The Lighter Side of the Fiery Flames of Hell

It’s hard to pinpoint when the apocalypse started. Was it Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Was it the murders perpetrated by the Manson Family? The 9/11 terrorist attacks? COVID? The Hawk Tuah girl’s rise to fame? I guess it doesn’t matter when it started, but the apocalypse is here, and it continues to rage.

Last Monday, I got a text that a half-acre fire started in the canyon where we live. Our Southern California community is an arsonist’s wet dream: a year-round tinderbox, drier than a bucket of Saharan sand. During the 30-minute drive home, the half-acre turned into ten, and the fire was promoted to naming status. The given name? The Airport Fire. A bit of a misnomer since the airport catered to remote control airplanes the size of a Pomeranian and not, ya know, actual airplanes.

Pretty much.

Right away online rumors started flying. Some hobbyist, cosplaying as Orville and Wilbur Wright, crashed his model airplane into the brush and now California is going to look like Chernobyl. This was just early hearsay, and it crashed and burned quicker than the spread of the fire. The truth was worse.

The thermometer hit 107°F that Monday—it had been that hot or hotter the previous five days—and some shot-caller with government-induced brain damage thought it would be the perfect day to fire up a bulldozer and move around some boulders, which was in the interest of—wait for it—preventing a wildfire. Some sources say that the bulldozer malfunctioned and caused a spark; others say one boulder knocked up another and gave birth to hellfire; and still others say that the bulldozer unwittingly opened up a portal to hell and Lucifer Brimstone himself popped in to say hello.

Getting back home to start our evacuation proved difficult. There are only two ways into our canyon, and the first was chaos. Our canyon is populated with horse folk. Horse folk don’t like to be told what to do. In fact, they like to tell 1,000-pound animals what to do. So when a police officer informed them that they could not drive into the canyon to fetch their Appaloosas and their Friesians and their Clydesdales since first responders needed access, the horse folk went a little outlaw.

Several of them tried to drive around the barricade, but they didn’t know who they were dealing with. This police officer looked like a Pixar character. He was all belly. I looked at him and thought, That is one roly poly solar plexus. Still, the man could move. A pickup tried to slip the barricade, and the cop boxed him out. A couple of SUVs got the same treatment. This portly police officer pulled out all the steps—he sashayed and cha-cha’d, he sidestepped and two-stepped—and nobody got by him unless their rig was fire engine-red and screaming wee-woo.

I drove seven miles to the other canyon entrance. The cop running that checkpoint had maybe 5% of the Pixar cop’s charm. I gave him my ID and said I had family and animals to evacuate. He checked it, threw a look over his shoulder at the hellfire, and said “Good luck” with such coldness that I figured the firefighters could end the blaze by neutering this guy and dropping his icy testicles on the flames.

Smoky hellfire.

I arrived home just a few minutes after my wife, and she was already soaked in sweat. She rarely sweats, and when she does, she insists she’s not sweating but rather glowing. Still, nothing turns your reality into a schvitz quite like an emergency evacuation.

When the thought enters your mind that you could lose everything, and it’s confirmed by the sight of a blazing tempest of doom, what’s important and essential snaps into focus. For me, it was my dad’s guitar and a couple of Mont Blanc pens. For my wife, it was jewelry she’s inherited, our wedding album, framed pictures of the kids. Keepsakes and heirlooms, the things that hold our broken hearts together.

The blazing tempest of doom.

Because the evacuation was temporary and not yet mandatory, we had time to text the kids and ask what they wanted us to grab. My daughter wanted a box of letters from friends, her journal, her baby blanket, and the box of money she’s been saving since she was a toddler. My son wanted one thing: his Dove Body Wash. No shit.

In our experiences of wildfire-related evacuations, the emotions are mostly existential dread, extreme anxiety, and an ever-mounting fever dream of terror. Generally, there’s not a lot of laughter. But a last-minute request for Dove Body Wash? If you don’t laugh at that, I don’t want to know you.

My son is accepting endorsement deals if anyone knows somebody.

After we got past the initial shock and bahahaha, we remembered that our son, now a freshman, has been showing growing interest in young women, and the heart wants what the heart wants. Apparently, his heart wants to smell good so that he can continue his romantic pursuits.

After we were mostly packed, I ran next door to see if our neighbor needed help. His name is Blue Bear. Okay, it’s not actually Blue Bear, but his name is a color-animal combination, and he has a bumper sticker on his truck that reads “Proud to Be Mohawk.” His face looks like a topographical map, and I’d guess he was born in the 1700s. Blue Bear has always been friendly with my family and me, but other neighbors have had different interactions with him that you might expect to have with Bobby Knight, Hunter S. Thompson, or a honey badger.

I knocked on Blue Bear’s door. His shepherd started barking the way you hope a dog never barks at you. “Come in,” a voice said. It was Blue Bear’s wife. She was seated behind a partition, so I couldn’t see her.

“Y’all doing okay in here?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said flatly, without any hint of concern.

“Did you hear about the fire?”

“Yes.” Again, nothing but matter-of-factness.

”Did you see the fire up on the mountain?”

“Yes.” This answer made me wonder if she heard “flower” when I said “fire.”

“Is there anything I can help you with?”

“No.” As a writer, I know something about subtext, and the subtext of this one-word response was “Get the fuck out of my house, asshole.”

I confirmed as much when I pulled the door shut and I said, “I’ll be next door if you need anything,” and she said, “Sure,” as in, “Sure, like you’re any help to anyone.” Once the dull ache of my bruised ego subsided, I reasoned that in the event I make it to several hundred years old, it would likely take a lot more than wildfire to upset me enough to abandon my comfy chair.

My wife went to her parents’ house with all our loot, and I stayed back with the dogs, cats, and chickens, ready to evacuate them if need be. My wife took one cat with her, but only because he made his thoughts on the matter crystal clear when we were packing up.

“Let’s get the hell outta here, Norm.” — Mr. Thunder Jones

One great thing about a wildfire is the flood of messages you get from friends. So many people reached out, offering us a place to stay, thoughts and prayers, help with the evacuation. Several friends even offered their trucks to help move stuff. We were nothing but grateful, but we declined all offers. We had it handled. Later, we realized our mistake, and in the next wildfire evacuation, we’ll absolutely accept these generosities. We’ll load up their trucks with the crap in our garage we’ve been meaning to get rid of, and we’ll send a parade of Marie Kondo’d nonsense to the dump. Never let a good emergency go to waste.

I spent the next four days at our house while my wife and kids were at her parents’ house. The fire grew to 23,000+ acres, and if I left, they wouldn’t have let me back in to evacuate our animals. The roads were shut down so that just first responders could get in. I’d walk up the easement every hour or so to watch the fireworks. Planes and helicopters created an air expressway over our canyon. If I had a slingshot, I could have hit some of them they flew so low.

If anybody knows the pilots in this helicopter, buy them a round.

Some of the neighbors and I would talk strategy, questioning why the firefighters weren’t attacking that side of the fire instead of this side, why they used water here and retardant there, why the helicopters used what seemed like leaky shot glasses, and several other thin-witted commentaries. We embodied the wobbly, pasty drunks at the sports bar who haven’t had muscle tone since Little League and Pop Warner yet still question the calls and reads of professional athletes. Literal fire scientists were keeping our homes safe, and that we had the audacity to question anything was the height of silliness. Nothing fuels self-righteousness like ignorance and fear.

It occurs to me that I know who the Kardashians are but not the name of the person who invented fire retardant. Whomever that person is should replace the bear on the California state flag because that person definitely saved our home. (Note: Apparently, fire retardant was developed over time by many hands, but still…)

And the pilots who dropped the retardant—those peeps need a statue or flag, too. Imagine your boss saying, “Okay, we’re gonna fill this metal tube with chemicals and you’re going to fly it into a cyclone of heat and pandemonium, and then you’re gonna do it again and again until the sun sets to save the homes of all these turds who think they know better. Oh, and we’re gonna pay you a government salary.”

Even the knowledge that legitimate heroes were fighting this fire wasn’t enough to make for a good night’s sleep. When the possibility of losing everything becomes real, the nightmares come in hot. In the one nightmare, I had climbed up on our roof to fight the fire with nothing but a full bladder. I unzipped my pants and let it rip. Unfortunately, in the dream world, my urine was flammable and the fire came for me and my manhood right quick. Fortunately, I woke up before my penis was engulfed in flames.

Subconsciously, I believe my bladder packs enough punch to extinguish this fire and protect the homestead.

On Wednesday, the fire continued to rage, and it was my birthday. If you’re doing the calendar math on that, then yes, you know that my birthday is on 9/11. Somebody up there really doesn’t like the fact that I was born. Lucky for me, somebody down here, namely my wife, does. One of our neighbors got permission to leave the canyon and return with groceries and other essentials, and my wife collaborated with those neighbors to get me a chocolate cake and a six pack of Space Dust for my birthday. She’s a good woman.

That said, eating a lonely slice of birthday cake as a fire rages all around is a little depressing. One of my best friends, however, a woman named Gwendolyn, can top me in a depressing birthday image contest. When she was a kid, her family moved to a new town and invited all her classmates to a birthday party at Burger King. And nobody showed.

Eventually, one classmate showed up, but it was just a coincidence. Her family just happened to go to Burger King for dinner. When the classmate’s parents realized the unbelievably sad turn of events, they forced their daughter to sit beside Gwendolyn, both girls wearing those shitty Burger King crowns made of paper, and endure the most pathetic interpretation of the Happy Birthday song ever sung. Every time Gwendolyn tells this story, I laugh my balls off. Well, I told her about my birthday, and now neither of us have balls.

It was hard to write this week. Few distractions can compete with the possibility of losing your home and everything in it. One of the days I was outside watching the planes and the helicopters take the fight to the fire, I noticed a yellow butterfly in our garden, a Western Tiger Swallowtail, according to my quick internet search.

Float like a butterfly. Good advice.

It was dancing from flower to flower, doing its job as usual, beautiful and ever so alive. It made me think of my wife, my kids, my friends and family, Dove Body Wash, all the things that matter. So I went back inside and started to write. Because when the fire is on the crest of the mountain, but the butterfly dances anyway, the I-love-yous and the go-fuck-yourselves are crystal clear.

---

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this, you might enjoy some other brushes with mortality I’ve written about:

• Horseplay: my wife rides well; I do not.

• The Finger: basketball can go wrong, really wrong.

• Making Friends with Agony: advice and experience for any would-be marathon runners

• The Canyon Zombie and My Beautiful Wife: we were having a rough year, and then the world said, “Let’s see how they handle zombies.”

You might also enjoy the dark crime comedy novella I published under the pen name Pastrami Crawford. It’s called Dig. Paperback and ebook available on Amazon.