A great number of people are probably aware that the state of California is pretty much a large forest fire at this point. One of the individual wildfires is the Oak Glen Fire. Yesterday, I was six or eight blocks away from it.
Today, my mother walked outside to look up at the planes dropping fire retardant, looked eight houses down to the end of the street, and saw flames.
M and I were right behind her, and it is uniquely terrifying to watch one's mother panic. In ten minutes, we had files, computers, medications -- the irreplaceable essentials. I packed up the entire contents of my brother's dresser and a few of his electronics in what must have been about 90 seconds. My father, who was still at work, can now confirm that his pickup does over 100, and incidentally is now a federal criminal because he went around a roadblock. "I figured they could chase me, arrest me at the bottom of the driveway after I gave my family the truck keys," he told our neighbor Dale.
We were never given the evacuation order, though I get the impression that's partly because there just wasn't time. It started a few feet from my neighbor Devon's back fence. She was all alone when it began. The whole thing was nightmarish -- I was grabbing things and not panicking, because only one person in any given crisis situation is able to panic but I was a little frantic. I was okay as I tried to think of any essentials we might have forgotten, and find the cats, but then I realized we were going to have to leave our tortoises behind and I lost it, sobbing for about thirty seconds before I could give myself another task to rush to.
When I went outside I could see the flames on the hill. The shrubbery around houses burns with a much blacker smoke than most natural California vegetation. And to think I could have gone my whole life without knowing that. I ran around the block to check on elderly neighbors, and people were frantically moving vehicles and trailers to the far end of the street, filled with possessions thrown into the backseats. Flashing lights were everywhere, and the planes were flying so low overhead I could pick out every detail of the mechanics.
It's interesting -- there's only a certain length of time that a human can maintain a frantic emotional state. We all sort of segued from terror to walking around and talking to each other and watching at about the same time. There was this general knowledge that there was nothing we could do but wait -- and then we hit the point where my neighbor Jim suggested ordering fifty pizzas and advising them that the delivery person would have to do some offroading to get around the police, and suddenly there was this knot of people laughing hysterically and dreaming up home-insurance fraud schemes.
They're calling ours the Pendleton Fire. It may have been an ember, but it was probably a lit fire -- and while they're not saying so on the news, I overheard a discussion of having caught some kid who is suspected of lighting the match. Suddenly, vigilante justice doesn't sound quite so bad.
We're all okay now -- and probably safer for having had all the fuel around us burn away -- but it was a long, horrible day, and I still can't sleep.
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