The Station Fire
I’m so done with the Station Fire!
It’s been a week now since the fires have been ravaging the hillside near our home. It’s rocky and steep and there’s no way anyone can stop it. We wake up mornings when the smoke is hanging over our house like a suffocating plastic bag and try to get out of town so we can breathe. Then afternoons when the wind shifts we drive back home and pretend we have a life. Since the vegetation hasn’t burned in 50 years plus, our community hasn’t been through this before. The police really don’t know what’s possible so we were woken up the other night at 3 AM and told there was a mandatory evacuation. While we packed, the sheriff’s cars sat outside our house directing folks down the hill. Finally at 4 AM when we were deciding what to do with our cat, the lights of the law disapeared. It was quiet. One of our neighbors walked by to say that his daughter was with the fire department and that the sheriffs had gotten it wrong. The mandatory evacuation was supposed to be for homes up from us.
It’s been over 100 degrees every day. Air conditioning has been blasting with an old unit that never gets the temperature down below 80 degrees. Even with all the windows and doors closed, the smoke still gets in bad enough to make your eyes hurt.
It’s not any better now than when they tried to evacuate us Monday night in a sense. The police are stationed two blocks down trying to keep everyone from coming in the area. It’s not clear what we actually can and cannot do. When they ask me why I’m going to my house, I just say to pick up a few things and leave. But it’s clear they don’t want anyone around just in case the winds shift and the fire blows down off the mountain into the community.
It’s interesting to watch my own coping skills through the disaster. It really reveals the role “normal” daily life plays in my sanity. Without the anchor of job, school for the kids, goals to achieve, I’m lost. I’ve been held hostage, glued to the TV screen hoping it would all “just go away.” But it’s not, not for a long time. To say the fire is “out of control” is like saying Dick Cheney has a problem with boundaries. You can’t overstate the nature of the circumstances.
I have a window cleaning business to pay the bills. Work shut down a week ago and was slow during August due to folks being gone for vacation, so I’m paying the bills with credit and bracing for the mountain of work coming up once this is all through. It’s going to be unlike any year prior. I’m pretty sure insurance companies pay for ash cleanup in mandatory evacuation areas. I’m not sure there’s a better business to be in unless you’re selling mushrooms at a Grateful Dead concert.
What I’ve noticed though is you can only stay victimized so long before something inside says, “Enough!” I can take stock in what I do have left, the long-term projects I’m working on, the time with the kids I wasn’t expecting. I can use this as an exercise in going inward and finding solace there. Exterior influences have long had too much of an influence in my life. With no end in sight all I really can deal with is this day, this moment. So here I am again, off to the wild blue yonder to find some fresh air and get the dog out. Funny . . . I’ve never valued “air” so much.
