Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [67]
Next I made several trips to the car, each with my arms full of scrapbooks, diaries, and paperwork, cramming them in wherever I could, trying to make them fit. My car was now an overstuffed duffel bag, albeit one with an internal combustion engine.
That accomplished, I joined a small group of my neighbors who were standing around in the middle of the street in front of my house: a place where under ordinary circumstances no one would ever be standing. There we gathered like villagers, waiting nervously for some armed invading horde. Every few minutes all conversation would be interrupted by a loud clatter as a helicopter flew overhead on its way toward the ocean to fill up its tanks with water to dump on the fire.
The TV was reporting that there were still sixty-mile-an-hour winds, yet the air on our street was completely still. This gave us all the impression that we were not in immediate danger, even though we could see a glowing line of embers on distant hilltops. That meant the fire was probably three or four miles away. The TV said it was headed in our direction.
At about noon, the people next door decided that there was no reason not to cook a big breakfast. When they invited us to join them, we were delighted. And so it came to pass that we ate biscuits and gravy in front of a big flat-screen television, staring at vivid real-time footage of the “fire event,” which, they now reported, was only two miles away.
While we ate, we debated how we would know when it was the right moment to get in our cars and leave. Predictably, the women were ready to flee. And the men? They were in favor of standing on the roof with their hoses.
“I’m gonna stay,” said my neighbor Jack, a big bear of a man. As he spoke, his wife and daughter were packing the car.
“Then I’m staying, too,” said Andy.
“But, guys, logically speaking,” I said, “if the fire hits our street, how much good are you two going to do standing on the roof with a hose?”
“Come on, Merrill, we’re guys, we don’t have much left,” said Jack. “Don’t take everything away from us. Let us have this much.”
For the rest of the meal, we channel surfed every local newscast for clues that would help us break the stalemate. With nothing definite to go on, it wasn’t long until we wound up back outside, next to our packed cars, staring at the glowing hillside. It was hard to tell if the fire looked worse or better.
That was when someone noticed a uniformed fire official walking into the house across the street. Why was he going in there? Was that a good sign or a bad one? “He’s a friend of ours,” said the teenage son of the family who lived there. “He will definitely tell us when we have to get out.”
This caused us all to begin staring at our neighbors’ front door like a bunch of dogs waiting for someone to throw us a ball. About a half hour later, when the same teenage boy emerged from his house and offered a buoyant thumbs-up, we were all both relieved and encouraged.
“We’re safe for now,” we all said to one another, inexplicably hinging our life-and-death decisions on the hand gestures of a nineteen-year-old occasional lifeguard who I mainly knew as the kid who filled up my recycling bin with empty beer bottles he was hiding from his parents after a big party.
Two extremely long and hazy days later, the fire was extinguished. Ash no longer rained. The sky was once again blue. The streets around my house had been spared. We had been lucky. Not far away, sixty houses had burned to the ground.
Even after the threat had passed, my personal state of emergency continued. I was agitated for another month. Only then did I relax enough to finally unpack my car/suitcase/chest of drawers.
And as I did, I began to examine for the first time the assortment of things I had selected to take with me on my frenetic escape to my brand-new life.
I had plenty of cosmetics—kind of ridiculous, really, since I hear they sell these items in stores. But the contents of my suitcase of clothes