January 12, 2010
Fire
When I was a kid, I was convinced—I guess because of all the fire drills and fire safety education we had at school—that house fires were very common, so common that it was inevitable that at some point in everyone’s life, his or her house would burn down. I used to plan and replan my escape route, which things I would grab on my way to the fire escape, how I would rescue the guinea pigs, how I would climb down the ladder while holding them. Once I reached the last rung and dropped down into the downstairs neighbors’ garden, what would happen? Would I just wait there? What if my family didn’t make it out?
Eventually I realized being in a fire was not inevitable, or even exceptionally likely, and I stopped obsessing over it. For years I’ve been living with both of my apartment’s smoke detectors disabled, because they go off every time I make toast if I put the batteries in. I don’t own a fire extinguisher. I don’t have renter’s insurance, though I’ve been meaning to get it ever since a girl I went to college with lost everything in a fire and said it wasn’t so awful, because the insurance had paid for her to get all new stuff.
Sometimes on my way home, I come out of the subway and smell smoke, and I wonder if this time it’s my building that’s burned down—perhaps the bad wiring in my kitchen finally lived up to its potential? Do I have backups of all my important files? Will I feel relieved that I no longer have to worry about whether I’m becoming a hoarder, because all my stuff will be gone? Will I remember even half of what was destroyed?
Last year, my mother’s upstairs neighbor started a smoldering fire with her pottery kiln. There were no flames, just smoke, and then the firefighters came and hacked some holes and poured enormous quantities of water through my mother’s ceiling. Her apartment smelled like a campfire for weeks and had to be repaired and repainted, but somehow none of the artwork got damaged.
This afternoon I got a tweet from a friend upstate saying her house had just burned down. Their dogs were killed. They lost everything. My friend and her husband were at work, thank god. It was electrical, caused by a bad cable between the house and the garage. “At least it didn’t happen in the middle of the night,” she says. But maybe if they’d been home, they could have put the fire out and everything would have been okay? I’d never be able to stop wondering. Resume obsession . . . now.
Have you ever had a house fire? Were you there, or away? What happened?
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Our friends lost their house to a fire three years ago. Around about this time of year. They were out freezing in the middle of the night in night gowns holding their chihuahuas watching the fire department douse it a little too late. Neighbors brought out blankets our friends could wrap up in. We got the news in the wee hours the morning after. One of the couple had to go pick up her father from a nursing home in Florida the day after. Linda, who worked with me, stayed with us 10 days or so. Then another friend, as luck would have it, had a house down the street she owned but wasn’t living in. Our friends stayed there while they rebuilt on the site. They were well insured, the new place is a showplace. Lucky and blest, no one was hurt.
Still, India, the escaping if it happened? Knock wood. It crosses my mind every now and then.
Jeez, India, that is dreadful news from your friend.
I have a kitchen-fire story that I just unaccountably lost, but I will resurrect it in a phoenix-like fashion
Awful story. I hope your friends can get back on their feet. That’s really really awful.
The thing of course with insurance is that you have to hope that the assessment comes back in your favour. You can be insured up the wazoo and they still come back claiming you left something on, or off, or exposed or whatever.
The thing about the dogs is probably the hardest for them of all of it. Oh God.
The dogs died of smoke inhalation, not the fire itself; a tiny consolation. Still, they must have been terrified until they passed out.
One thing I just remembered about my childhood fire obsession: since I was sure that every person was in a fire once in his or her life, I was very glad to hear that there had been a small fire in my mother’s house when she was a girl. I felt that that immunized our house somewhat.
Crazy magical-thinking kid.
On my birthday in 2005, my girlfriend (now wife) took me to a lovely brunch to celebrate. When we returned there were fire trucks up and down the street and her apartment — one of three units in the building — was in flames.
We managed to save both dogs and both cats, but she lost almost everything else.
One dog ran out the front door as soon as the firemen broke it down. The other was hiding underneath a (literally) burning bed upstairs.
One cat was hiding in the fireplace — a surprisingly safe place to be in a fire — and the other made a dramatic and amazing leap from the second-story window to a nearby tree. She missed the tree completely and landed on the other side of the courtyard, unharmed.
The fire was caused by bad wiring in the attic, and the rental company took *forever* to admit it was their fault and pay for *part* of her losses.
I just remembered a friend telling me about a childhood event that is almost like a house fire — about the time she witnessed the phenomenon known as ball lightning right in her house
I’m not sure insurance companies even acknowledge the existence of ball lightning.
India. From a typically writerly perspective, let me say that I love the whole story you have set down here. I feel the huge sadness of actual events recounted, but also the admiration that comes in the presence of that rare effectiveness of expression one longs for.
I saw a frame house once that had just caught fire in a big way. The steeply pitched shinkle roof erupted in flames in an instant as I pumped gas across the way at a convenience store. A few people ran toward the house and I heard a person say “I think an old lady lives there.” A siren sounded in the distance. A neighbor knocked at the door. An old lady answered, and what I remember is the apparent discussion required to convince the woman that there was a significan problem occuring, at that moment, in the immediate area. All present were saved.
Daryl. (India.) I’ve been thinking similar thoughts. There’s a quiet power to this.
The movement within time is what gets me: when I was a kid, eventually, sometimes on my way home, last year, and finally, this afternoon.
Gosh, thanks, Daryl, Sheila. I wasn’t trying to write, I was just trying to get some things out that were jostling in my head. Which is how it works, sometimes.
Though you might not think it from the fact that it took me six weeks to write a lousy two-thousand-word paper last semester.
My parents and four sisters and I lived in a log cabin vacation home the year before I went to college, deep in the hills of Southern California, surrounded by miles and miles of sage brush and other indigenous plants that no one is allowed to clear because of some Environmental protection for small creatures that also live in the area. A fire had been raging for a few days and edging closer but I had to go to junior college so I left, and about five miles from home a police roadblock stopped me and told me I could either go home or keep going but if I kept going I wouldn’t be allowed back in for a few days. I decided to go to school, I don’t really know why, I think I had a math class I was failing.
The next year when I was at college, my parents called and said that the entire area around their new house (next door to the old one) had been burned, that fire trucks had stayed in our front yard spraying water. (We have a dedicated fire station a few miles away that services the entire high-fire danger area.) When I came home next everything was scorched. It’s all regrown now and ready for another fire.
[...] you recognize any of these books? It’s my friend’s bookshelves, the one whose house burned down. She can’t bear to look at it (another friend retrieved it from her Facebook account for me), [...]
I never meant to not answer this question. So I’ll just join in a little late. India, I am very sorry to hear of your friend’s loss. And like Lucy said, especially of her dogs.
My dad was a “Navy brat,” as they say, and got his first taste of stability after his parents moved to the island of Coronado when he was 10. His sister ran away from home that year and so he used to hide in the attic, thumbing through the boxes of their history. Four years later, every plank of that house burned down and he’s had almost a compulsive desire to photograph, videotape, and store back-ups of family history ever since.
I’ve never spent much time worrying about fires. The story I tell about house fires is really the one about adopting Nina. Once I brought the rabbit home, I realized that if there was a fire I’d have to leave my bike behind. Ol’ Goldie was the only thing in my life I’d ever cared for more than myself up until that point.
I do not have renter’s insurance and this unsettles me if I ever stop to think about it, which is why I try not to. I lost everything on my external hard drive last summer, all my written, photographic, and musical history. A shock at first, I find the clean slate refreshing. But losing a house or apartment isn’t the same. Where I now take pleasure in listening to the radio in place of having a music library, I couldn’t replace the freedom of my own home with anything else. Renter’s insurance, folks. I should grow up and sign up.
This is so terrible. I have never been in a serious house fire and never gave it any more thought than the day I went over it in elementary school. I cannot imagine what that must be like for them.
Three house fires, actually:
1.) My girlfriend left a candle burning in a tupperware lid on the wooden headboard of my waterbed (yes, it was a while ago, and yes, we were in bed at the time.) We woke to a smoke filled room just before the flames really started leaping. We put out the fire quickly, but the walls were charred and the headboard was a total loss. We painted the room quickly before my parents returned from vacation the next day.
2.) A housemate made deep-fried onion rings before going to work one morning, and left a pot of cooking oil on a faulty electric stove. The kitchen was completely destroyed, and the rest of the house badly smoke damaged. The owner of the house was already in default and had neglected to pay fire insurance. We squatted there for two months until we had enough money for first and last on a new place.
3.) In San Francisco, A junkie on the floor below us nodded out with a lit cigarette and set fire to the whole building. Actually, it was a pretty nice place, there were just a lot of junkies around at the time, no matter which neighborhood you lived in. Our flat was saved, but the fire crew came in and hacked holes in the floors and walls to make sure the fire was out. We continued to live there rent-free while the land-lady sorted out all the insurance claims. The smoke damage was pretty bad, but my clothes at the time were from thrift-shops and street-curb giveaway boxes, so I just replaced everything.
Just writing this fills my nose with that smoke. That acrid, sickly-sweet, house-fire smoke of burnt pine, and paint, and plastic. Happily no one has ever been hurt in any of the fires. Even the junkie got out in time.