What burns away

We are among the lucky ones. We did not lose our home. We did not spend day after day evacuated, waiting to learn the fate of where we live. We never lost power or Internet. We had three or four days where we were mildly inconvenienced because PG&E wisely turned off gas to many neighborhoods, but we showered at the YMCA and cooked on an electric range we had been planning to upgrade to gas later this fall (and just did, but thank you, humble Frigidaire electric range, for being there to let me cook out my anxiety). We kept our go-bags near the car, and then we kept our go-bags in the car, and then, when it seemed safe, we took them out again. That, and ten days of indoor living and wearing masks when we went out, was all we went through.

But we all bear witness.

The Foreshadowing

It began with a five-year drought that crippled forests and baked plains, followed by an soaking-wet winter and a lushÂ spring that crowded the hillsides with greenery. Summer temperatures hit records several times, and the hills dried out as they always do right before autumn, but this time unusually crowded with parched foliage and growth.

The air in Santa Rosa was hot and dry that weekend, an absence of humidity you could snap between your fingers. In the southwest section of the city, where we live, nothing seemed unusual. Like many homes in Santa Rosa our home does not have air conditioning, so for comfort’s sake I grilled our dinner, our 8-foot backyard fence buffering any hint of the winds gathering speed northeast of us. We watched TV and went to bed early.

Less than an hour later one of several major fires would be born just 15 miles east of where we slept.

Reports vary, but accounts agree it was windy that Sunday night, with windspeeds ranging between 35 and 79 miles per hour, and a gust northwest of Santa Rosa reaching nearly 100 miles per hour. If the Diablo winds were not consistently hurricane-strength, they were exceptionally fast, hot, and dry, and they meant business.

A time-lapse map of 911 calls shows the first reports of downed power lines and transformers coming in around 10 pm.Â The Tubbs fire was named for a road that is named for a 19th-century winemaker who lived in a house inÂ Calistoga that burned to the ground in an eerily similar fire in 1964. In three hours this fire sped 12 miles southwest, growing in size and intent as it gorged on hundreds and then thousands of homes in its way, breaching city limits and expeditiously laying waste to 600 homes in the Fountaingrove district before it tore through the Journey’s End mobile home park, then reared back on its haunches and leapt across a six-lane divided section of Highway 101, whereupon it gobbled up big-box stores and fast food restaurants flanking Cleveland Avenue, a business road parallel to the highway.Â Its swollen belly, fat with miles of fuel, dragged over the area and took out buildings in theÂ the random manner of fires. Kohl’s and KMart were totaled and Trader Joe’s was badly damaged, while across the street from KMart, JoAnn Fabrics was untouched. The fire demolished one Mexican restaurant, hopscotched over another, and feasted on a gun shop before turning its ravenous maw toward the quiet middle-class neighborhood of Coffey Park, making short work of thousands more homes.

Santa Rosa proper is itself only 41 square miles, approximately 13 miles north-south and 9 miles east-west, including the long tail of homes flanking the Annadel mountains. By the time Kohl’s was collapsing, the “wildfire” was less than 4 miles from our home.

I woke up around 2 am, which I tend to do a lot anyway. I walked outside and smelled smoke, saw people outside their homes looking around, and went on Twitter and FaceBook. There I learned of a local fire, forgotten by most in the larger conflagration, but duly noted in brief by the Press Democrat: a large historic home at 6th and Pierson burned to the ground, possibly fromÂ a downed transformer, and the fire licked the edge of the Santa Rosa Creek Trail for another 100 feet. Others in the West End have reported the same experience of reading about the 6th Street house fire on social media and struggling to reconcile the reports of this fire with reports of panic and flight from areas north of us and videos of walls of flame.

At 4 am I received a call that the university had activated its Emergency Operations Center and I asked if I should report in. I showered and dressed, packed a change of clothes in a tote bag, threw my bag of important documents in my purse, and drove south on my usual route to work, Petaluma Hill Road. The hills east of the road flickered with fire, the road itself was packed with fleeing drivers, and halfway to campus I braked at 55 mph when a massive buck sprang inches in front of my car, not running in that “oops, is this a road?” way deer usually cross lanes of traffic but yawing too and fro, its eyes wide. I still wonder, was it hurt or dying.

As I drove onto campus I thought, the cleaning crew. I parked at the Library and walked through the building, already permeated with smoky air. I walked as quietly as I could, so that if they were anywhere in the building I would hear them. As I walked through the silent building I wondered, is this the last time I will see these books? These computers? The new chairs I’m so proud of? I then went to the EOC and found the cleaning crew had been accounted for, which was a relief.

At Least There Was Food And Beer

A few hours later I went home. We had a good amount of food in the house, but like many of us who were part of this disaster but not immediately affected by it, I decided to stock up. The entire Santa Rosa Marketplace– CostCo and Trader Joe’s, Target–on Santa Rosa Avenue was closed, and Oliver’s had a line outside of people waiting to get in. I went to the “G&G Safeway”–the one that took over a down-at-the-heels family market known as G&G and turned it into a spiffy market with a wine bar, no less–and it was without power, but open for business and, thanks to a backup system, able to take ATM cards. I had emergency cash on me but was loathe to use it until I had to.

Sweating through an N95 mask I donned to protect my lungs, I wheeled my cart through the dark store, selecting items that would provide protein and carbs if we had to stuff them in our go-bags, but also fresh fruit and vegetables, dairy and eggs–things I thought we might not see for a while, depending on how the disaster panned out. (Note, we do already have emergency food, water, and other supplies.) The cold case for beer was off-limits–Safeway was trying to retain the cold in its freezer and fridge cases in case it could save the food–but there was a pile of cases of Lagunitas Lil Sumpin Sumpin on sale, so that with a couple of bottles of local wine went home with me too.

And with one wild interlude, for most of the rest of the time we stayed indoors with the windows closed.Â I sent out email updates and made phone calls, kept my phone charged and read every Nexil alert, and people at work checked in with one another. My little green library emergency contact card stayed in my back pocket the entire time. We watched TV and listened to the radio, including extraordinary local coverage by KSRO, the Little Station that Could;Â patrolled newspapers and social media; and rooted for Sheriff Rob, particularly after his swift smack-down of a bogus, Breitbart-fueled report that an undocumented person had started the fires.

Our home was unoccupied for a long time before we moved in this September, possibly up to a decade, while it was slowly but carefully upgraded. The electric range was apparently an early purchase; it was a line long discontinued by Frigidaire, with humble electric coils. But it had been unused until we arrived, and was in perfect condition. If an electric range could express gratitude for finally being useful, this one did. I used it to cook homey meals: pork loin crusted with Smithfield bacon; green chili cornbread; and my sui generis meatloaf, so named because every time I make it, I grind and add meat scraps from the freezer for a portion of the meat mixture. (It would be several weeks before I felt comfortable grilling again.) We cooked. We stirred. We sauteed. We waited.

On Wednesday, we had to run an errand. To be truthful, it was an Amazon delivery purchased that Saturday, when the world was normal, and sent to an Amazon locker at the capacious Whole Foods at Coddington Mall, a good place to send a package until the mall closes down because the northeast section of the city is out of power and threatened by a massive wildfire. By Wednesday, Whole Foods had reopened, and after picking up my silly little order–a gadget that holds soda cans in the fridge–we drove past Russian River Brewing Company and saw it was doing business, so we had salad and beer for lunch, because it’s a luxury to have beer at lunch and the fires were raging and it’s so hard to get seating there nights and weekends, when I have time to go there, but there we were. We asked our waiter how he was doing, and he said he was fine but he motioned to the table across from ours, where a family was enjoying pizza and beer, and he said they had lost their homes.

There were many people striving for routine during the fires, and to my surprise, even the city planning office returned correspondence regarding some work we have planned for our new home, offering helpful advice on the permitting process required for minor improvements for homes in historic districts. Because it turns out developers and engineers could serenely ignore local codes and build entire neighborhoods in Santa Rosa in areas known to be vulnerable to wildfire; but to replace bare dirt with a little white wooden picket fence, or to restore front windows from 1950s-style plate glass to double-hung wooden windows with mullions–projects intended to reinstate our house to its historic accuracy, and to make it more welcoming–requires a written justification of the project, accompanying photos, “Proposed Elevations (with Landscape Plan IF you are significantly altering landscape) (5 copies),” five copies of a paper form, a Neighborhood Context and Vicinity Map provided by the city, and a check for $346, followed by “8-12 weeks” before a decision is issued.

The net result of this process is like the codes about not building on ridges, though much less dangerous; most people ignore the permitting process, so that the historic set piece that is presumably the goal is instead rife with anachronisms. And of course, first I had to bone up on the residential building code and the historic district guidelines, which contradict one another on key points, and because the permitting process is poorly documented I have an email traffic thread rivaling in word count Byron’s letters to his lovers.

But the planning people are very pleasant, and we all seemed to take comfort in plodding through the administrivia of city bureaucracy as if we were not all sheltering in place, masks over our noses and mouths, go-bags in our cars, while fires raged just miles from their office and our home.

The Wild Interlude, or, I Have Waited My Entire Career For This Moment

Regarding the wild interlude, the first thing to know about my library career is that nearly everywhere I have gone where I have had the say-so to make things happen, I have implemented key management. That mishmosh of keys inÂ a drawer, the source of so much strife and arguments, becomes an orderly key locker with numbered labels. It doesn’t happen overnight, because keys are control and control is political and politics are what we tussle about in libraries because we don’t have that much money, but it happens.

Sometimes I even succeed in convincing people to sign keys out so we know who has them. Other times I convince people to buy a locker with a keypad so we sidestep the question of where the key to the key locker is kept. But mostly, I leave behind the lockers, and, I hope, an appreciation for lockers. I realize it’s not quite as impressive as founding the Library of Alexandria, and it’s not what people bring up when I am introduced as a keynote speaker, and I have never had anyone ask for a tour of my key lockers nor have I ever been solicited to write a peer-reviewed article on key lockers. However unheralded, it’s a skill.

My memory insists it was Tuesday, but the calendar says it was late Monday night when I received a call that the police could not access a door to an area of the library where we had high-value items. It would turn out that this was a rogue lock, installed sometime soon after the library opened in 2000, that unlike others did not have a master registered with the campus, an issue we have since rectified. But in any event, the powers that be had the tremendous good fortune to contact the person who has been waiting her entire working life to prove beyond doubt that KEY LOCKERS ARE IMPORTANT.

After a brief internal conversation with myself, I silently nixed the idea of offering to walk someone through finding the key. I said I knew where the key was, and I could be there in twenty minutes to find it. I wasn’t entirely sure this was the case, because as obsessed as I am with key lockers, this year I have been preoccupied with things such as my deanly duties, my doctoral degree completion, national association work, our home purchase and household move, and the selection of geegaws like our new gas range (double oven! center griddle!). This means I had not spend a lot of time perusing this key locker’s manifest. So there was an outside chance I would have to find the other key, located somewhere in an another department, which would require a few more phone calls. I was also in that liminal state between sleep and waking; I had been asleep for two hours after being up since 2 am, and I would have agreed to do just about anything.

Within minutes I was dressed and again driving down Petaluma Hill Road, still busy with fleeing cars.Â The mountain ridges to the east of the road roiled with flames, and I gripped the steering wheel, watching for more animals bolting from fire. Once in the library, now sour with smoke, I ran up the stairs into my office suite and to the key locker, praying hard that the key I sought was in it. My hands shook. There it was, its location neatly labeled by the key czarina who with exquisite care had overseen the organization of the key locker. The me who lives in the here-and-now profusely thanked past me for my legacy of key management, with a grateful nod to the key czarina as well. What a joy it is to be able to count on people!

Items were packed up, and off they rolled. After a brief check-in at the EOC, home I went, to a night of “fire sleep”–waking every 45 minutes to sniff the air and ask, is fire approaching?–a type of sleep I would have for the next ten days, and occasionally even now.

How we speak to one another in the here and now

Every time Sandy and I interact with people, we ask, how are you. Not, hey, how are ya, where the expected answer is “fine, thanks” even if you were just turned down for a mortgage or your mother died. But no, really, how are you. Like, fire-how-are-you. And people usually tell you, because everyone has a story. Answers range from: I’m ok, I live in Petaluma or Sebastopol or Bodega Bay (in SoCo terms, far from the fire), to I’m ok but I opened my home to family/friends/people who evacuated or lost their homes; or, I’m ok but we evacuated for a week; or, as the guy from Home Depot said, I’m ok and so is my wife, my daughter, and our 3 cats, but we lost our home.

Sometimes they tell you and they change the subject, and sometimes they stop and tell you the whole story: when they first smelled smoke, how they evacuated, how they learned they did or did not lose their home. Sometimes they have before-and-after photos they show you. Sometimes they slip it in between other things, like our cat sitter, who mentioned that she lost her apartment in Fountaingrove and her cat died in the fire but in a couple of weeks she would have a home and she’d be happy to cat-sit for us.

Now, post-fire, we live in that tritest of phrases, a new normal. The Library opened that first half-day back, because I work with people who like me believe that during disasters libraries should be the first buildings open and the last to close. I am proud to report the Library also housed NomaCares, a resource center for those at our university affected by the fire. That first Friday back we held our Library Operations meeting, and we shared our stories, and that was hard but good.Â But we also resumed regular activity, and soon the study tables and study rooms were full of students, meetings were convened, work was resumed, and the gears of life turned. But the gears turned forward, not back. Because there is no way back.

I am a city mouse, and part of moving to Santa Rosa was our decision to live in a highly citified section, which turned out to be a lucky call. But my mental model of city life has been forever twisted by this fire. I drive on 101 just four miles north of our home, and there is the unavoidable evidence of a fire boldly leaping into an unsuspecting city. I go to the fabric store, and I pass twisted blackened trees and a gun store totaled that first night. I drive to and from work with denuded hills to my east a constant reminder.

But that’s as it should be. Even if we sometimes need respite from those reminders–people talk about taking new routes so they won’t see scorched hills and devastated neighborhoods–we cannot afford to forget. Sandy and I have moved around the country in our 25 years together, and we have seen clues everywhere that things are changing and we need to take heed. People like to lapse into the old normal, but it is not in our best interests to do so.

All of our stories are different. But we share a collective loss of innocence, and we can never return to where we were. We can only move forward, changed by the fire, changed forever.