A Sad Day

I've spent the past two weeks reading and thinking about fire, trying to internalize the language of wildland firefighting so the characters in my second novel will sound authentic--both those who are firefighters themselves and those who have lived with or around them. Growing up in Idaho, I knew a lot of people who worked fire crews in the summer. It's a fast way to make decent money, when you're a college student. But I never knew anyone who planned to fight fires long term, to make it their life's work.

It's a good thing some people do. On Monday evening, a range fire swept up a hillside in Boise and burned nine houses, damaged ten more, near the subdivision where my sister and her family lived for years. News reports are saying firefighters were on the scene in just minutes and had a plan of attack for fighting a fire in this area--the wildland-urban interface is always vulnerable, especially in the West, where rain is scarce and fuel abundant. Everyone who lives there knows fire is a distinct possibility.

But, then, every one of us who lives in a house with electrical wiring knows fire is possible. We don't respond to that threat by living in tents and giving up our wired lives; we take our chances, try to be safe and hope for the best.

One person died in the Boise fire. She was a woman I knew when I taught at Boise State--not a close friend or someone I kept in touch with after we moved away, but a person I liked and admired. I'm sad to know she's no longer in the world, sad that anyone had to die this way. Her husband had noticed smoke rising behind their house, stepped out the back door to see where it was coming from--and then, he says, the fire swept over the top of the ridge and toward their home so quickly, he didn't even have time to get back inside. He ran around to the front, and when he saw that his wife wasn't waiting for him there, he knew she wouldn't have time to make it out.

This is a powerful reminder that the subject I'm taking on in my work has real consequences for real people--it isn't just the dramatic engine of a story. It's a regular part of life in the West, no different than hurricanes for people on the Gulf coast, earthquakes in California or ice storms in New England. None of them can be stopped. The best we can do is decide where we want to take our chances.