Science Mama

The sidewalk glowed orange. The once blue sky had turned brown and dim. I had just made it home from a trail run and stood at the end of our driveway. Fierce wind slammed into my body and my lungs began to burn. I knew that kind of burn from living most of my life in California. That burn and that brown were some of the reasons my husband and I had decided to find a better place, a forever-home to raise our 6-year-old son. We found that forever home here, in Colorado.

The wind continued to whip across my body and every muscle froze. The neighborhood sat eerily quiet as my instincts shouted run. I sprinted inside and screamed to my husband in a jumbled mess: FIRE. I grabbed the car keys to go get our son from a winter day camp about a mile up the road.

By the time I pulled my car into the day camp’s parking lot, I could see the fumes pouring through town, unrelenting, channeled by 110 mph winds that guided it like a smooth brush stroke into the heart of our neighborhood.

 “Probably in the mountains,” a woman said to me, “I’m sure it’s a lot farther than it seems.” We’d all become so accustomed to smoke and wildfires that many people in the parking lot didn’t even look twice at the growing plume.

I had seen the ramifications of waiting too long to evacuate. I reminded myself of the tragedy of the Paradise Fire of 2018. The Santa Rosa Fire of 2017. More than 100 fatalities because people didn’t have time to escape.

After that is a blur. Ripping through drawers, kid’s paintings, forgotten jewelry­–what items in an unfathomable rush can define the moments that made your life meaningful?

My son, without hesitation, packed every single one of his twenty-three stuffed animals. He was more clear-headed than I could even dream of being.

My husband, who had been listening to a police scanner, began to usher us to the car. “It’s jumped the freeway,” he mouthed while buckling in our son. The freeway is a half-mile from our home.

Still, I questioned my sanity. Were we overreacting? Did we miss something? No firefighters had come to tell us to evacuate. No phone call or text. No emergency siren. Only silence. As we pulled out of our driveway, I glanced around our neighborhood. Cars still in driveways, unpacked.  No one knew. Families, still in their homes, sitting ducks to a blaze of hell barreling towards them only a half-mile away.

I called everyone I could while we drove away. Friends, working from home, hadn’t noticed the amber sky outside as they sat inside staring at computer screens all morning.

I looked at our backseat. Five bags total. Twenty-three stuffed toys, one bag of documents, three overnight bags. This was it.

We got to the other side of the fire perimeter and watched across the reservoir as the town was engulfed in flames. Like a birthday cake, each house lit with the spark of the previous one, until down the line they glowed in unison.

My neighbor, Caroline, called me about 45 minutes after we had left. She had only found out because a relative called her after seeing it on the news. She barely had time to evacuate with the clothes on her back. There was no time to hunt down her cat, Fluffernutter.  Half of her apartment complex was quickly gone. Fluffernutter would later be found with scorched paws.

I stayed up all night listening to the scanner as the fire swallowed each neighborhood, like a ravenous animal returning from its winter-long hibernation. The fire crew couldn’t do much in the way of fighting the flames as the high winds crafted a life-threatening situation.

At no point did I get an evacuation alert. No reverse 911 call. The best I saw was a Twitter post. In a time where I get Amber Alerts pushed to my phone at 3 a.m., one would hope we could find out if there is a fire racing towards our house.

The next morning, my son lay down next to me in the hotel bed with his tiny hands clutching a worn brown teddy bear. “Do we still have a house, Mama?”

I scrolled through the dispatch transcriptions as best as I could. Line by line, I tried to read through the addresses. Uncertainty has a space to it; oblivion is freedom from certain fate.

The following day, on New Year’s Eve, we returned to our block. What once was a glowing neighborhood of Christmas lights and holiday cheer was now a dismal war scene, charred and blackened under a gray sky. The house four doors down that once filled the neighborhood with the sounds of cheery piano lessons now rested silent; ivory keys lay charred in an encore of rubble.

When it reached our cul-de-sac, the fire made a horseshoe figure around our home. Our house was one of the last still standing amongst the perished. The smoke and ash damage on our house was so bad that the house will need to be ripped down to the studs and most of our belongings will be destroyed. Without warning, our family lost our home.

I watch my son walk along the sidewalk. His whole world, this small community, gone in an instant. The impermanence was not lost on him. I think about how much instability has affected his life since the pandemic. How home was the only safe place for so long. “Safer at home” had been our slogan for the past two years. Home was where we sheltered, surge after surge, the walls an impenetrable force against the invisible virus.

Now to drag him between hotels and short-term stays for the next few months with the added anxiety of catching a deadly illness. It is nothing a mother ever wishes for her child.

But maybe that’s how I prepare him. Finding solace in the impermanence. His generation will need to brace for more uncertainty than we ever knew. Climate change. Civil unrest. Pandemics.  Stability is ephemeral.

The aftermath of the fire is nothing short of a catastrophe. One thousand homes and buildings destroyed. Families narrowly escaping their homes. Burned bodies. Missing people.

As we walked through the street, small, crystalline snowflakes fell to the ground, effortlessly dancing on the seared earth. They enveloped the rubble and ash, draping the destruction in a clean, white blanket. The radio played New Year’s Eve music on the drive back to the hotel. Around the world, people were counting down to a new beginning. Out the window, the snow silenced the burning embers. We left behind us everything we knew and braced for what’s ahead. A New Year.