Yesterday I got an urgent text message in my cellphone through Reverse 911 that 100 homes were being evacuated near Pleasant Park Road in Conifer because of a wildfire.
A fire? In CONIFER?? This is the sort of story I’m supposed to watch on 9News, riveted by the orange flames licking the edges of some distant canyon, not a few miles down Rte. 73 near the homes of a number of my friends. My husband and I ran outside and watched, openmouthed, as a giant plume of smoke billowed across the sparkling blue sky.
A few minutes later I discovered there was a second fire along Grapevine Road in Idledale, perhaps two miles away as the crow flies from our Kittredge house. I had driven right past that spot just two days earlier. Suddenly I felt incredibly vulnerable.
Natural Disasters
Everywhere that I have ever lived, there has been some sort of natural disaster to be wary of. Back east, where I lived two blocks from the Long Island Sound, we worried about floods, windstorms, and the torrential downpours that edged hurricanes. When I lived in Puerto Rico, a block from the ocean, we were also afraid of hurricanes, and a volcano erupted on the island of Montserrat. My husband lived in Tornado Alley for a while. I have felt the earth shake under my feet during an earthquake.
When we moved to Colorado, we thought we had found a home that didn’t seem to be a victim of Mother Nature’s irrational outbursts. No tornadoes, no earthquakes, certainly no hurricanes. But how wrong we were. Mother Nature is so erratic here – flooding us one season, parching us the next. (And of course, last year we did have a deviant earthquake.) We are at the mercy of the rain, the snow, the mercury – seesawing between abundance and famine. Those 330 days of sunshine a year that attracted us are also a curse!
As the fire rages in Conifer, a number of my friends have fled their homes, and many others live in the fire’s path. Friends and family from back east, who have seen our fire on the national news, call and email asking if we are OK.
A Fire Plan
Our family spent dinnertime tonight creating a fire plan. We prioritized what needed to be done if the Reverse 911 call came in about a fire in OUR neighborhood. Get US out safely, of course. Also the cats, important papers, hard drives, Grandpa’s violin, Great-Grandfather’s Revolutionary war epaulets, family photos, what else?
Our lovely cedar-and-stone house sits at the edge of 40 acres of beautiful ponderosa pines. There’s some comfort in the fire hydrant that sits at the edge of the front yard, but less comfort in the pine boughs you can reach from the back deck. Forget about “defensible space” — we chose this house because of the woods. We love the smell of the pine in the air, especially on windy days. But today, as I look at those pine trees, I see a threat.
So I’ll call my insurance company tomorrow, make sure I’m covered in case of fire, post the Family Fire Plan on the bulletin board — and pray I never need to use it. And then I’ll go help make sandwiches to help feed the firefighters in Conifer, and pray they get those flames stamped out soon.
Stay safe.
