Saturday Started With Me Watering the Vegetables

Saturday started as a perfectly ordinary day.

I got up, watered the vegetables, had some breakfast and spent part of the morning working on Monday’s article. Late in the morning my gardener unexpectedly showed up. He usually comes on Sunday, but I hadn’t seen him for a couple of weeks, so we talked about several things that needed attention.

Later, when I went outside to finish a few follow-up chores, I noticed smoke in the distance.

My wife had heard there was a fire somewhere near Verdi, a small community west of us. We’ve had fires over there before. They came and went without causing us much concern, so this one didn’t seem particularly noteworthy either.

By the middle of the afternoon, that began to change.

People started calling to ask whether we knew about the fire. There was now plenty of smoke visible north of us, and around three o’clock I could see flames along the top of Peavine, the mountain immediately north of our house.

I still wasn’t particularly concerned.

The wind was blowing toward the north. The visible fire was on the ridge. Fires generally prefer to burn uphill and with the wind rather than downhill against it. From where I was standing, the fire seemed to be doing exactly what I expected it to do — moving away from us.

So we went about the rest of our day.

After dinner, as dusk began to settle in, I went outside to take another look.

The entire ridge of Peavine was ablaze.

More importantly, the fire was starting to come down the mountain.

That got our attention.

We decided it might be a good idea to pack a few things just in case. I put our important documents and passports into a suitcase, along with prescriptions and several days of clothes.

Sandy packed clothes too, but she made some different choices. She filled a couple of large boxes with photographs — family events and pictures from trips we have taken over the past fifty years — along with some of her painting things. Interestingly, she left the paintings hanging on the walls.

I left behind boxes and files filled with financial papers that ordinarily seem terribly important.

Apparently an evacuation provides a rather efficient way of establishing priorities.

We had just started settling in for the evening when our phones told us the situation had changed again. Our evacuation status went from essentially “be prepared” to “leave now.”

So we packed the car.

There was no great emotional moment as we drove away. I didn’t stop at the end of the driveway and contemplate the house, our possessions or fifty years of accumulated stuff. We had been told to leave, so we left.

Sandy had talked with a friend who lives across the river and well away from the fire. She invited us to stay with her. On our way, we went out the back of our community and picked up our kids, who live nearby and were still in a lower evacuation category.

At the time, I considered the evacuation mostly a precaution.

I still didn’t think our house was in much danger. The closest flames were more than a mile away, the wind was generally carrying the fire away from us, and the primary threat I could imagine was an errant ember somehow getting into the brush behind the house.

But over the next day I began to understand the evacuation somewhat differently.

Getting residents out isn’t only about saving residents from flames. It also gets thousands of cars and people out of the way of the people trying to fight the fire.

The Hawk Fire eventually grew to just over 15,000 acres. By Monday afternoon firefighters had etablished containment to 27 percent, with roughly 900 personnel involved. At least 32 homes had been destroyed and six more damaged, primarily in areas north and northeast of Peavine, where the fire was considerably more threatening than it ever became on our side of the mountain.

The fire response included large numbers of engines and crews, helicopters, bulldozers and outside assistance. Officials were trying to establish and hold fire lines across difficult terrain while also dealing with evacuation traffic, utility problems and tens of thousands of people who either had been evacuated or told to be ready to leave.

Seen from that perspective, keeping us out made more sense.

By Monday morning the territory closest to our neighborhood appeared to have largely burned through, and I began wondering why we still couldn’t return. Some people who had managed to get back to their homes were apparently allowed to remain, although they were told that if they left they would not be allowed back in.

Meanwhile, those of us outside couldn’t get to our houses next door.

That was frustrating. But opening a neighborhood doesn’t mean allowing one homeowner to drive home. It potentially means allowing thousands of cars back onto roads being used by firefighters, law enforcement and utility crews.

By about one o’clock Monday afternoon, our evacuation restriction was lifted and we were finally able to return.

We found essentially what I expected to find.

Nothing had happened.

Our neighborhood was fine. Friends who live farther up the side of Peavine had watched the fire get considerably closer, but their homes were fine too. The serious damage occurred elsewhere, particularly on the northeast side of the mountain, where some people lost homes and others remained threatened even after we were back sitting comfortably in ours.

That distinction matters.

For us, the Hawk Fire amounted to an inconvenience. We packed some bags, spent a night or two with friends, disrupted a few plans and then came home.

For other people, it was something entirely different.

Perhaps that is one of the strange things about a wildfire. From one side of a mountain it can be a catastrophe. From the other side it can be an interesting glow in the evening sky, followed by an annoying message on your phone telling you to leave.

Same fire. Very different experience.

There was one casualty at our house.

Saturday morning I had started the day watering my vegetables. Then I spent a couple of days wondering whether they were getting any water at all.

When we finally got home Monday afternoon, the house was fine, the neighborhood was fine, and life resumed pretty much where we had left it.

I went out to check the garden.

Considering what happened to some of the people on the other side of Peavine, having to worry about a few thirsty vegetables seemed like a pretty good outcome.