In the Burn Zones

I live in Talent, Oregon. This post is about the Almeda fire.

A note: this post has been edited since first publishing. I originally wrote it just a few weeks after the fire. At the time of writing, I wasn't ready to tell the whole story I wanted to tell. More than a year later, in November of 2021, I added to it significantly, stuff I was too tired or reluctant to discuss before. I believe these details are important, but I had to recover a little self confidence before I could bring myself to talk about them. Please know that I'm doing much better now than I was in 2020.

Background: Anjou Club Apartments, where I live. Foreground: What remains of Oak Valley Community.

A small Buddha sits in a patio strewn with ash and debris. Across the street, a statue of Mary meets a patch of rubble with her loving downward gaze. I guess it makes sense that stone-wrought icons would survive fires. These two in particular seem to survive anything. Keeping respectfully to the sidewalk, I kneel in the dust and try to find a good angle on Mary through the simple lens of my phone's camera. Her image now resides in a small virtual gallery of devastation, tucked away in my pocket.

You can see the hot side and the cool side of the trees, whose branches point north, frozen as they were on that day when the wind was blowing the fire north.

I've been spending some time in the burn zones. My routine town walk takes me right through them. I have long enjoyed walking a short circuit from my apartments to downtown Talent and its tree shaded neighborhoods. These streets I walk after work when my mind won't settle down, or on weekends when I wake up late in the morning, or at night while catching up with a long distance friendship over the phone. I roam them restlessly with the stray cats and the starlings until I find a place to settle- a cafe or a park bench- and watch the world go by.

Now, after the fire, not a single block is the same. My apartments and the neighboring townhouses stand like an archipelago of normalcy among the gray ruins of homes and businesses to the North, South, East, and West. The window of my study once looked out over the beige rooftops of an elderly enclave that abutted our community of college students and young families. I've since closed the blinds on what remains: cinders and foundations and the short pillars of tarnished washer-dryer stacks.

The glass panels of the bus stop melted.

We, the residents of Anjou Club Apartments, owe everything to the firefighters and the maintenance team who stayed all night to put out embers thrown from the inferno as it raged northward along our Eastern and Western borders. It's hard to imagine the adrenaline and the terror of that fight. It's hard to find words sufficient to express my gratitude. It's hard to trace the fine boundary that separates these feelings of gratitude and loss. I walk that line when I walk through town, where one side of Talent Avenue burned to the ground, the other remains as it was, and the lamp posts separating the two sides still weep from the heat of the fire, their softened glass arrested in various states of melt.

All that remains of the downtown bookstore I once perused is a foundation filled with the ashes of burned books. The charred artifacts of a kitchen stand in the footprint of a burned restaurant. A large mixer denuded of its enamel and discolored by the flames, ironically heat-frozen, will never turn again. The pizza oven looks almost undamaged, aside from a couple long cracks in its face.

I feel an urgency to photograph these things, to document these painful memories before they are gone. Cleanup has begun, and I feel like I'm racing against ashy dozers with drivers in hazmat suits to preserve a piece of this transient yet critical time in Talent's history. When concerned friends ask if I'm wallowing, my first instinct is to disdainfully remind them that I can't come and go from my home without passing by wreckage. I can't avoid the visions of loss all around me. Instead, I reply that I feel better in the burn zones than outside them. There is nothing left there to catch fire. No safer place to be. It's been almost a month and I'm still waking up several times a night in a state of panic, still trying to find my lost appetite, still losing weight, still reminding myself I'm one of the fortunate ones.

There's something cathartic about these spaces. The burn zones possess the same mingled peace and sorrow as a cemetery, where the solitude and the silence invite you to dwell in your love for what is gone, where you are not expected to pretend at happiness or normalcy, and you can relax in your sorrows, wounds lifted so the bleeding may slow, wounds open to the air so the blood can congeal.

Plenty of people, perhaps most, seem to retreat to the bright side when confronted with a tragedy. Quick to note that we're lucky to have homes, we're lucky to have jobs, we're lucky to have our lives, they reserve their grief for the luckless displaced families whose immigration status won't qualify them for assistance, and when they need to drive across town, they carefully pick routes that don't pass through burn zones.

I'm familiar with the emotional calculus of counting blessings. I've done it enough to estimate the distance between myself and the world's most unfortunate souls. But from where I'm standing, the bright side looks suspiciously like a form of denial, and staying there too long can really inflame your survivor's guilt, something I'm struggling with already. I'm content to stay on the dark side, the burned side of Talent Avenue, just outside the caution tape, reckoning with a loss that afflicts us all, homed and homeless, employed and jobless, reckoning until I've sorted out what I can do. There must be something I can do. For now, I take pictures. I won't let these small vignettes of tragedy be forgotten.

Someone pulled wrenches from the ashes of the bike shop where I had mine repaired this summer, and they arranged them in a heart on the pavement. Near the heart is a melted stream of aluminum. I think it must have been a bicycle frame.

I was working a twelve hour day at the winery when the Almeda fire sparked in Northern Ashland. I was on day fifteen without a day off, normal for harvest and acceptable to any self-respecting winemaker whose life is otherwise stable. I got a call from my partner at noon, breathless and panicked. They had to evacuate her workplace in North Ashland. Twenty foot flames were approaching fast when a cop rushed in ordering them to leave via loudspeaker. They barely made it out in time.

She went home to Talent. She promised to call back in an hour to check in. When she did, she was breathless again, racing around the apartment collecting a few irreplaceable things, preparing to evacuate a second time. I told her not to wait for the order, just leave now. After I hung up, I dialed everyone I knew in Ashland, Talent, and Phoenix. Over the sound of grape processing equipment, I shouted at friends to leave their belongings and get out. Between phone calls, I kept working.

While I worked, my loved ones fled their homes in a struggling surge of traffic too heavy for our small country roads. While I worked, the choppers circled and the tankers dropped fire retardant on my town and the wind blew relentlessly. I thought about leaving, but it was unclear how far the fire had traveled, and I wasn't keen to add one more vehicle to the overburdened roads. My family and friends all gathered safely at my parents' house some distance away. We had no word yet of structures burning. It was probably going to be fine. So I kept working.

By the time the day's work was done, all the roads between me and my family were closed, and a heavy dread settled upon us as we realized everything was not fine. I could not go to my family. I could not hold and console them. All I could do was sit in shock on the Ashland couch of my friend Ayase, drinking gin and watching a hilltop livecam of tall flames ripping through Talent and Phoenix, begging my father over the phone to leave our forested family home, situated just outside a level-two evacuation zone where they could see the distant light of the fires and hear the explosions of propane tanks.

The rest of the family had retreated further from the blaze, but he had stayed with two stubborn friends to defend the house. They put sprinklers on the roof and they drove around the property with a water tank on the back of the tractor, wetting the ground. Late into the night, I called him over and over, progressively drunker and more belligerent, to ask, demand, argue, pray, and plead desperately for his immediate departure. Each time, he promised he would leave soon.

When I finally tried to sleep on Ayase's floor, I slept with the fear that the wind would change direction in the night and bring the fire toward us while we were unconscious. Everyone in Ashland slept with that fear. Those who slept at all. I fell into a sleep-wake cycle that would haunt me for weeks to come. Lie restlessly in bed. Sink weakly into unconsciousness. Surge violently upright, sometimes to my feet, heart beating hard upon my ribs. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

Fire is not a thing. It is not an object, but rather a process. It is the visual apparition of an exothermic conversion: from flammable matter to ash. It is the light and heat that dance around combusting materials as they dissolve into dark snowflakes and particles of smoke. Fighting a fire is not like fighting a material enemy. Firefighters battle entropy itself.

Evidence of the battle can be found all over town, if you look carefully. Street signs, chopped through at the base, lie upon the pavement unburned. They may have blocked a truck or snagged a hose. Fences knocked down, fences sawed through to make way. Mad circles of tire tracks in blackened fields. A charred length of fire hose coiled next to the burned fence of Anjou club Apartments.

Talent lost one third of its residences and dozens of businesses that day. Lost in their entirety. Burned to the ground. Phoenix had it even worse. The devastation was reported far and wide by major outlets from the New York Times to National Geographic.

Talent and Phoenix smouldered for over a week after the fire. Large sections were cordoned off by the National Guard until it was safe to go back. Our apartments were in the middle of a hazard zone. We were kept out for a full nine days while crews cleaned up the downed power lines and repaired the water system. My father and the family home survived by good fortune. Firefighters later told us that if the fire had jumped Pioneer road, it would have spread uncontrollably to Griffin Creek, engulfing the house and my father with it.

My parents' house quickly became a gathering place for evacuees and friends who lost a home. For a few days, every spare bed and couch was taken. After that, people steadily dispersed, back to neighborhoods that were declared safe. Ours was the last to let anyone in. The utilities were a mess and our apartments were surrounded by the carnage of fire. We spent our extended evacuation living out of a hotel room with a few belongings and a lot of dread. When we finally returned, it felt like coming home to a bombed-out war zone.

Still, I acknowledged my luck in every conversation about the fire. Still, I worked every day of the week, wholly committed to the profession I love. Thirty straight work days is not unusual for harvest in the wine industry. I hid my lingering anxieties from my coworkers. I joked and laughed and acted like everything was fine.

Funny things happen to the mind when immersed in this level of chaos. The survival instinct turns some people into victims and others into heroes. It turns some into monsters and others into clowns. I cope by cracking jokes and lightening the mood when everything is falling apart. Some cope by preparing for war.

I met the masked warrior the morning after the fire. Thin smoke streamers rose from Talent and Phoenix, and I sat in the nearly-empty parking lot of Shop N Kart eating a hasty breakfast. A stranger approached from the only car parked near me. His coronavirus mask was printed with the open jaws of the alien from Predator. He kept it on despite being outside. He asked me for a picture.

I was tired and emotionless at that point. After a night of little sleep, I had risen early that morning with a strong desire to go home. Home was on the other side of a police barricade, so I sneaked across it when the officer drove away for a few minutes (shift change? I'll never know). I saw the smoldering ruins of Oak Valley and felt nothing. I saw the charred silhouettes of burned trees and the lonely figures of chimneys standing in ash and I felt nothing. I saw my apartments, still there, and thought "what a relief". But it was just a thought. No feeling of relief came. Just the postponement of dread. I grabbed a few belongings and decided to get breakfast. That's how I ended up in the parking lot of a grocery store, where I was approached by the man in the Predator mask.

We chatted a few minutes. I listened to his rambling conspiracy theory that the fire was caused by exploding Pacific Power smart meters. He had an odd fake-sounding laugh, as though he practiced it in the mirror, and he looked all around the parking lot as he spoke, as though suspicious someone might be watching us. He told me he'd been out all night "trying to get home". He passed me his phone, set to camera. He said "just a second" and reached into the back seat of his car. There was an electric tension in the air, as though he was finally reaching the summit of a peak he'd been climbing since he first asked me for a photo.

There, laid across his belongings in the open, was an AR-15. He pulled it out and held it across his chest, fake-laughed again and stared at me, waiting.

In that moment, my interior became a vacuum, my exterior became a masked portrait of fear, and my mind was consumed with a single thought: mass shooters take selfies before they start blowing people away. The man with the predator mask offered no explanation before he pulled out the gun. He stood there with it as though posing for a victory shot, at eight in the morning, in the parking lot of a grocery store. He laughed at the look on my face.

The fear of being shot managed to surpass all the other fears of the previous night. I barely maintained my composure as I told him I'd rather let him find someone else to take his photo. Passed him the phone. He took a selfie as I tore out of the parking lot without a backward glance, head down, white knuckled and shaking, wondering how much distance I should put behind me before I called 911. I headed toward the winery, simply because I didn't know where else to go.

By sheer happenstance, I ran across the Sheriff on the way. He was parked on a gravel corner and talking on his radio. I pulled over frantically and rolled down my window to tell him what happened. He looked as though he hadn't slept. First responders across the valley were still working overtime to put out the spot fires, manage evacuation zones, and deal with God only knows what else. World-weary and skeptical, he asked if the man had pointed the gun at anybody. I thought about it. Um, no. He replied that the man's actions were perfectly legal. His eyes looked so tired and old. Older than his years. He told me he'd send someone to check up on Shop N Kart. Then he went back to his radio.

I swallowed all my fears and rolled up my window. I sat there for a few minutes before I went to work, grappling with the fact that an American can legally scare the living daylights out of a woman in a parking lot by confronting her with an automatic weapon and face no repercussions. Predator Mask Guy had seen my face. He had even learned my name. He's still out there somewhere. I wonder if he knows I reported him. I have not seen him since.

In times of shock and terror, my feelings don't always find me right away. They stay locked down until I'm either ready to let them out, or I lose my nerve completely. I was all locked up when I got to work and told my boss flatly, "The neighboring complex burned down but ours is okay". I was still locked up when I worked through a few essential tasks at the winery, and still locked up when I left work early to find my phone, which had gone missing in all the chaos, and to reunite with my family on the other side of a long and crooked chain of burned homes and evac zones.

I took the freeway toward the North Medford strip malls. I hardly noticed a fresh plume of smoke beginning to rise in the distance ahead of me. I passed my grandmother's old neighborhood in Phoenix, where she lived for over forty years and where we celebrated every Christmas Eve until I was thirty, a quaint little mobile home park for the retired with more lawn gnomes than human residents. It was gone. Just. Gone. All of it, every last house. I thought to myself numbly, good thing she moved to the retirement home year before last. I turned my attention toward the swelling plume just as I passed the South Medford freeway exit, my last chance to turn back. A new fire had started in Central Point, a few miles up the road. All around me, the traffic slowed to a standstill. We stopped on the Viaduct, a 3200 foot long overpass over Downtown Medford.

That's how they finally found me, all those fears I'd locked away. They found me when I was forced to stop in a line of cars on an overpass while a fresh fire raged ahead of me, and there was nowhere to go.

With each passing year, fewer living people remember September 11th. I find myself close to the boundary of those who remember and those who don't. I was fourteen when it happened. The memory that really stuck was the weeping reporter. We turned on the TV to see a man choking up and crying as he reported breaking news that people had started jumping out of the trade center. He was standing outside. I think he was filming from New Jersey with the burning towers in the background. Blurry footage of people leaping to their deaths accompanied his report. They were jumping to escape the fire.

Those images screamed through my head as I sat there on the Viaduct, unable to turn around or change course, helicopters thumping overhead, emergency vehicles flying past us in the pullout lane, passing so fast it made the car shake. All of North Medford was being evacuated, and I was trapped among the last cars that remained on the freeway before the North Medford section was closed, all pointed the wrong direction, all struggling to merge with North Medford's evacuees so we could turn around and get the hell out of there. I crept past a big rig blocking my view of the smoke. The tall billowing pillar was black, the color of burning synthetic materials, the color of burning houses. It was just a couple miles away. I thought about the charred ruins of Oak Valley Community.

It took the Almeda fire a mere seventy five minutes to travel five miles from the outskirts of Ashland to Talent. I was stuck on the freeway for over forty five minutes, praying for the wind to keep blowing north, for the love of humanity keep blowing north. A big tanker plane swooped low overhead to drop fire retardant. It flew so low that I could make out the details in its belly, the delicate lines of metal panels. I watched it disappear behind the big rig and tried to imagine its trajectory. I watched the trees blowing hard in the wind. I made up my mind that if the wind changed, if it blew the fire our way, I would grit my teeth and jump off the overpass and hope that I'd land sufficiently unbroken to run.

By the time I made it off the freeway and turned around, some part of me knew I'd had one too many moments of "Well this could be how I die", but I could hardly imagine what that might mean for me in the long term. Only the short term existed, and the short term demanded that I forget about replacing my phone and go home. So I took a long and circuitous route around the evac zones to my parents' house, which was packed to capacity with evacuated friends. I showed up beaten and weary like Odysseus returning from his Odyssey, hugged my mother, and was just starting to tell them about Predator Mask Guy when my friend Sam declared that her house had burned down. I decided it was best not to talk about it. Instead, I hugged her on the couch while she cried.

There was nothing left to do, it seemed, except carry on with life. Harvest stops for nothing. It would be a shame to give up on the whole 2020 vintage, and I was needed at the winery. So I worked another day, and another, and another. And when I went home to my burned-out town, I fell into a depressive pit where I felt undeserving of anyone's sympathy. And when I tried to sleep, I slept fitfully through dreams haunted by fires and armed strangers. I dreamed of being trapped on the road by encroaching flames, of being shot in the head, of begging my family to leave their house while nobody listened. And I surged out of bed over and over, ready to run for my life.

I laughed it off, I worked, I leapt out of bed, and I was fine because my house didn't burn down. I laughed, I worked, I cried in the bathroom, and I was fine because my house didn't burn down. I laughed, I worked, I sat in my car staring into space, and I was fine because my house didn't burn down.

All the tires are absent from the shells of burned cars. The auto shops feature fragile stacks of shattered hub cabs where pillars of tires once stood. All that rubber burned until it was gone, no trace of it left, converted to vapor, committed to the heavens with the burned polymer siding and the motor oil and the antifreeze, joining with the vaporized drain-o and the bleach and the insulation and all the other toxic things that burn in residential fires. Now, when it rains, Talent smells like a wet ashtray with hints of singed plastic.

I managed to carry on for three and a half sleepless weeks before something inside me finally gave, and I found myself sobbing uncontrollably behind the winery over the mistakes I was making at work. It's hard to remember all the small important details when you're sleep deprived and traumatized. I felt utterly worthless. The lack of sleep was slowly breaking me.

In my darkest moment, sitting on the ground behind the winery with my back against a stack of empty picking bins, I resolved that the best course of action was to go home and swallow enough Percocet to knock me out, not much caring if I woke up in the hospital or woke up at all. It seemed the only way to reach that state of deep unconsciousness I so badly needed. I felt trapped by the demands of my work, trapped with no escape, trapped like I was trapped on the Viaduct, and I was ready to jump off the bridge. I asked permission to leave early. Left work fully intending to overdose on opiates. Desperation brings on some truly grand notions.

I guess the sleep deprivation helped me in the end. I was scarcely able to drive home and carry out my plan. I kept stopping at green lights and blowing stop signs and eventually decided I shouldn't drive at all. So I pulled over and called a hotline. The nice lady on the hotline told me to get my partner to take me to urgent care. Alira ferried me to a doctor who prescribed me sleeping pills. She put Alira in charge of the medication so I wouldn't try to swallow the whole bottle.

Like my personal nurse, she administers my dose each night before bed. It makes me feel like my limbs don't belong to me, but it helps me sleep, and that is all I want in the world. To escape my fears in the deepest sleep.

But what I need is to stop. I've been charging ahead since the fire and I need to stop running. To stop and be with the pain and the fear. To be with these emotions until I can reconcile them.

I've found a lot of BBQ sets in the ruins. Some of them look as they did before the fire. I've found a sagging barbell still elevated upon its stand above the mess of a former garage. I've found striking artifacts of peoples' lives, standing watch with the chimneys over the quiet graveyard of burned neighborhoods.

Today I found a birdbath offering ash-poisoned water to the birds. They seem to know better than to drink it. I'm surprised to see a lot of birds now in the burn zones. I've spotted a small gathering of doves in the leafless canopy of a burned tree. I tried to photograph them, but they were too high up for my phone to capture. So I stood quietly and listened instead, alone in the cemetery of homes. Here, in the burned zone, birds are singing. Here, on the dark side, healing begins.