Things We Lost in the Fire

For the past two weeks, everywhere we've gone, we've seen traces of the all-consuming California blaze: Paradise, King City, the Santa Cruz Mountains, Oakland even. It's usually within a visible distance but not close enough to affect us at all really, other than provoking a hacking smoker's cough now and again.



This whole fire concept is completely new to me. Growing up in Tennessee, "all" we had to worry about were tornadoes, hurricane aftermath and the occasional earthquake (of 2003, remember that one?); in New York City, it was Spitzer and tipsy socialites. No threats of smoldering kindle for miles.



On my way down to Paso Robles last Wednesday -- WHEN I SHOULD HAVE BEEN INTERVIEWING DAVID BECKHAM, AND WILL FOREVER MOURN THE DAY I PASSED ON THAT PARTICULAR OPPORTUNITY -- the fires from Santa Cruz weren't even showing inland. Four days later, you can see how the wind carried them (and also deem how windy it is -- never a good addition to any burning scenario -- judging by my hair and dress whipping around like so):



It's so eerie, like the calm before the storm. The skies are an amazing ribbon of yellows and oranges (which aren't as visible here, as we stupidly only had our Canon point and shoot and not the almighty digital SLR; note to self: never leave home without it, you never know when you'll bear witness to a natural disaster). Don't you know this is exactly what Dorothy saw before she was swept up from her quaint Kansas home and deposited in a hellhole full of buoyant midgets and airborne primates?



When we got back to our pad, all was good on the homefront. The Cat had held down the fort while we were away, save a semi-serious ant invasion that clearly resulted from the heat wave. We could see a layer of fog settling in over the city, but alas, as always, it stopped just at the edge of South San Francisco where we live, and there was no trace of any substance in the air. Then, no more than 20 minutes later, alarms started sounding, the air all around us smelled of burnt hair (and for once, my straightening iron wasn't the cause of it!), and we walked out our front door to find this:



Never the sight you want to see from your own driveway. It was pure insanity. And while our neighbors gawked and Scott joked around about it -- he's a true pyro if ever there were one -- I got to worrying a little. Particularly, because we're leaving town for 10 days on Friday (Alaska, here we come!), and what if we return home to a pile of ash and some measly rubble? At least, maybe then the ants will be gone.

Video of the madness:


Fire on San Bruno Mountain from krysleigh on Vimeo.

And more pics:






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Update 10:49pm: News stories here and here. The fire at San Bruno Mountain is nowhere near contained. And more than three-and-a-half hours after the blaze began, there's still not more than a few paragraphs on the web. I love what one of the commenters wrote: "Newspapers can't even scoop ice cream, never mind the news."

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Update Monday, 7:55am: Seventy-five percent contained! For once, I'm praising the fog for rolling in and taking control of what could have been an otherwise dire situation. Two hundred acres is a lot of acres, after all.