Another Year, Another Fire

A grey haze dulls the details of the massive cedar, tall and visible above the shed which cozies next to the property line at the back of my rented bungalow. If I keep my eyes focused on this tree, my eyes will burn trying to define the spray of aromatic needles on its upturned branches. And, of course, they also sting from the smoke hovering in the air.

Instead, I concentrate on the details of the wine barrel teeming with serrated strawberry leaves and its determined outreach toward fertile soil to implant its roots. I have to cut those tendrils off or train them back into the tub or plant them in separate containers. I’ve never been able to throw them away without remorse, so I have small pots of strawberry plants everywhere. I am also trying to figure why I don’t have any red berries, only lush green leaves, as a reward for my efforts.

Bringing my attention into closer focus, I am pleased to be at my salvaged sitting area. A metal table and two chairs are revived with sanding, Rustoleum, paint and varnish. I’ve always wanted a corner in my garden for an eating area or a place to write outside. Now I’ve created that space and none too soon.

The fires causing the thick-smelling air have been burning for weeks and, hopefully, will be under control by September 1^st. Smaller fires have been battled and contained either in town or up the hill in the forested housing development. After last year’s scare when the threat to my valley and town came so close to being real, this year’s nearby blaze has brought me similar anxieties.

If the wind blows too long or the day reaches past a survivable temperature, I am on edge. When the sirens shriek in the day or night, I am awake and anxious.

I’ve packed and unpacked my car several times. Somewhere in my head I hold a belief that if I am ready, it will never happen. The ‘it’ being evacuation; the bigger “IT” being the loss of my way of life, my security, my comfort.

This very sense of potential tragedy paralyzed me for the first weeks of living near the growth of the largest wild fire in California history,

Then I rebelled. I didn’t want to live under waves of fear. I want life to flow atop waves of possibility and hope. If any of my dreams had any possibility of becoming true, I decided, then I needed to work at them. Even if I lost them in the nightmare of a fire’s destruction.

So, I set up the outdoor work bench and began sanding the underbelly of the round metal table and the two chairs. The local hardware store re-mixed my one-year old paint. In the past two weeks, I have completed one of my promised projects. I also planted medicinal plants in pots, put fish emulsion around all the veggie and berry plants, strengthened the drip watering system, and trimmed shaggy bushes.

I brought my focus home and into my own back yard, leaving the foggy future somewhere beyond my here and now. Looking closely, I actually see a dangling baby strawberry. Tomatoes are ripening as are eggplants. Asters are in bloom and lemon cukes are forming.

A siren crosses the threshold into my corner of peace then fades into somewhere else. For this moment, I am here, and I am ok.

The Last Phone Booth

About three blocks from my bungalow, there is a pole at waist-high level that supports an old-fashioned half-sized booth. It used to house a telephone. It doesn’t have a bi-fold door to it. It’s more like the ones that used to sit along a wall at the train station or airport. I’ve been wondering why this thing is still standing. There is no phone in it. The phone book holder is empty.

This telephone booth, that is not a telephone booth, is opposite the town post office and in the parking lot of a very busy liquor store. I’ve been thinking I should decorate it for the Holidays.

Several years ago, a local playwright wrote a three-act musical called, “The Last Phone Booth in Willits.” The range of plots around this idea included questions from “How was anyone going to call home if there weren’t enough phone booths?” “How did anyone make their drug deal if they couldn’t meet in the phone booth?” “Where was Superman going to change to save us?” to “Who in the world would trust their lives to a cell phone when it wasn’t attached to a wall and a continuous wire?”

My town is a rural town. We have been slow to pick up the fast-pace of city ideas and those of the millennials. We are getting there, but we are very hesitant to take on new technology without any good reason to do it.

Most people want to keep and have kept their land lines. Little did many know that they weren’t doing just that when the local AT&T promised that everyone could. AT&T said it would be better if we bundled our services together and gave discounts if we bought our TV, internet, and telephone services through them. What AT&T did, however, was make land lines into digital phones that were dependent on the tower installed on the hill near town. Many people don’t have hard-wired land lines anymore, although they thought that they did.

Many of us were happy when DSL service got to our area a few years ago. The DSL line was buried alongside the highway. Between the DSL line (one of them) and the tower (one of them) those of us in Willits were pleased to be experiencing what many in the rest of the country have experienced for years, faster service, sortuv.

But, then came the fires. No one could have predicted that the conflagration would come at us from so many different directions at the same time, or that they would melt into each other and grow faster than any fireman had ever seen in this county. This observation came despite the devastating fires we have had for the past two years. This year, though, no one could have foretold that the rapid response of well-trained fire fighters would not be enough to save whole mountainsides, entire vineyards, or neighborhoods. Because of the fires in Santa Rosa which is a more affluent and higher-populated area, many of the firefighting divisions were there. Besides, how fast can a fire go across mountains?

Faster than any of us thought. In some places, families made it out in their pjs and slippers. Some didn’t make it out at all. Some were burned in their cars. Others scrambled ahead of the fire only to meet another line of flames and have to backtrack across charred land hoping that no active fire would burn across it again.

And that special AT&T tower which brought us all our cell phone communication, it melted. They fixed it. The fire backtracked and melted it again. Right next to it stands a CB radio set-up with its tall tower and a cement building. It also houses the antenna for our small-town radio station. In the beginning of the fire, that radio station informed us as to what was happening where and who needed to evacuate. There are or were so many people in the hills and in the way of the fire, the usual emergency protocol was not able to be set into motion. No reverse 911 calls could be made. No information could be obtained through the internet either because the DSL line had melted. It wasn’t buried deep enough. They fixed it and the fire backtracked and melted it again.

As a precaution to the town of Willits, PG&E shut off the natural gas lines. I agree that was something that should have be done. There was, however, no way to give us a heads-up that this action was needed or was going to be done. We just didn’t have natural gas, so there was no heat or cooking or hot water. A week later, it finally dawned on me that that action should have alerted me to the fact that Willits was in more danger than I knew. The large pieces of ash falling in my yard should have given me another clue. I didn’t really think, at the time, that this ash could have had an ember still burning. I look around my town now and see so much potential vegetation that could have gone up in flames and shudder. We didn’t have a real clue. Visual details are now showing how near we came to being wiped out. If the wind hadn’t turned from its northwest direction and headed south east, we would all be toast. Destruction came very close.

In this emergency, one thing became clear to many of us. Technology is a fragile thing. Cell phones and internet are just two of those advanced techy privileges we purchase and depend on and have been told are the way to go into the next century. What I know is that CBs and radio announcers brought us through this event. Knowing how to use a Coleman stove or warm water in the sun in a gallon milk carton sitting on top of aluminum foil is the stuff that makes survivors. And if that phone booth at the corner of Main and East Valley Road had been in working order, my family in the bay area would have heard a lot sooner from me. Like I said, I’m thinking of decorating it for the Holidays as a tribute to what was once and which we might regret isn’t anymore.