Just Wait…

‘Just wait until we get the smoke from the fires in California. Then you’ll see how bad it really is.’ Those words still stick in my mind, though I cannot remember whether they were in an article in the local newspaper, a post from a friend on facebook, or even a casual conversation overheard in the grocery store.

The words stick because, as life largely went on unchanged around me, I was preparing for a fire that started 20 miles away from my home. A fire that’s now one of the 5 largest fires in Colorado history, in a year that Colorado's previous largest fire, the Hayman fire, was replaced by a new, even larger, fire.

Even as I dealt with the much smaller fire closer to home, that fire was burning in the southern part of the state. In fact, I watched, standing on my front porch with a roommate, as the sky turned first red then orange with the smoke from the most distant fire, not yet aware of the threat much closer to my home.

We watched as the sun turned red, a beat behind the rest of the sky.

We watched as the curl of smoke from the fresh fire near our home created a kind of eclipse, on small thread of smoke completely blocking the light from the sun. Then another. Then another. Until, only five minutes later, we could not see the sun in the sky at all.

That fire was a lurking dragon, it’s flames unpredictable but never seeming too out of control, never seeming too dangerous.

And then the Cameron Peak Fire grew exponentially. One morning we woke up to a 40,000 acre fire, a fire that grew a few hundred acres a day for more than a month, but never more than a couple thousand at a time. A fire that was in the middle of the wilderness, where the biggest threat seemed to be the loss of a few campgrounds and some forest service stations.

Not insignificant losses, but distant. The kind of stress that you put in the back of your head and keep moving forward like everything is still normal.

It’s there. You’re more stressed overall because of it. But there are more important things to thing about.

And then the fire exploded. In 48 hours out nice, calm, distant fire grew to just over 100,000 acres, growing more in two days than it had in the entire month of ‘extreme fire activity’ previous.

My home was placed under voluntary evacuation orders while we had friends over for the weekend, trying to escape the larger stresses of the coronavirus, of working in a service industry when service industry income is so unreliable.

By the next morning, with the fire little more than 5 miles away, a short up-hill burn that it had proved could take only hours, not days, our evacuation was mandatory.

Not that we could simply grab a go-bag and leave.

No. Cats, a dog, three lizards, and two horses had to be evacuated along with the human lives at risk in that fire. Just from my home, not to mention the dozens of other homes in our community, the two larger towns that were also evacuated at the same time.

Three frantic hours. That’s what it takes to get horses, cats, dogs, lizards, humans, and as much property as we could carry out in time. We only had that time because we had to wait for trailers to arrive, for the help that would get the horses out of harms way, that would carry their grain and hay so that their lives could continue on, for the most part, normally.

‘Just wait until the smoke from California arrives.’ Because in this world of concurrent disasters it’s hard to imagine that something the magnitude of the California fires could be eclipsed by a more personal and immediate danger.

‘Just wait until the smoke from California arrives.’ As if we hadn’t already been living through one of the greatest global disasters of my lifetime. As if the magnitude of lives lost to this pandemic has been reduced to background static as the skies get darker and the air gets harder to breathe.

As if we were lucky enough for the ‘smoke from California’ to be the most important threat on the horizon.

We aren’t that lucky.

This year has been a lesson in concurrent disasters. It’s been a lesson in stress and empathy fatigue when there is just so much wrong in the world that your brain can’t make space for one more tragedy. Where the catastrophic explosions in Beirut (which is on fire as I’m typing this, in case you were wondering) could occupy only a week of time on the news before the world moved on. Had to move on.

A world where fires in California mirror fires in Australia, two events that seem like they should be separated by years or even decades instead of mere months.

‘Just wait…’ That’s the lesson here. ‘Just wait’ 2020 has more to throw at us all. ‘Just wait’ there’s something worse coming on the new horizon. ‘Just wait’ you aren’t done yet.

Just…

Wait. 

This should be a wake-up call. But we’re all too tired, too stressed, and too scared to see it. Instead of staring into the void, instead of succumbing to the sense of impending doom around every corner, we must do something.

You must do something.

Give Kindness wherever you can.

Hold on to small victories.

Revel in small comforts.

Get out and VOTE.

Remember that your disasters might not be the same disasters that the people around you are dealing with. There are plenty of disasters to go around, and your foremost concerns might hardly register on someone else’s radar.

And give compassion to yourself as well. You can’t do everything, you can’t be everything.

Being yourself is enough.

As for me… I’m going to curl up with a warm drink, a good book, and my cat, grateful that I can take shelter somewhere safe, comfortable, and familiar. Hoping… Always hoping… that the fire is put out and that my home doesn’t burn when this fire, briefly dormant thanks to unseasonal snow, wakes up.