#pocket fire

Part of my city burned down over the course of a week.  You may have heard about it.  As I type this, it’s seventeen days since the first blaze, and tonight is the first night I’ve been able to see the moon.

My father is one of the unfortunate folks who got out with the clothes he was wearing and little else.  Two weeks later, the local authorities had decided to let people back into the neighborhoods that had been leveled by the fires, under strict supervision and for four hours only.  I went with him and his wife, their two rambunctious golden retrievers trying to climb into my lap the whole car ride there. To call it surreal would be an unjust understatement. We drove along, and everything seemed like it would be okay even though we knew it wasn’t.  The neighborhood I had called home for twenty years still looked much the same, there was the market, a familiar lightpole, the girl scouts building and then...nothing. I had thought that we’d be able to see something, maybe a standing wall.  Movies and TV would have you believe that there is anything left after a fire, anything at all, but there wasn’t.  Some of the houses had especially thick trees in their yards, and those trees now stabbed upwards, limbless and sharp in a most untreelike manner.  There was nothing alive about any of it, no birds, even the insects were gone.  Just a smell like fireworks, all sulfur and copper and eye-stinging chlorine from evaporated swimming pools.

The National Guard and a team of volunteers equipped us with slapdash Hazmat equipment, and made certain then double certain that we belonged there.  “How y’all doing?” asked one serviceman, not even looking at us as he ran our names down the list of residents.  I frowned in the back seat.  How exactly the fuck did he think we were doing?  My father had lost everything, thirty years worth of photographs, self-made business, and life.  His wife had just obtained a large amount of her own momentos from her family, and had been keeping them in our garage.  We were about to wade through the ashes of all that and see if anything could be dug back out again. How were we doing?  How stupid a question is that?  Of all times to try for normality, he had to pick that particular colloquialism? The volunteer lady was no better.  “Have a nice day!” she chirped as we drove away from her station. Yeah.  Nice.

I didn’t know that ashes liked to form in the exact shape of the thing they had once been.  A book I had thought might have survived inside a filing cabinet didn’t even crumble in my hand--instead, my hand passed straight through it as if it were water.  I stood there looking stupidly at the clawmarks my fingers had left down three straight inches of what had been densely packed paper. I started lining up things on the driveway that had made it, no matter how useless they were, no matter how little they meant to anyone.  The head of a shovel; a teacup that held its shape though the glaze was gone; flowerpots that somehow still had dirt inside.  A sudden stroke of luck: I knew where my father had kept his most valuable things, and poked around until I found a tiny box, the gold wedding band from a previous marriage miraculously untouched.  Dad was quiet as he pocketed the ring, choked with too many things to say much. I didn’t tell him that I recognized the squares of the medals he had been awarded during his time in Vietnam.  They weren’t medals anymore.  Now they were shrapnel.  I lined them up next to the empty ring box, and carried on digging.

Some of my old art supplies made it.  Four different grades of charcoal.  The largest was as thick as my middle finger, appropriately.

I hadn’t known what to expect when I went to the creek.  That creek meant more to me than anything else we had come to see--the religious among you can liken it to a church.  Tall bay trees and aspens lined a little trickle of water that supported a whole ecosystem of otters, steelhead, turtles, pumas and deer.  There had been wild chamomile that grew there, introduced but struggling, and horse-tails and cat-tails and salamanders with orange bellies. It had been bleached. The trees and everything green were now a pale tan, the exact shade of jeans that have come into contact with undiluted bleach.  The ground was black and th weeds shorn close to the soil, as uncanny as everything else because the grass and wild fennel had been taller than I was.  It looked like a negative photograph of somewhere else. It was then, standing at the precipice that separated the woods from the edge of the neighborhood, that finally I began to cry.

HELLO FRIENDS

So currently half my county and surrounding areas (including where my mom is up north) are on fire (again, because it's October in California and thus fire season). I discovered this upon landing back in the US on Monday to frantic texts and voicemails from my roommate and have not made it home yet due to road closures. I'm staying with friends in Sacramento with hopes of being able to get home in the next day or so.

My house is okay (just outside evac areas and fire is moving away), mom is fine--she was within an evac zone but didn't leave; but again, fire moving away and she ain't stupid. She has everything ready to go in case she does have to leave but at this point no reason to leave.

My roommate evacuated on Monday because of the smoke but no actual fire near us. She can go home whenever but her mom won't let her until I'm home whoops.