fire days

It is Friday, July something. Something with a 1. Maybe it's the 10th or maybe it's the 11th. I do know it's Friday. On Tuesday we woke up in the morning to an incredibly strange, orangy-gray sky. At 7:30 in the morning it was as dark as before dawn. A little later, the sun was so muted we could look straight at it. As the day progressed, the sky did not. It got a bit lighter, but mostly it just stayed eerily orangeish, and midmorning we realized small bits of ash and embers were raining down on us.

We realized the lightning fires that had been burning for two weeks had kicked up, particularly the one in the West Branch Feather River canyon, which was due east of us.

We spent a couple of hours thinking and mumbling and watching the sky and the news. By 2:00 pm we were putting into our cars the items we had packed over a week earlier: the canvas bags filled with important papers, pictures, albums, assorted pieces of jewelry (like we owned the crown jewels or something), sketch books and journals (me), oil paintings of long-gone pets and lighthouses (Steve), and an odd assortment of small items like little cat figurines (me) and earplugs and swim goggles (Steve). We did this in silence, each of us methodically marching back and forth to our respective cars. Finally the moment came when it was time to pack up the cats (all five of them) into their carriers, throw cat food and a litter box into the car, and take off. With a last scan of the front yard, we drove away.

Friends had set out a couple hours before us, with their four cats, headed for a Motel 6 in Willows, about an hour and a half away, so we followed them there. As we drove into the motel parking lot, I got a call on my cell from my friend Sharon, who had evacuated with her husband and four cats. Within two hours, they were unloading cat carriers into the motel room next to ours. This picture of our cars prompts me to want to sing:

"One of these cars is not like the others.
One of these cars doesn't belong.
Can you guess which car is not like the others,
before I finish my song?"


Thanks to free wireless Internet, we contacted friends and neighbors who had scattered to various places. We had about a day of worry when one close friend, a former neighbor who lived right on the burning canyon and who had been manditorily evacuated (cool word, manditorily) seemed to have disappeared into the ether, but we decided to go with the "no news is good news" train of thought. Finally, we received word from his wife that he was safe, and that the cat was in the shelter run by the North Valley Animal Disaster Group (donations gladly accepted).

The next morning I received some emailed pictures from another former next door neighbor on the canyon, who had snuck with her husband back into their home the night before and taken pictures from their deck, showing the fire burning across the canyon. Their house, and the one we used to live in as well as a whole line of them, sit at the top edge of this canyon, some on stilts. Down below is the West Branch of the Feather River, a rather narrow little thing, certainly not enough of anything to stop a fire.

Firefighters (bless them all) had been and were still battling to keep the fire from jumping the (very narrow) river and racing back up the other side, straight to these houses. 

Yesterday, I guess that was Thursday, we had this view from our motel window:


Conversations with some of the firefighters who descended onto the motel revealed that they were "having a hard time getting the fires under control." Fortunately, it has still been prevented from crossing the river into the town of Paradise. The people in Concow, south of us, have not been as lucky; they've lost about fifty homes and the fire is still burning.

And burning.

Hopefully, we will be able to go home soon. Maybe tomorrow.
.

fire, fire everywhere

Lately we have had fire at the forefront of our thoughts, day and night. Living on a ridge at the top of and alongside a series of canyons, we began on June 11 alternating between various news sources to keep abreast of fire updates as a huge fire skipped across the bottom of four canyons and headed uphill. As I wrote on June 15, nearly 30,000 acres burned just outside the town of Paradise, and 67 homes were lost. It took several days for that fire to be contained, and for those of us who were not affected, things started to get back to normal.

But not for long.

A week ago Saturday, in the middle of the afternoon, we started hearing thunder. And then it got louder. There were not many "one one thousands" to say between the flashes of light and the amazing crashing noises that went along with them. We also heard zaps and cracks and pops. It didn't take us very long to get all the cats into the house (not that we needed to coax them) and by that evening, we started to hear about fires that had been started by the lightning. By Sunday night, hundreds of fires were burning throughout Northern California, over two dozen of them here in our county. And it wasn't long until we discovered that we were literally surrounded by fire.

And smoke. Lots of smoke. For three days, we could hardly see through the trees to the house next door.

There are firefighters here from all over the state and even out of state. We have been constantly checking the Internet, television and radio to see which fires are getting bigger, which ones are spreading to where, which ones are merging, and which might be threatening us (none, so far... whew!), and who is being evacuated from where.

On the day when we discovered that a fairly close neighborhood was on evacuation alert, we started getting organized ... just in case. So now we have satchels and canvas sacks full of pictures and important papers all packed up and ready to be carried out the door. The cat carriers (five of them!) are stacked in the garage and we have lists of "last minute things" to grab, like medications and money and underwear. And the external hard drive and the laptop.

The biggest worry for us is that there is only one road out of our community, going down the hill. For over ten years, the citizens here have been asking for another exit road. There's an unpaved forest road to the north (which also happens to be uphill), but it's pretty rugged and only good for trucks and 4-wheel-drive vehicles. Our Congressman, Wally Herger, has been in office over twenty years and has done nothing about this problem. Of course, every time there's a fire, he flies around in a helicopter looking at the damage and then attends town hall meetings where he pats himself on the back for having secured 11 million dollars for the road. Which needs more money than that. Which is still just gravel. Which HE doesn't need because HE lives in an exclusive, gated community. And of course he doesn't mention that he only secured that money because citizens hounded him. But I digress ....

Today the helicopters are flying overhead with regularity, carrying those big buckets of water, and the skies are starting to be blue again. Thank you, firefighters!
.

invasion

No terrorist, no alien
from deepest space
could do more damage
than fire storming
every edge
of this mountain town.

One quiet morn
it quickly flares in weeds
ten miles away, jumps
over delta-carved canyons
four in a row, just like that,
heads uphill far too fast
for a small town fire crew.

Homes fall in its path
one after another.

On the high side of town,
at the apex of this
confluence of canyons
we flip from news to news.
Maps spread on the table
we follow the path, measure
the shrinking distance
between us and it, finger-trace
the north road, the south road,
balance the cost of leaving
with the risk of staying.

We field emails and phone calls
from family, from friends,
“Are you alright?” they ask
“Is it close?” and we say
“We are fine,” while we know

that we sit at the apex
of this confluence of canyons,
that no road leads to safety,
that we are
at the mercy
of the wind.
.