I had no idea what was happening.
I had come home from poker Tuesday night around half an hour after midnight, and had puttered around for a while, finally going to sleep around 1:30, and the next thing I knew Trish was screaming at me.
I kind of expected Trish to wake me up on Wednesday, as she does each morning, but something was different. Oh, yeah, she was screaming. I sat up in bed and tried to process what was going on–she was yelling that I needed to get dressed. This is not the normal thing that happens in the morning. Why is she telling me to get dressed? Why does she sound so upset?
I look at the clock. It’s 3AM. Why is she yelling at me from down the hall to get dressed?
Suddenly I am awake–she’s yelling at me from Sarah’s room. She sounds more scared than I’ve ever heard her. Something must be wrong with Sarah–I kick into hyperdrive, pulling on some pants and a shirt as I run down the hall.
If you aren’t a parent you have no way of imagining what I was feeling as I came down that hall, the nightmare scenarios that were playing through my mind, etc.
When I turned the corner into Sarah’s room, two things struck me immediately: Sarah was there, looking OK, and all I could see outside Sarah’s window, filling the whole window, was FIRE.
I’ve seen a lot of fire on TV, and even two out-of-control forest fires in real life from a distance. Neither of those things prepares you for turning a corner and being confronted with a 40 foot column of fire and ash blasting into the sky.
Since my brain was working by then, I could tell that it was the neighbour’s house, and that it was already too late for the fire department to do anything but contain the fire–that house was gone.
You can’t normally see our neighbour’s house from our place–we live on large lots, so the house is not close, and there is a wooded section between our lots that screens our yards. What I saw now was a the bright orange of fire glaring from between tree-shaped silhouettes, and a column of flame extending up well above the treeline. I remember quickly thinking both “man, I should have a camera” and “huh, the Tyndall effect makes the smoke look like solid light”, with the nerve-twanging undercurrent of my lizard brain screaming at me to get the hell out of there in the background.
Trish, still sounding shrill and shaken, had already got Sarah’s jacket and stuff on her, and was calling the neighbours. We immediately planned to get Sarah out of our house, in case the fire spread, and all three of us piled into the car and went to the home of friends on the other side of the road, a few houses down. My lizard brain was still freaked by the fire, but frankly I was relieved that Sarah was OK. Moments later I was feeling a little guilty for that relief when it was possible my neighbours were still in there, but the guilt was small compared to my relief.
There were lots of fire trucks arriving on the scene, and paramedics, and as we moved we could see them setting up what looked like above-ground swimming pools in the middle of the road. I assume they were water storage, since we live in the woods and don’t have city water, they have to bring in water to feed the pumper trucks. You can’t run a fire hose off of a well.
To make a long story short, we spent the night at our friends home. Sarah had gone immediately back to sleep when we got there, and I only stayed up for about an hour. Trish, on the other hand, was too freaked out to sleep and sat a kind of nervous vigil all night.
In the morning, we went back to our house. Our place was fine–unmarked really except for some ash on the roof. By then the fire department had pretty well wrapped things up, and all that was left of our neighbours’ home was a roofless set of walls surrounding a charred empty hole. The neighbours themselves were able to get out in time, fortunately. They woke with the fire already blazing, and don’t know what could have caused it. (Unless, of course, it was Neil trying to solve his Chris problem with fire, and hitting the wrong house.)
The fire did not spread off the property, and indeed didn’t really escape the house–fortunately it was pretty damp, so the ash and sparks that were shooting into the amazing display when I first saw the fire didn’t spread it. In fact, sitting at our breakfast table on Wednesday morning, you couldn’t even tell anything had happened–the trees screen the neighbour’s yard, so we couldn’t see the giant smouldering hole where their house had been. It was kind of unsettling to have things look so normal, and know they’re not.
Machines came today and pulled the charred remnants of the walls down. Apparently they don’t waste any time with that.
A story about the fire was in today’s Chronicle (yes, that’s the “good” daily–the one with the startlingly good pagination.)
