The Million Year Romance
Dragon in the Land:
People and Mega-fire in California
- Episode One:
Lightning and Smoke - Episode Two:
Remembrance of Fires Past - Episode Three:
Red Ball Sun - Episode Four:
The Running Battle - Episode Five:
Evacuations and Destinations - Episode Six:
Maze of Chaos - Episode Seven:
The Dragon in the West Village - Episode Eight:
Fire Camp - Episode Nine:
Man-dragon - Episode Ten:
Percent Contained - Episode Eleven:
Smart Work, Dumb Luck - Episode Twelve:
What To Do Before The Nightmare Comes True — Again
What's New
Writing
Dragon in the Land:
People and Mega-fire in California
by Howard V. Hendrix
Episode Eleven:
Smart Work, Dumb Luck
By the end of its third day of operation, the Red Cross Shelter and Evacuation Center in the gym at Sierra High is packed beyond capacity. Despite the best efforts of Red Cross and Emergency Services staff, as well as evacuee/volunteers like Pete and Mary Shaw, the place doesn’t smell too good. People are hot, devastated, shocked, grumpy, exhausted, aggrieved, fearful, and hopeful, all at once.
The volunteers providing emergency food and shelter look at least as exhausted as those they are assisting. Even the specially trained Red Cross mental health counselors — brought in to comfort and support those who have lost a lifetime’s possessions to the fires — look like they could use a mental health break themselves.
Day after day, Pete has seen around him evacuees on cots, little clusters of families or friends or newly acquainted strangers, people in dozens of tiny impromptu communities. Some are catching sleep, others are clutching wallets and purses with identification, money, check books, credit cards. Still others carry boxes loaded with personal hygiene items, or prescription drugs, or medical supplies. Some carry plastic containers with photo albums, family heirlooms and jewelry, computer back-up disks and hardcopy documents. The more-recently arrived carry in their arms bedding, clothing, children’s toys — whatever they could carry away as the evacuation orders pushed them from their homes, ahead of the flames.
Many worry about their pets, with the concern and emotion others reserve for human family members. All talk about their homes, the lives they left off, the lives they will take up — again, but never the same — once this disaster is over.
By the time the fourth day of the calamity dawns, Pete has learned from rumors and media reports that their misery has much company. The fires ignited by the great dry-lightning event have made refugees of over 900,000 Californians, driving them out of foothill and mountain communities up and down the state. The President has declared a major disaster in all areas of California affected by the wildfires, paving the way for federal money to come to those governments, businesses, and individuals that have suffered losses due to the blazes.
At local Red Cross chapters all over the nation, relatives seeking information on family members housed in California shelters are filling out Disaster Welfare Inquiry forms. Over the internet, aid and assistance is coming in from as far away as Auatralia through a proliferation of California Fire Disaster “wiki” websites, all coordinating donations of money, time, information, labor, equipment, and other goods.
The fact that California has almost exclusively taken the brunt of the dry-lightning event also has a paradoxical upside. Since the rest of the West has been relatively quiet, there have been firefighting resources available for shifting to the California firefront — luckily. Hope surges with every report that, at last, those fighting the fires are gaining the upper hand throughout the state.
With the prospect of that statewide success, however, also comes the fear, for so many individuals and families, that they will soon return to find the homes they left are now only ashes and broken stone. Beneath the certain knowledge of the vast statewide calamity lies the great uncertainty of what the endgame will be for nearly a million Californians — and for many millions more, in their extended families throughout the nation and the world.
In Pete’s own family, he and Mary have heard from his older son Billy and daughter-in-law Karen, temporarily and safely housed in Fresno. They have not so far been allowed to return to their place in Sky Harbor, so they as yet know nothing definite about their home’s status.
Highway 168 into Clovis is still closed to all but emergency vehicles and personnel, so their younger son, Tom, remains marooned in town. On the phone, however, Tom is hopeful that today he will at last be allowed to return to the foothills, to check their home on Gooseberry and reunite with Jen and the kids at the shelter.
The uncertainty of it all has been particularly excruciating for Mary. She has never been fond of being uprooted, and the whole business has been an emotional rollercoaster for her. Every good weather or fire report heightens her hopes, every bad one feeds her fears.
“The things we worry about are usually the ones that don’t happen,” Pete says, trying to comfort her.
“Yeah, but then there are the things we don’t worry about that do happen. That’s what worries me.”
“Which means, logically . . . ?”
“What I should really be worrying about is everything I’m not worrying about,” Mary says with a crooked smile. “The only way to make sure absolutely nothing happens is to worry about absolutely everything.”
“And that’s asking a bit much — even for you, my dear.”
As the day goes on, hope seems to be getting the better part of fear. Pete learns from a Cal Fire Public Information Officer that the second and much moister monsoonal flow has dropped enough rain over the higher elevations to free up fire companies that had been fighting blazes around some of the nearby mountain communities.
“Don’t get me wrong — there are still fires burning in the back country,” says the Cal Fire PIO, “but the rains in the higher elevations, combined with the sparser populations up there, means a lot of the companies that were fighting wildfires around mountain communities in the central and sourther Sierra are now coming down to the foothills. They’ll be assisting with the fires still burning in the lower elevations.”
Engines of the Shaver Lake and Pine Ridge Volunteer Fire Departments, Pete learns, are among those local companies coming down from the mountains, on standby. He and Mary make their way toward the staging areas, on the off chance of possibly seeing his brother Joe among the standby crews.
When they do see Joe, he’s not with an engine and he’s not in uniform. He does have his wildland turnouts and all the rest of his personal protective equipment in the gearbag he’s carrying. A RELM emergency personnel radio also crackles from the holster at his belt, from time to time. He looks even more exhausted than Pete feels.
Their sister-in-law Yolanda is with him. They have come down off the mountain together, to try to find Pete and Mary. After they share hugs all around, Pete and Mary hear the good news from Yolanda and Joe. Their house in Shaver Lake has come through it all, largely unscathed.
“Looks like getting that fire-prevention religion paid off for you,” Pete says, smiling.
“Or maybe some other kind of religion?” Mary suggests.
Joe gives them a long look, then slowly shakes his head.
“Smart work and dumb luck, as far as I can tell.”
“What do you mean?” Pete asks.
“Even though most homes that didn’t have the required fire clearances did burn, I have neighbors whose homes were just about as fire-safe and defensible as mine, and they still lost everything. Maybe they forgot to cover a vent in their foundation or attic, but anyone can overlook that kind of detail. Our place survived, and theirs didn’t. I don’t know why. I can tell you it wasn’t because they were ‘bad people’ that their homes burned down. It wasn’t because we’re the best of folks that our place survived, either. Can’t put it all on faith or works. It was more random than that.”
“Luck?” Pete asks. Joe gives him a weary smile.
“No, not just that. You’ve seen me at a casino — “
“Only once.”
“— and that’s plenty enough to know that if I didn’t have bad luck I’d have no luck at all. The one smart thing Yolanda and I did was work to make our place as fire-safe as we could — in the hopes of improving our odds. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst. It seems to have worked out, this time.”
A moment later, Joe takes a radio call. He’s being called back to duty on one of the Shaver engines. Before he departs to change into his wildland gear and join his crew, Yolanda gives him a long kiss, but she stays behind with Pete and Mary. She is still with them at the shelter, with Jen and the kids, when they get the good news — and the bad.
The first call comes from their older son and his wife. Auberry Road has been opened. Karen and Billy’s place in Sky Harbor has suffered no more damage than the loss of an outbuilding — a small woodshed.
They have barely started to enjoy their relief when they take a call from their younger son, Tom. He tells Pete that 168 has been opened, then asks to speak to his wife. Pete turns the phone over to Jen.
In moments they learn that Tom and Jen’s place on Gooseberry has burned to the ground. They have lost everything they left behind.
Before Jen can break down in tears, Pete hurries the kids out of the shelter on the pretext of seeing if they can spot their greatuncle, “Guncle” Joe, before he leaves with his fire engine. Looking back over his shoulder, he sees Mary comforting a tearful Jen. For the briefest moment, Mary turns to him a face that has worried both too much, and not enough.
Pete walks with his grandson Will at his side, the boy who looked at the satellite images of the fire on TV and saw in them the shape of a great dragon. Pete thinks about that, and about what Joe said.
In a disaster, it is not necessarily the best who lose nothing, nor the worst who lose everything. Somehow, the perfect fear of losing everything and the perfect hope of losing nothing are two sides of the same coin. Flip it and call it. Dragon’s heads. Dragon’s tails.
The randomness of that will be a comfort to him in the coming days, especially once he learns what has become of their place in Twin Ponds.
All episodes were originally published in 2007 as a fire education series in the Mountain Press, the Sanger Herald, the Snowline Tiimes, and their sister publications covering the central California portion of the foothills and Sierra Nevada Mountains.
Spears of God
Howard's latest book—Spears of God—is in stores and online. Check it out today.
