I just made the bus, I ran, or maybe I ought to say I jogged, but I made it, just barely. Gave the driver a big thank you from the heart, because the afternoon was packed with things to do on this Monday before Thanksgiving. Settled down to watch the neighborhoods pass by, wondering why after a visit to the dentist your mouth always feels a bit grimy. Maybe it’s the dental toothpaste grit.
I had about two hours before my husband would pick me up for a dinner party on university business. Two hours, and I needed to make sure before I left to get the neighbor’s two cats in for the night, even though we’d be leaving before dark. We have coyotes and bobcats in our area of southern California, and they love a tasty cat for dinner. My cats are indoors only, I’ve spoken here about why before, but it bears repeating. Traffic, predators, diseases, parasites, and perhaps most of all, I love my birds and lizards and don’t want to see what havoc my three young cats might wreak on the local populations.
Off the bus and down the road, I got myself home, picking a few of my apples from the Granny Smith on the way through my yard. What then? The big job. Writing.
Remember, it’s nanowrimo — National Novel Writing Month, and I had hit over 42,000 words and was full of the goal– to tell that story which had haunted me since I was a teen dreaming in my cold bed in New Hampshire of spiders and mountains, murder and a failing world. And I wanted to hit the goal of 50,000 words set before all participants in nanowrimo before the month’s end. (By the way, for fellow participants, my nano name is bugmom13 on the site.)
As the light lengthened, I took a break from writing in the cozy study to pick some eggplant from the garden, and the arching blue sky felt cold, the sun a lovely contrast on my back. In November the shadows have a brilliant edge, a cutting clarity. I hurried back in to change for the party, after that grabbing the neighbor’s key. I was early on the job but there are times those cats next door don’t feel like going in, and I wanted to be sure they were safe before we headed out for our gig. The air smelled off to me, but glancing around, I saw nothing. Maybe a chilly person in the neighborhood had decided to light up their fireplace with a few logs. The first burn of kindling and paper often has an acrid tang.
Next door, the orange and the black feline came running– I guess they felt the day was over and food would be welcome. I saw my husband draw up in the old Toyota, earlier than expected, and hurried faster. I scooped out kibble for the cats, changed the water in their dish and a klaxon went off on my belt.
I pulled out my cell and read a fire warning with first evacuation orders for up the mountain near the 154 highway that snakes over the pass. Thought of the smoke I’d thought I scented. Locked the cats in and went back to meet my husband.
It took no time to make a decision. This fire, due to the configuration of the land, had its sights potentially on us. No dinner– we went into fire prep mode after sending off a text message to our hosts with abject apologies.
First thing? We took down all the cat carriers in the carport. One per cat, and one extra because next door only had a single carrier. Water bottles.
I went in the house and grabbed the boxes we have packed with important and sentimental papers, photo albums, and memory sticks from the computer. Realized I hadn’t backed up all my images from recent trips and started a new memory stick on that job. I changed my clothes in a rush. Now for outside, but I first grabbed a steak from the freezer and set it in the oven to thaw safe from our cats, knowing we’d be plenty hungry later. The lights flickered. I put a small flashlight in my pocket. Nice to have a gas stovetop in these circumstances.
Husband on ladder, myself with rake. In the now fading light we cleared every dry leaf we could from the perimeter of the house, cleared the gutters. From recent reading it seems that living foliage isn’t a problem, but anything dead is. We already had fine mesh over all our house roof vents, and the roof itself is concrete shingle. We doused down the perimeter, it now being full dark, and readied the sandbags I sewed years ago for the bottoms of all the outside doors so no embers could be drawn in.
This may sound bloodless to you, but I cannot tell you the terrific quality of the orange fluctuating glow in the sky over us, brightening to an occasional glimpse of bare flames leaping skyward on the mountains. Everyone knows who has seen it, that fire always looks closer than it really is at night, all the distances abbreviated. Still, we could tell that the fire was racing down towards us, borne upon warm gusty winds. If we had this much wind down in the flats where we live, what was it doing up in those mountains where it was always far more violent? Each gust felt like a threat, and ash fell, fine and thick. Twice more in the night as we worked, the klaxon on our phones sounded with fresh evacuation warnings and orders. No orders for us, yet.
(I apologize for the poor quality of these photos. The smoke obscured everything so much, and what glimpses we got of the tall flames always seemed to flicker away before the camera caught it.)
Across the road from us the great apartment-sized horse van drew up repeatedly, doing ferry service. We heard the banging of hooves inside, the skittish thud and protesting whinnies of the horses they loaded up to evacuate. Evacuating horses underscored the seriousness. No one moves a horse at night in haste without good cause. We appreciated the fact they were taking the animals before a mandatory evacuation was announced. In the nineties a fire called the Painted Cave Fire raced down from the mountains to this neighborhood, borne upon hot winds, and the evacuation was a nightmare by all reports, in part due to the need to move horses in their great clumsy vans.
Husband and I met up, agreed we’d done what we reasonably could. I went in and organized cat food in a bag in case we indeed needed to evacuate, and then we went off in the Toyota to see if we could learn more about what we were facing than the news gave. Glad we did, because we discovered that there were three loci of flames well established, and two were low, in the foothills, running down the arroyo valleys like glowing glittering lava. If you look at my blurred photo above, you can see a second low orange hue on the right between the trees, and that’s one of the outlier fires. What the wind does in these circumstances is pick up gobbets of flame like bowling balls and hurl them across the landscape to lodge where they can.
Yes, we’d done the right thing to cancel our dinner plans. Funny to think of how important my race to catch my bus had seemed so few hours ago! I talked with our guest house renter who had just returned in the dark from a trip north, making sure he had flashlights if we lost power and that he had his own plan. Unsurprised to find he did, and plenty of flashlights.
I went next door and dosed the cats with the vet’s prescription of Gabapentin. I’m on reasonable terms with them, but I knew the little black guy was skittish and I didn’t want to have a wrestling match in the middle of the night if we had to move fast.
We settled to dinner, thence to bed after a last check of the news, which I’m sorry to say, seemed really inadequate, not even discussing the fire’s progress we’d seen from the high road. But the county would issue that klaxon again if necessary, and we counted on that.
By morning, the sky was full of smoke, the ash fall continued persistent. The air reeked. I kept all windows closed, worked on Thanksgiving dinner prep, and had no concentration for my novel. The weather predictions called for rain which was a lovely notion, but so often we’ve been told we’re about to be doused with wonderful rain and nothing has come of it. So especially under the circumstances, our need feeling so acute, I didn’t believe we’d see any. The day cleared as the winds changed direction, but the air outside still tasted foul.
Looking at the patterns, the places that had burned, it was clear the firefighters had done Herculean labors in cutting off the fire’s run down out of the foothills. I unpacked my clothes. Kept cooking. The fire was still at zero containment, then finally by evening it rose to 10% containment.
Last night, Tuesday night, I woke to the sound of rain.
robinwinter 