Fire

I don’t have any experience with wildfires. I grew up in North Carolina where summers are hot and steamy, filled with violent afternoon thunderstorms and damp heavy air. It’s stifling and sticky during the day and the nights are heavy and thick and humid. Not a place for wildfires. We have to pour diesel fuel on things to get them to burn. No one leaves car windows down because if you do it WILL rain. It takes days for wet jeans to dry outside, everyone has AC, and no one worries about wildfires.

Then I moved to northern California, where the air is light and dry and the summers are made of sunshine and there are never any clouds. The summer is golden yellow—the grass is crunchy and dry and if you want your plants to live you have to water them. It is hot, like the heat that hits your face when you open the oven door to check your baking; but it gets cold at night when the sun dips behind the hills. You can leave your car windows open for days and nothing gets wet. Your wet clothes dry within the hour. The landscape is clothed in muted browns and dusty green and everyone worries about wildfires.

And maybe that’s why I didn’t know the right things to say to the kids when the fire came. Maybe I was too calm. I’m not sure. It is an eerie feeling though, walking outside and seeing ashes falling from the sky. Having the sun shine with a sick red-orange glow, having the air hurt my lungs and burn my eyes. I thought it would scare me more to pack my things. To choose what’s important, what I cared about, and shove it into a bag, knowing that when we come back everything may be gone. I thought those choices would be harder, that I would want to bring more things. But once I had gathered what was important and packed it I realized what I had was 1 backpack of clothes, a journal, some letters, my camera bag and my laptop. Everything else, everything I had expected to care about, or expected to want I knew I could replace.

I threw a couple more bags of clothes in my car, (the more expensive ones, if I’m being honest) just in case, and parked it in the middle of the ball field in hopes that if the campus burned, the watered, empty field would keep it from totally melting. Then I got in the bus with the kids who were unable to go home with their parents, and drove them north, out of the evacuation warning zone.

And honestly, from there my experience with the fire was pretty abstract and distant. I had to stay with the kids. I wanted to go see the fire, because I was curious; because I wanted to photograph it. But I got to hang out with some pretty cool teenagers, take them bowling and to the beach and keep them distracted and not focused on the fire, and that was pretty fun too.

But I did get the chance to drive down through Santa Rosa after the fires ended and after all the kids went back to school. I got to drive through burned neighborhoods and see one house destroyed and the neighbor’s untouched. I talked to a lady as she and her husband sifted through the ashes of their home looking for grandparent’s jewelry. I listened to our day students talk about being evacuated, and how two of their houses burned.

I have since watched the grass grow back over the ashes, and cover the black sadness with its soft, bright green. I’ve watched things crawl back to normal and I’ve seen people have the strength to rebuild.