I'm sure this weather event is going to turn out to be a nothingburger, but they are now evacing the towns of Healdsburg and Winsor.
Every single year I study the fires and the damage to see if I would have survived had that been me. I'm like - that house would have never made it. That house would have been fine. Every year I have the conversation with Mr S. that I am not evacing. I'm staying to fight for my house. I'm not reckless. Please no comments about that. I just pray to a gawd I don't believe in that I'm never tested. Fire is the number one way I don't want to die.
Survivor guilt is a powerful thing though. I've always felt if I wouldn't have gone to stay with my boyfriend that night my cousin would still be here. And I'm not losing everything I own twice. You do eventually get over it but....It's like you have no history. Like you don't exist before a certain time. You are just an article in a newspaper.
Out here in the burbs there is a lot of grass. Fire is an omnipresent thing. The creek by my house goes up almost every year and all it would take is a little wind. But the firefighters tamp stuff down super quick out here. It only becomes concerting if they are stretched too thin.
At least my deck is fire door rated. It covers about 1/4th of my roof surface. I just can't believe every year I have to have this conversation. But I'm reasonably sure everything will just be overhyped. You can never take things too much for granted though.
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"I've always felt if I wouldn't have gone to stay with my boyfriend that night my cousin would still be here ..."
ReplyDeleteI know as an absolute certainty that if I'd have joined my girlfriend where she was at the time, rather than staying where I was and wrapping up business before flying to join her, that I'd be dead.
It wasn't just that the search teams couldn't find her body.
They couldn't find her house.
And that's why at the first sign there's going to be a really bad storm, let alone a full-blown hurricane, my ass is in motion toward Get Me The Fuck Out Of This Shit-ville.
You've thought my running like hell out of North Florida has been funny, but there's the story behind it.
Everyone has different history that leads them to do different stuff.
Read Pico Iyer's story about his own fire experience sometime -- I think he mentions his California fire story in his book "The Global Soul".
Ah, yeah, here's a bit more on that. Not exactly young when it happened -- I think he was 33 or 34 then.
I was a little bit older than that.
Yet despite this, I still prefer to live on the coast.
No way I'm ever moving back to Austin.
"At home in Nara, Japan, Iyer and his wife Hiroko Takeuchi have no car or bicycle, and Iyer spends his life in a five-square-block radius ..."
You have no idea how appealing that sounds on occasion.
But for me, the world is not enough.
And that's why buying a place tends to make me even more anxious than worrying about a fire or a hurricane, come to think of it ...
Maybe one day I'll even tell you my Buddhist monastery story.
You do know I'm a Buddhist, right?
No I didn't. That is intense. Life can be so cruel. And never being able to find them adds another layer. I guess we are all hostages to our deamons.
ReplyDeleteYes the mailer type ones. ;) You sort of have to make jokes to cope.
ReplyDelete"... mailer type ..."
ReplyDelete何ですか？
:-)
Mailer daemons?
ReplyDelete