been awhile.
21 Jun 2012 05:53 pmWell, the bombshell update is that we came within about twenty feet of having our house burn down from an electrical-cable-started brushfire. Fortunately, it was middle-of-the-day, and (since our house is pretty much blind to that side of the woods) we had a sharp-eyed and -nosed neighbor who first thought it was a midday barbecue... then thought twice and came down the street to see. She banged on our door as she was calling 911, then ran to our neighbors and alerted all of them, too. It couldn't have been more than three, four minutes from her call to the fire trucks' arrival, but my gods, it felt like the longest and most terrifying moments of my entire life.
Crazy enough, my first impulse was to grab a picture of my great-grandmother off the wall (why? it's scanned, and my sister has a copy), and the next reaction was to turn off my computer. Whut? Apparently, logic is not my friend when panicked. Then I headed to the backyard with a hose -- because thinking clearly also is not in the cards. I think I was there for a minute, before the water pressure dropped too far (because CP had turned on the longer hose, in the front yard), so I went back inside to grab the dogs and get them into the car. When I came back out with a cat, next-door neighbor was there and asked if she could do anything, so I just handed her the cat and went back inside for the youngest cat. (Middle-cat was outside, keeping himself well away from the chaos, fortunately.) Took a lot of chasing, wrestling, and some serious scratches and one pissed-off hobbit-in-a-box later, I was walking out the front door as the fire trucks pulled up.
If you've ever done a sport that has sprints at the end -- running, biking, whatever -- you know how sometimes time doesn't seem to make any sense? The average race for my sport was about six minutes. Fifteen hundred meters: two minutes for a five hundred meter start, two minutes for the five hundred meter body, two minutes for five hundred meters of sprint. Well, give or take thirty seconds wherever. Thing is, I can distinctly recall races where it felt like the sprint alone was twelve minutes. Time lengthens, stretches, doesn't mean anything anymore, when that much adrenaline is in your system. Standing in the yard watching the flames eat up the summer grasses, I couldn't tell if they were coming at me fast, or slow, or frozen, or if I was there fifty seconds or five hundred seconds.
I'm not sure if it's consolation that the fire chief's comment (as they were wrapping things up, afterwards) that the timing was really close. Five more minutes... he waved in the direction of a coming storm. Rain, I said. No, he said: wind. And the wind was heading cross-creek, right at our house, which meant if the neighbor hadn't reacted as fast as she had, and the fire department weren't literally a mile up the road and a quarter-mile to the left, the storm's vanguard of high wind would've hit that fire and shoved it right up against our house.
Yeah. Yikes.
(Yesterday, CP said something about how if an electrical cable is going to snap off and hit dry grass and spark something, why didn't it happen during a storm when there's rain? I said, better at 1pm on a Tuesday than 1am on any night. If it'd been middle of the night, by the time we'd realized, it would've been too late.)
Anyway, talk about having things wake you up to putting life in perspective. Of all the things that I wanted to grab, or thought I should grab, in a split-second decision standing there trying to figure out where I'd put the leashes (more like spinning in place in a total panic trying to find the leashes) I realized the priority was to get the animals out. Anything else would be gravy. But the animals were one thing that required no compromise. Which should probably be an obvious decision, but it's wierd, it's like your brain goes through the revelation anyway, in that moment.
Amusing footnote: as I realized the most important duty (while CP was outside with the hose) was to save our four-legged children, Sachiko ran back to her bed then reappeared for me to put on the leash. I barely noticed. I got the dogs outside, pretty much dragged them both across the zapping invisible-fence-line (didn't have the motor coordination to remove collars as well as put them on), shoved them into my car, rolled down the window, and ran back inside for the cats. Only later, when the firemen gave us the clear, did I realize: Sachiko had grabbed her stuffed frog and had been holding it in her mouth the entire time. Clearly the priorities are the same for everyone in this house: save the babies! Even the stuffed ones.
Fifteen minutes later, we had large drops of rain coming down. It rained later that night, and again for about a half-hour yesterday. I still haven't walked out to see the empty lot, or the size of the burn scar. All I know is that CP's comment was that the fire wasn't halfway across the lot like my adrenaline-crazed eyes had thought. It was more like fifteen feet from our property -- and our house is only about five feet more from that point. Another five feet and the fire would've hit dry two downed trees, and a dry old fence after that. The firemen literally arrived in the nick of time.
Very, very, lucky.
Crazy enough, my first impulse was to grab a picture of my great-grandmother off the wall (why? it's scanned, and my sister has a copy), and the next reaction was to turn off my computer. Whut? Apparently, logic is not my friend when panicked. Then I headed to the backyard with a hose -- because thinking clearly also is not in the cards. I think I was there for a minute, before the water pressure dropped too far (because CP had turned on the longer hose, in the front yard), so I went back inside to grab the dogs and get them into the car. When I came back out with a cat, next-door neighbor was there and asked if she could do anything, so I just handed her the cat and went back inside for the youngest cat. (Middle-cat was outside, keeping himself well away from the chaos, fortunately.) Took a lot of chasing, wrestling, and some serious scratches and one pissed-off hobbit-in-a-box later, I was walking out the front door as the fire trucks pulled up.
If you've ever done a sport that has sprints at the end -- running, biking, whatever -- you know how sometimes time doesn't seem to make any sense? The average race for my sport was about six minutes. Fifteen hundred meters: two minutes for a five hundred meter start, two minutes for the five hundred meter body, two minutes for five hundred meters of sprint. Well, give or take thirty seconds wherever. Thing is, I can distinctly recall races where it felt like the sprint alone was twelve minutes. Time lengthens, stretches, doesn't mean anything anymore, when that much adrenaline is in your system. Standing in the yard watching the flames eat up the summer grasses, I couldn't tell if they were coming at me fast, or slow, or frozen, or if I was there fifty seconds or five hundred seconds.
I'm not sure if it's consolation that the fire chief's comment (as they were wrapping things up, afterwards) that the timing was really close. Five more minutes... he waved in the direction of a coming storm. Rain, I said. No, he said: wind. And the wind was heading cross-creek, right at our house, which meant if the neighbor hadn't reacted as fast as she had, and the fire department weren't literally a mile up the road and a quarter-mile to the left, the storm's vanguard of high wind would've hit that fire and shoved it right up against our house.
Yeah. Yikes.
(Yesterday, CP said something about how if an electrical cable is going to snap off and hit dry grass and spark something, why didn't it happen during a storm when there's rain? I said, better at 1pm on a Tuesday than 1am on any night. If it'd been middle of the night, by the time we'd realized, it would've been too late.)
Anyway, talk about having things wake you up to putting life in perspective. Of all the things that I wanted to grab, or thought I should grab, in a split-second decision standing there trying to figure out where I'd put the leashes (more like spinning in place in a total panic trying to find the leashes) I realized the priority was to get the animals out. Anything else would be gravy. But the animals were one thing that required no compromise. Which should probably be an obvious decision, but it's wierd, it's like your brain goes through the revelation anyway, in that moment.
Amusing footnote: as I realized the most important duty (while CP was outside with the hose) was to save our four-legged children, Sachiko ran back to her bed then reappeared for me to put on the leash. I barely noticed. I got the dogs outside, pretty much dragged them both across the zapping invisible-fence-line (didn't have the motor coordination to remove collars as well as put them on), shoved them into my car, rolled down the window, and ran back inside for the cats. Only later, when the firemen gave us the clear, did I realize: Sachiko had grabbed her stuffed frog and had been holding it in her mouth the entire time. Clearly the priorities are the same for everyone in this house: save the babies! Even the stuffed ones.
Fifteen minutes later, we had large drops of rain coming down. It rained later that night, and again for about a half-hour yesterday. I still haven't walked out to see the empty lot, or the size of the burn scar. All I know is that CP's comment was that the fire wasn't halfway across the lot like my adrenaline-crazed eyes had thought. It was more like fifteen feet from our property -- and our house is only about five feet more from that point. Another five feet and the fire would've hit dry two downed trees, and a dry old fence after that. The firemen literally arrived in the nick of time.
Very, very, lucky.
