« freaky. | Main | books for July »
Friday, August 01, 2008
thank you notes
Apparently the reason that I am not frantically gathering irreplaceable items and loading them and my family into our cars this morning is that a man who lives a few miles from here, when his house caught fire around 2 AM, ran out in his unmentionables, got on his tractor, and cut a firebreak so that the inferno wouldn't spread to his neighbors. The sirens, and the neighborhood dogs' reactions to the sirens (you never really know how many dogs are in your area until there's an emergency response in the middle of the night), woke me as I was juuust about to go to sleep, and I went outside to reassure myself that there wasn't a fire, only to see with my own two eyes that actually there was. Thank you, homeowner, for your presence of mind and probable sacrifice of your belongings, since you could have been grabbing them and fleeing instead of preventing another week of heartache and disaster in our area.
While I'm on the subject, the nearby city's paper ran a story about our fire that made me cry a little. There's a guy who lived in the immediate area of the beginning of the fire. When he and his neighbors got the order to evacuate, he got a frantic call from a neighbor whose husband was out of town and who had no way of getting her four horses to safety. Rather than save anything of his own, the guy got on his horse and led his neighbor's horses (and one other neighbor's donkey) out to safety. He lost everything -- except the eternal friendship and hero-worship of every animal lover in the state.
Most of the fire crews have been loading up and heading out -- some to go home, and some to head to the northern part of the county to fight the much-reduced remnant of the fire (which, it turns out, at 34,000 total acres burned, is still way less than one-twentieth of our county. Who knew?). I am not given to emotional flights of fancy -- my tearful reaction to the above story, to be brutally honest, was more because the guy self-sacrificially put his neighbors' needs over his own, and lost all his unique rawhide-braiding tools and equipment to save some horses that could probably have made it to safety on their own, than because animals are some kind of holy creatures that should be rescued at all costs, and you can all hate me now -- and I know that they're getting paid (probably plentiful overtime) for their work and it's their job to go where they're told and put out fires. But even so I got a little lump in my throat every time a truckload of them would drive by, because job or not, they've been here for a week risking their safety to save my town instead of being at home kissing their wives hello after work and playing Lego with their kids. (Or, you know, hanging out with their roommates playing Nintendo. Whatever. Most of them are awfully young.)
And with that, it's past time for me to be outside watering my garden and hanging clothes, with especial thanks to God and my neighbors and some 4,000 assorted strangers that I still have a garden to water and clothes to hang. Book post tomorrow... I hope.
Comments
It is amazing how wonderfully selfless our fellow fallen humans can be in the face of crisis. It warms my heart. I am so glad you and the rest of your neighbors are OK. That man should get a medal. Sersly.
Posted by: jennifer at August 1, 2008 12:27 PM
I've had an awful couple of weeks and have been feeling a certain grim hopelessness over The STate of Man, but reading that? Lifted me. Wow.
Posted by: Beck at August 5, 2008 10:57 AM
