Fire Night

30 December 2021

Structures are burning.

We arrived at my parent’s house around 3PM and promptly turned on the TV. NBC, channel 9. They were carrying breaking-news coverage of the fire. And structures were burning.

Shit. This was no grass fire.

Kyle Clark, a local celebrity/news correspondent for NBC, started broadcasting about a quarter mile from our house near Harper Lake. We saw houses burning in the background behind him, roughly where our house was. But none of the newscasters were naming neighborhoods or cross streets. It was impossible to know anything specific except “houses near Harper Lake are burning.”

Between commercial breaks, Kyle was answering questions over Twitter. So I tweeted at him asking if he had news of our neighborhood:

(me, tweeting with Kyle Clark)

Ok, he responded! Am I famous now? And ok, there’s hope! Open space schmopen space.

The watch.

Jackson left his Verizon smart watch at our house, and this device would provide hours of hope for us and a small cadre of people. Yes, the power and WiFi was out. But his smart watch was on the Verizon cell network. And, the battery monitor on my iPhone’s Verizon app told me that his watch still had power.

If the watch is alive, the house is alive. Let the watch live.

Battery Meter: 99%. 98%.

Friends and neighbors kept asking if the watch was still talking to my iPhone app. I sad “Yes.” They held onto that as a sign that their houses might be there, too. I feel bad for misleading them.

Battery Meter: 97%. 96%. 96%. 96%…

Stuck at 96%. Must be a glitch. I’m sure the cell towers are overwhelmed, and the watch just can’t report accurately anymore. I’m sure the watch is alive. I’m sure our house is alive. “Let’s get ready to support our friends whose houses didn’t make it.” Emily and I discussed what we’d do for them.

The death knell.

Around 9PM, a friend of ours sent us these pictures from a confidential source. They’re all houses in our neighborhood along Via Appia.

That last photo is the entrance to our neighborhood. The fire’d already made its way in before the sun set. Our house was a good 200 yards from that glow, though, along McCaslin, not Via Appia. The fire won’t wipe us all out, right?

Just after 10PM, our next door neighbor John sent me this.

Emily and I headed to bed, numb. My mind raced. I couldn’t sleep. At 1AM I got up and tried to take control of the situation. I filed a claim with our homeowner’s insurance declaring our house a total loss. Maybe, just maybe, I’d be proven wrong the next morning when we went up to see for ourselves.