicago who would’ve gladly had me move back. I always had a kitchen table where I could unravel, places where I felt more at home than the apartment from which I’d run.
Eventually less than two years later, I moved to Idaho rather spontaneously and for variety of reasons. Once here, I noticed I was less afraid. I stopped looking for a particular shape of headlights in the rearview mirror. I made new friends, taught in a new school, grew a new life.
About two weeks after the fire, rumors were confirmed. The blaze was started by teenagers setting off fireworks. Thanks to multiple fire crews, no homes or animals or people were lost. Four-hundred and forty acres of land and trail system burned. The brush and sage will recover. We were all very lucky.
When I walk along the ridge now, I see scorched earth on one side and the beauty of Boise’s autumn trees on the other. There is something—not comforting, exactly—but grounding about having both so clearly in my view. I almost wish the scar from the fire was more visible from town. You have to hike up the ridge to see how close this fire came to the edge of us. It’s easy to think the danger has passed as if it couldn’t happen again next summer or tomorrow.
We are all vulnerable in the face of wildfire or hurricanes or the threat of violence or cancer or Alzheimer’s or death. And yet, in moments when this frailty comes most into focus, I am also aware of what I have. The things that won’t burn down.
Had we lost our house, I would have many kitchen tables where I could be myself as I wept. House or no house, I have places I belong including inside my own body, my own marriage, my own community.
The truth is that the winds have always been in my favor. I have had and always had layers and layers of safety net, many of them since birth. I have to participate to maintain relationships, but I have had one hell of a running start.
Loss in these conditions is different than losing a home when everyone you know is also living on the edge of poverty. Or when you are new to a country. Or when you have fled abuse and no one in your community believes you.
My questions for myself these days have less to do with how do we build emergency shelter and more to do with how can I help make sure that in my community people have places where they can be themselves in good times and in times of loss. It feels like a complicate question that will take me time to know.
November is a month of giving thanks for many of us. It is also my birthday month, having made now fifty-seven trips around the sun! What a gift it is to be here.
As a small way to celebrate, I am making donations to nonprofits in my area committed to providing community and support as well as secure housing to those in Boise going through challenging times. I welcome you to join me! Or to give in your own community in whatever way is most meaningful. In the meantime, I will be following my question about what my own role is in nurturing a beloved community in my home town.
With love and gratitude,
Laura
Catch: Every Family. Every Person. A Home.
Idaho Coalition Against Sexual & Domestic Violence
Boise’s Agency for New Americans
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Oh Laura, I’m so thankful this turned out the way it did. I was so involved in the story that by the time you walked by the piano I had chills. The photo of everyone lying underneath it… Your acknowledgement of the nuances of degrees of home loss and homeless – yes. Holding this story of packing in a hurry to flee beside the earlier one – wow. I’m so glad you were able to write this in your “spare time,” it is a gift, like every single post you write.