Viewing-distance From a Disaster
content warning: Marshall fire, community disasters, evacuation
In my very first blog post, I mentioned that starting this blog was a sort-of resolution I made at the beginning of 2022 after the Marshall fire. This was a big fire that happened in my home town right after Christmas. We had been having a very warm, very dry winter up until that point, and that day it was very windy (very windy for a place where they test wind turbines because it’s known for being very windy).
The fire started in some grasslands/fields, then crossed through vast stretches of land you would have sworn were nothing but concrete – parking lots, highways – to burn down about 1000 homes in the towns of Louisville and Superior, Colorado. My home was not touched by the fire aside from a few days of a boil water notice (they’d had to bypass the water treatment plant in a desperate attempt to help the firefighters pump water even faster), but it came within a block of my daughters’ school. The structures it took were reduced to literal rubble.
And the end of 2021 of course was at the end of nearly two years of living with Covid, when we’d all been living with the feeling of being in a disaster but one that, for many of us, felt very abstract, especially two years in. Things felt like they were supposed to start becoming ‘normal’ very soon. But, for me at least, that was at the cost of shoving down the worry and anxiety and stress very hard, feeling like there wasn’t much of an option except to pretend like it wasn’t there. And then the fire happened, and I pretty much had to just keep doing that.
Not much happened to me and mine – our story is very uneventful, especially compared to so many others’ – but the main reason I put a content warning at the top of this post is that I still don’t do well if I’m surprised with reminders about that day. Which even now feels like a response I’m not really allowed to have. I got off so light. A week or so after it happened, I wrote a bit to try to pin down that feeling, that weird duality where the appearance (and even the freaking logic) of wholeness overlies something shattered. I couldn’t quite capture it then, but I also can’t do better now. So, just below is the unedited version of what I wrote a year ago:
January 2022
So, I’d just like to write briefly about my experience of the fire that occurred in Louisville and Superior, CO on Thursday, December 30th, 2021. I live in Louisville, and while my husband and I were not at work that day, we were away from home, with our kids visiting relatives near Denver.
First, though, a disclaimer: I cannot even begin to speak to the experience of those people who lost their homes to this fire, to those who worked as responders, or even those who ‘only’ experienced being themselves in the smoke. For them, this event was something else entirely. For myself, and as feels to be increasingly common, my experience of this disaster was along its periphery, something that I can imagine is apart from me, because I wasn’t actually touched, even though it happened literally in my home town.
The basic facts are: We were away from home when the fire started. On the drive back we had to divert, and divert again, in order to park somewhere we could get back to our house. We collected up our valuables and the basics and loaded up the truck, then spent 20 minutes to drive 2 blocks to get out of our neighborhood. We stayed with the kids’ Grandma in Wyoming for a few days, then came back when our (essentially unaffected) neighborhood got the all-clear. If it hadn’t been for the fire, the big weather news at that point would have been that (when we got back) we finally, finally had some snow on the ground – things finally felt like winter.
For me, this fire, and the events surrounding it, were such a 2020’s sort of disaster – at once apocalyptic and mundane. It began with a lot of confusion. But, then the what-to-do became clear (evacuate), and we all shuffled ourselves into doing it, and that doing, for several hours, was oh so close to simply another monotonous routine. As long as you didn’t look behind you.
You see, as we were driving away, I did have to be careful not to really look behind me.
In front of me, the skies were clear and normal, the winds not so noticeable while isolated within the cocoon of our vehicle. In front me was my husband leading our little caravan of two (he’s a really good caravan lead), lots of other traffic creeping along, but also lots of traffic creeping along in the other direction too, since some of us were heading for Wyoming and some for Denver. Not quite stop-and-go traffic. Boring enough that you have to force yourself to pay attention.
But when you’re driving, you should be looking in that rear-view mirror, too. It’s just that it was really hard to focus when I did – it was hard to actually see what the traffic behind me was doing. Because the sky behind us was…apocalyptic. And we were trying to escape. So, then I’d look forward again and work to forget it, because my kid in the car, and the other drivers around me, really couldn’t afford for me to be freaking out right then. And that was really just the beginning of several hours of force-yourself-to-pay-attention boring driving.
And now we’re safe. Freaking out now doesn’t seem appropriate either. The kids got a surprise visit with their Grandma. Outside of our routine for a while, we all went to bed early, and got a lot of sleep.
But for a few days afterward my fingertips would just periodically go tingly and half-numb. I still don’t know why. The only other time I can remember that precise sensation was when I was in labor, a time when I felt like my mind was very much under control, but my body was in a different place entirely.
Now it’s a few weeks later. The boil water notice is no longer in effect and the kids are back in school. The view’s a bit different in places if I drive to south Louisville, but I’m still doing the work-from-home thing so I rarely see more than my immediate, uninteresting neighborhood. Mostly we’re just persisting in the larger not-quite-apocalypse the same way we have for nearly the past two years. One step forward and one step back. Vaccines for everyone 5+ at last, but Omicron to balance out that brief sense of safety, that brief hope I might be able to start excavating our lives back into something that feels like it’s moving forward again.
And it’s definitely too late to be freaking out about that situation. Except sometimes I just…stop, and I don’t know why. Compared to all the raw worry of last year, my mind feels empty…and clear.
So, yeah. 2022 still had lots more in store for us after that (that was written before the outbreak of war in Ukraine). And now, 1 year later, my fingertips aren’t going numb anymore (in part because of hard work to make it so – early in 2022 I used to lay in bed, desperately weary but unable to rest because I was so exhausted I felt like I was burning). But I also don’t yet have the words to convey what I know it all means. I want to write context to wrap around what I wrote last year to make it seem less fragmented, but I can’t. It’s still fragmented.
And one reason I wrote that last year was because I feel like we’re not allowed space to be disaster victims – not if we don’t look it. We go to work, go to school, keep up with our groceries and our Netflix habits. Nothing material in my life has been affected, so society wants me to forget about it. ‘We are all individuals’, and look at you! you’ve got it good. But sometimes my brain and my body become full with it. The perfectly silent buzzing of it. So full it crowds out room for actual thought. So silent my mind is nothing but blank.