The Last Adventurer

Some things are simply indescribable. They are important pieces of an individual’s life, moments, minutes, days, months, and sometimes years that comprise who and what we are as people. And yet, these mili-seconds, these earth-shattering things, these experiences, simply defy description. There is nothing that can be said about these things that even comes close to what really happened. No word, no syllable, no language, nothing, absolutely nothing can even touch the event by even the smallest fraction. All of these things, for good or bad, are simply untouchables, as unknowable to strangers as smelling an atom or falling into a black hole.

A week after the fires began in San Diego; I sit in front of my computer, searching for words to describe the last week. As a person who makes their living by saying and writing the right words, it is an odd feeling. Plenty of words float around my head, each comprising an infinite amount of description and commentary about what has happened in my life during the last three hundred uneven hours. Yet each and every one of these words seems small, little, and lacking – mere two dimensional black and white representations that can never touch or paint a picture of how those fast fleeting moments in time really were. I sit and stare at the blinking electrons that form the cursor on my computer. I’ve re-written every preceding sentence a million times, trying to find some sort of rhythm that will allow me to express how my heart feels. But nothing works. Finally, I make a conscious decision: I’m going to move forward with what tools I have, as clumsy as they may be, and try to address the untouchable. I’m going to answer that question that’s been behind every phone call I didn’t answer; every e-mail I read; and every brief thought that people out of state had. I’m going to tell you, as best I can, what it was like during the 2007 San Diego fires.

This story begins with uncertainty – an uncertainty that began as a benign ignorance and spread into quiet desperation before ultimately subsiding before the calm coolness of hope. I didn’t know when the fires began. Even if I had been home, I probably wouldn’t have known when those sparks turned into embers, which grew to flames and surged into fires. Where was I? I was hundreds of miles north, descending Mt. Whitney with a group of friends. As we drove back late Sunday night, and into early Monday morning, our car passed into San Bernardino County, and then San Diego County. As we sped down the mostly empty freeway, I couldn’t see more than a mile ahead. It was hazy. It was grey particle filled haze that caught the orange lights of the cities we passed, and it didn’t dissipate at all. My instincts rumbled tiredly at this odd phenomenon – it wasn’t smog; it wasn’t fog, and it shouldn’t have been there. Dressed in my cloak of exhaustion, I still hadn’t figured out what was occurring, but subconsciously, I think I knew – something was burning.

I dropped everyone off at my friend’s house on the east side of Fairbanks Ranch. Tree branches fell in the tumultuous wind and all types of debris flew about. The bitter tang of smoke seeped into our collective nostrils as we said our goodbyes. Did I know then? I certainly had a clue, but I hadn’t placed the pieces together. As I pulled out to head home, I turned on the radio. The static cleared, and the first thing my mind heard was panic. And from that moment on the next hours and days swept by in a blur. The caller’s voice was clipped, urgent, astonished, and was attempting to describe something awful. I flipped the station. The same terror came through the speakers but with a different inflection. I was almost home when my lungs twitched and I coughed, a full-fledged smoker’s cough, deep and hacking. I tasted ash. I shuddered and turned the air to internal.

At home, I ran about slamming windows. The air didn’t seem to be moving. Everything reeked of smoke. I didn’t know what to do. I slept. Four hours later, my alarm woke me. Half-asleep, I stumbled outside with my dog. My sandal clad feet left a solid trail behind me in the soot. Little grey flakes fell like dead snow on my head, my arms, floating in the stagnant air. I looked up, squinting. The red eye of the sun shifted and slid between shifting brownish waste that covered the blue sky. I stumbled back inside, confused. Blearily, I got ready for work. Back at the car, I turned on the radio. Report after report poured into my ears, my head. Five minutes into my commute, I learned that the area I work in was evacuated, and that no one was allowed to either enter or leave. I turned off the freeway, stunned. Everywhere I looked, the sky was obscured with the brown grey ooze. I passed three gas stations on the way to my house. All were closed, blocked off with battered cones.

Unconsciously, I turned on the television. Evening news anchors sat at desks and delivered grave pronouncements, backed by ravaging orange and red images of destruction. I changed the channel, only to see different faces delivering the same somber developments. I flipped the channel again, only to hear the desolate wail of the disaster alarm system. I flipped back to the first channel and stood in front of the television, slack-jawed, mind stunned, and felt the scope of the crisis sweep over every aspect of my life. Each image was more horrific than the last. I was certain that any moment, the cameras were going to cut away, and that billowing flames and living smoke were going to disappear. It seemed like it just couldn’t be real – it couldn’t be real – but it was real. My wife pulled me away from the television. In hushed, anxious tones we discussed our course of action. We decided that we had to prepare – we were too close to the fire not to be ready to leave.

Out of drawers came dusty papers – wills, titles to cars, passports. My backpack lay abandoned on the floor where I had left it the night before, along with its discarded individual accomplishments of the previous weekend. Everything that was in it was irrelevant in the face of imminent displacement and dispossession. I began to fill it with essentials – wedding photos, dog food, changes of clothes and irreplaceable mementos of our life. In a matter of minutes, it and several bags were packed and waiting. They sat out in the middle of the floor with me, staring at the television. My dog ran around the clutter and whined nervously. Absently, I tried to comfort her while my eyes tracked the destruction on the screen. Next to me, my wife napped fitfully. Minutes and hours passed. I went back outside with the dog; now the air was thick and heavy, and scalded my lungs with every breath. The streets were empty of cars. What sounds there were echoed strangely off the ash.

Back inside, my phone rang quietly. Guiltily, I answered calls from friends and family that came in quick, clipped tones. Everyone was looking for a place to go; and everyone wanted to say more; but no one wanted to talk as we had been warned to stay off the lines in order to aid the fire-fighting effort. Between every unsaid warning and every unsaid expression of sympathy were pauses of quiet desperation. Other calls I let go to voicemail. Despite all of the technology around us, I felt isolated. For the rest of the day and some of the night, I waited, transfixed, hour by agonizing hour to see what would happen. I watched the walls of my house and wondered if I was looking at it for the last time, before the ravening maw of fire would take it and destroy it, turning it into ghostly sooty memories. That night, with my dog pacing around the silent bags, I slept fitfully on the couch.

When I woke the next day, I was calm. I was as calm as I could be, even though I had no idea what was going on. The feeling was like a wild seed that required fire to germinate before shooting forth. Even though I hadn’t panicked the day before, but I just had a blind feeling of hope about the situation when I woke. The situation was still bad. I had heard it first from my wife, who had just returned from her shift at the hospital. During the night, she had seen the red tongues of flame eating hillsides, and left work under the pall of smoke hanging over the county. Quietly, with no real reason, I waited, and tried to keep that shoot of hope alive. The day went by, and things began to improve – the winds died down; aerial tankers began their drops; and the situation began to look survivable. Eventually, the news began to shift – from that of despair over loss to wonder at the generosity of the community – of people helping people at shelters; and of feats of heroism of first responders and total strangers.

Suddenly, it was as if one of the raging sixty-mile an hour wind gusts had come through my window and blown my uncertainty away. It was fundamentally stupid, illogical feeling. I didn’t know any more than what I had known two days before. I honesty didn’t know if my house was going to be fine, or that of my friends and family. What I did know, though, was what I was going to remember about the 2007 fires. Strangely enough, it wasn’t the charring and blackening of countless of pristine acres of wilderness that would never be the same in my life, if ever. It wasn’t the dreadful feeling that the fire might blow its scorching flames to the ocean and destroy the county and city. It wasn’t the horrific loss of people’s homes. It wasn’t the general terror that the disaster had brought.

It was simple, clean images. It was people bringing supplies to Qualcomm stadium. It was volunteers fighting fires with construction equipment and garden hoses. It was the simple gratitude and thanks that people gave first responders. It was the skill and tireless effort of those same first responders. It was the generosity of people in each and every way. It was neighbors helping strangers; strangers helping friends, and everyone over the course of several days pulling together for one effort for that brief moment in time. It was all of those things and more. It was the general tear-jerking feeling for what everyone had lost. It was the feeling that, even if the city had burned, San Diego, and all of San Diego county would live on, because the very identity of the city was wrapped up in its people, and not its buildings, trees, bushes and fixtures. It was that clear concept that no matter what happened, as long as there were people, there would be this place that we had called home and made special, no matter what nature, or anything else could throw at us.

It was hope. It was the collective wild seed, burnt to a cinder by the fire, placing out its green tendrils through the ash, and growing into something wonderful. It was the fantastic sense that despite the disaster, life would go on, life would return to normal, and life, eventually, would be back, and better than before, despite the losses we’d all suffered. And as I think about it now, this feeling, this positive yet realistic outlook is the best indescribable feeling there is – that despite the suffering the fires had caused, it is going to be alright. All I – and anyone else has to do is look for the shoots that are rising from the rubble in greater and greater numbers each day.

Play nice, people! I think that while it was good for the city to rally behind something after what had happened, it was probably a little tough for the remaining evacuees to have to move twice - once to the Q and once to somewhere else (the Fairgrounds, I think). Having said that (and not to squash discussion), it already happened, so there's not much that I - or anyone else can do about it, so hopefully whatever lessons that came from the situation were learned!