In Fire Season, the Sequel

My neighbors took their extra pickup truck, packed it with things that they would never want to lose, and drove it to a friend’s house in Sacramento for the duration of fire season. (Which makes me wonder: What would it be like to have not just one truck, but an extra one, too?) My next door neighbor has suitcases lined up in her hallway; she is taking them to her boyfriend’s house in Davis. I am going to move my massage table into the backseat of the car soon, so there will be room in the trunk for a few of my most sentimental, irreplaceable things: a quilt my Grandma made, memory books with my children’s early art work, handwritten letters from my Mom and Dad.

Welcome (back) to fire season in Northern California.

(Not the first time I’ve written about this, I’m afraid. Probably won’t be the last, either.)

I started thinking about go-bags again today. I have a little one packed, but it’s not complete. And the tricky thing about the go-bag is that sometimes you forget what is in there, and so you start panicking when you can’t find something and you know where it was supposed to be (the dog’s shot records?) but then finally remember that you took it out of the file cabinet and put it in the go-bag, but not until you’ve wasted a lot of time looking for it.

Then there’s this problem: what happens if the fire breaks out when you are not home? Should the go-bag with the passports and passwords and medical records and business records live in the car, too? What is more likely, that the car could get broken into and all of that information stolen, or that the house could get swallowed by a horrific fire when you are not home to grab your go-bag? Also, who is to say that the car won’t catch on fire in some random act of nature one day when you are driving home?

(One of my on-line writing friends suggested that I scan all my important documents and back them up to the cloud. That’s a great idea! I should do it! I think I could do a good enough job just with apps on my phone. So why don’t I do this? What is my resistance? Because clearly there is some strong resistance there, since I haven’t done it yet.)

Bottom line?

I’m not sure that any of us forest dwelling folk feel safe at home anymore, at least not during fire season.

There was a fire down the hill from us today. I have a friend who always seems to know exactly when the fires are breaking out around here. I’m not sure how she does it, if she has a police scanner or some other kind of alert system. It’s nice to have someone like that in your circle, though. I go about my day a little more calmly because I know that if a fire breaks out anywhere around me, she’ll let me know.

She let me know today.

It’s funny, because I am already obsessively checking Yubanet.com, our best local news source, several times a day, just to make sure that all is right with the world. I checked it between massages and was relieved to know that no new fires had erupted. But then I got to my final massage of the day, and my client said that there was a fire that had just started that was close to her home.

Incredible.

Her husband was ready to leave if need be. Their cats were safely inside. They were one evacuation zone over from the voluntary evacuation zone, so he wasn’t too worried.

She was brave and smart and wiser than I would have been and turned off her phone during her massage. If something happened and the fire turned and moved toward them, what could she do about it anyway? What point was there in worrying (what point is there ever in worrying?) and ruining her massage session?

In the end, that fire was quickly contained.

The fire that broke out near us was quickly contained, too.

You just have to be grateful for that.

Because we know. Because we have seen. That while CalFire gets most fires out quickly, sometimes they explode from 10 to 50 to 100 to 1000 acres in a matter of hours. Last year’s Dixie Fire started in July, wasn’t 100 percent contained until October, and burned more than 960,000 acres. It destroyed entire towns; three firefighters died. We know another fire like that could happen anytime. There is no safety here.

Honestly, though?

There is no such thing as safe.

We are just lucky most of the time and blissfully drive our cars down the freeway at 70 mph and fly in planes and send our children off to elementary school and high school and college where who knows what could happen and eat sausages with nitrates and don’t realize how many close encounters with disaster we avoid every day.

Bought three kinds of ice cream at the market today. Grocery Outlet, so the ice cream pints were only $1.99, and for lo carb ice cream at that.

Ice cream is a marvelous distraction from fire season.

I think I will eat some now.  And maybe scan some documents with my phone. And be grateful that this time, our firefighters knocked out that nearby fire quickly. And pray for the folks who lost their homes in the Oak Fire, which started around a week ago and has already burned more than 19,000 acres. It’s at 45 percent containment, so that’s good news. Doesn’t look to be turning into a Dixie Fire. But still.  A heartbreaker. Our region’s first major fire of the season, and most likely, and quite terribly, not the last.