Wildfire: Two Years Later

This is a summary of how we escaped the Marshall Mesa wildfire that swept through parts of Boulder County, Colorado, on December 30, 2021 – killing two people, causing hundreds of millions of dollars in damage, and upending thousands of lives.

“We” is my wife and me and our cat, while “upending” is a very imprecise term to describe the trauma, psychological and otherwise, to specific individuals during and after the conflagration, and to the community at large.

It happened on a Thursday, the last day of the work week – Friday being the New Year’s Eve holiday. Sometime in mid-to-late morning le spouse and I, both working from home, detected the unmistakable smell of smoke – woodsmoke, like a campfire. As it persisted we looked out a front window, and saw what was reminiscent of coastal fog.

At some point my wife looked at social media. Someone had posted something about a wildfire that was burning across many acres of open space, a few miles west of our neighborhood. Winds in excess of 100mph whipped its intensity. We took solace in the knowledge that a six-lane highway separated us from where the fire appeared to be burning.

A little later le spouse checked social media again. Now someone had posted video of flames burning across a wooden fence in their back yard, much closer to us. That wide highway hadn’t stopped the fire’s progress, after all.

Before much longer it became obvious that we might have to flee. It felt premature – and in truth, unreal – but I gathered a few things, like a toothbrush and a change of clothes. Also got my guitar and camera (photo ops), and the pet carrier our cat despises.

Meanwhile the smoke visible out the front grew denser and, presumably, closer.

Finally, a little after 1pm, we got the inevitable emergency robocall telling us that if we valued our lives, we would get the hell out. There are certain things you only need to hear once. Amid ever-increasing fear and uncertainty, we piled our stuff into the car and pulled away.

“Which way shall we go?” asked le spouse.

My first thought: you’re joking, right? To the west, towering columns of dense smoke. To east, clear skies.

So I sang my reply: “Blue skies, smilin’ at me! Nothin’ but blue skies...”

She was not amused.

Thousands of others fled, too. The usual five minute drive out of town became half an hour, maybe longer. Finally we reached relatively open road – but had nowhere to go, so we zig-zagged aimlessly. I don’t remember how long that lasted, or how we learned of the emergency evacuation center set up at the local YMCA. But once we did we headed over, and spent several tense hours there. Few facts were available at this point. But we did learn that our grown-and-gone kids had heard of the fire and were tracking our movements via the Find My Friends app.

That night we wound up at a hotel, where we smuggled in the cat and got our first good look, on CNN, at the scope of the disaster: jaw-dropping video of familiar sites – buildings, shopping centers, neighborhoods – consumed by immense, wide-spread flames.

The next day I posted to social media that my wife and I were safe.

We spent a largely sleepless night of profound uncertainty. I sprawled on the bed like a body with chalk lines not yet drawn. The cat kept nestling against me in this nook, that cranny, before emitting a stressful yowl.

Returned home this morning to the immense relief of finding our abode unscathed. Reeks of smoke but our neighborhood survives. Yet we are surrounded by catastrophic, unimaginable loss.

One inevitably turns to truisms at such times: like the fleeting nature of life, and the difference between what is truly important and what only seems so.

Ultimately, the cause of the fire was pinned on smoldering, wind-whipped embers, and loose power lines. Many lawsuits are pending.

As the fire’s first anniversary approached, I talked to some people directly involved in these events. Can we ever recover? “We, as a community, are all irretrievably altered,” one said to me. “It’s a communal trauma.” Recovery is a relative term.

Now, two years after that devastating event, the trauma remains. To a casual observer the worst may seem over: homes being rebuilt, burned debris hauled off, once-charred open space covered in new growth.

But take a closer look, and the scars are plain as day. The wildfire is never far from my thoughts, and is never far, no doubt, from the thoughts of anyone else who lived through it. A windy day, common enough around here, is a psychological trigger. And probably always will be.

Ham On Rye: A Book Review

Early in his career, the novelist William Kennedy was a journalist whose writing included book reviews. In an essay collected in Riding The Yellow Trolley Car he describes how he hated writing bad reviews – probably because, as a fledgling author himself, he knew how hard the discipline is.

I find myself recalling this now as I begin my review of Ham On Rye, Charles Bukowski’s offensively ill-written novel from 1982.

I’ve never read anything by Charles Bukowski before, and maybe this novel isn’t the best way to ease into the work of someone I’d always thought of as a poet. I understand that he is highly regarded by many people; that he is viewed as a sort of poet-laureate of the Outsider. Maybe that’s why my expectations, in terms of literary merit, were so high.

There just isn’t much redeeming value to Ham On Rye, an autobiographical coming-of-age story. Bukowski had a crappy childhood. I get that. He grew up poor during the Great Depression, with an abusive father and almost no nurturing or encouragement. That much comes across. The novel’s big flaw is that its main character Henry Chinaski (Bukowski’s alter-ego) is nearly devoid of introspection, and is almost entirely unsympathetic.

As I see it, Chinaski/Bukowski decided very early on to more or less devote his life to excessive drinking, and to life on the outside. An unanswered question is, why?

In Chapter 22 (there are 58 chapters in all, many of them quite short, in this ordinary-length book) he describes his first encounter with alcohol. He's around twelve years old when a friend shows him his dad’s stash of homemade wine, and goads him into trying some. After a few glugs, Henry says, “I like this stuff.”

It was magic. Why hadn’t someone told me? With this, life was great, a man was perfect, nothing could touch him.

This may be Ham On Rye’s most worthy detail, even without accompanying exploration: Bukowski’s immediate reaction to, and affection for, alcohol. By now science may have answered the question of why some people are so drawn to alcohol, while others can take it or leave it. Bukowski’s recollection is a kind of case study, presented with elegant simplicity.

The novel ends in Chinaski’s young adulthood. On one hand, he seems to want to better himself – his education and station in life. On the other, he is critical of aiming too high, and happily devoted to self-destructive behavior. His greatest passion seems to be drinking. It may have been a choice, or it may have been surrendering to addiction. To me, it seems like a waste. Illustrating this may be Ham On Rye’s greatest value.

Dream State

Quite recently, I had very minor surgery to correct a potentially serious condition. I was in the OR, sedated and oblivious, for only a couple of hours.

With most surgical procedures, even minor ones like mine, there is a void afterward, a gap in your memory. One moment you’re on a gurney with an IV in your arm. The next someone says, “We’re starting the sedation now,” and you’re invited to count down from one hundred. Few get below 95.

Then comes the void – an indeterminate period of time. Long, short, who can tell? The surgeon tinkers on you. But at some point the void passes. You become aware, only vaguely, that it’s over, that you are creeping back; that you have more or less reached a semi-conscious dream state.

I reached this state the other day, and drifted passively along. Then some dusty back room in my brain began to supply a weird mix of images. Most of them evaporated quickly. But one stayed with me: the vivid sense of having my son’s dog Gizmo in my lap. Gizmo (pictured) lives in Arizona. But I swear he was with me; surely it happened!

The dream state fades, though, and the next post-op phase begins. It involves gradually, groggily, becoming semi-alert. I realized I was gradually, groggily, becoming semi-alert. My brain beckoned. This made me think of the Mose Allison song, “My Brain.”

Before long a nurse named Bonnie came into my curtained off area. “How are we doing?”

This groggy, semi-alert phase includes a near-total lack of judgment and inhibition. “Listen to this,” I slurred. “I’m going to sing you part of a song.”

My brain is always workin, my brain.

My brain is always workin, my brain.

My brain is always workin – long as you keep that coffee perkin

My brain, cool little cluster that’s my brain.

Bonnie clapped lightly and laughed. “How nice! I’ve never had a patient sing to me before. Do you want coffee?”

I didn’t, so she offered me apple juice and applesauce. These I accepted, in spite of the stitches in my mouth. Powerful anesthetic residue coursed within me but mental clarity crept closer. An hour or so later I was discharged.

Mose Allison – My Brain

Leaving the House (eventually)

We expect to be in our house for a couple more years. But with the kidlets now graduated, grown and gone, the house is too big. There is too much room. Thus our time here grows short.

I love this place. I’ve always liked it, but my affection has really grown. Le spouse and I sometimes dismiss it as a cheap tract house, which it is. But I love the floor plan, and a series of remodeling projects (for which le spouse gets 100% credit) has improved many of its cheap tract house shortcomings.

It is also, of course, where our kids grew into adults.

We survived two natural disasters here: a flood and a wildfire. We have also lived through lesser catastrophes, such as hailstorms, snowstorms, and the like.

But leaving this house behind is inevitable. It will be sad, but is utterly pragmatic – and at some point, the right thing to do.

•

When I was in high school one of the guys in my immediate circle of friends had to move to a distant city. All of us in that circle were disappointed, to put it mildly. We were becoming young adults learning to determine our own destinies, after all – but this move involved parental maneuvering beyond our control.

And then: a reprieve! Or so it seemed. According to eyewitness accounts, the friend’s dad was seen walking around their back yard, fondly taking it all in. Surely, we convinced ourselves, he was having second thoughts about leaving.

Now, approximately one ice age later, I understand what was happening. The dad was, indeed, fondly taking it all in. That’s where little Billy used to play cops and robbers, he must have thought. There’s the tree he fell out of, and broke his arm. And right over there, we had a great birthday party.

There was no reprieve.

I’ll miss this place.

Joseph Anton

In February 2023 David Remnick appeared on the Stay Tuned With Preet podcast to discuss a profile he’d just written about Salman Rushdie. Their discussion focuses on how the novelist has fared in the months since he was viciously attacked, and nearly killed, in Chautauqua, New York.

That brutal assault resulted from a more than thirty-year-old fatwa, or death order, issued against Rushdie by Iranian hardline fundamentalists because of his novel, The Satanic Verses.

In the course of the interview Remnick, a New Yorker editor, mentioned Joseph Anton, Rushdie’s nonfiction account of his fatwa years. Curious, I got it from the local library. It is astonishingly good. The prose is superb; within a page or so its hooks were in me. Why on earth have I never read anything by Salman Rushdie before?

Published in 2012, Joseph Anton describes life under the constant threat of violent death. It is riveting, chilling, and in places, even funny. In has, in short, all of the elements needed to grab the reader’s attention and hold it to the last page.

The book was published ten years before that murderous attack by a knife-weilding zealot, on a public stage before hundreds of eyewitnesses. Knowledge of the attack haunts the book, and from the perspective of 2023 makes for some disturbing reading.

During the worst of the fatwa Rushdie lived under near-siege conditions, in a series of secret locations and with round-the-clock security. On a visit to New York his wife arrives at his hotel room unexpectedly. For security reasons they did not travel together, and she is confronted by a guard who doesn’t recognize her. “Elizabeth’s cool,” Rushdie quickly intercedes. “Elizabeth’s with me.”

The guard replies that if he wanted him dead, she is exactly the type of person he would send to do the deed. He gestures toward a table, and its array of snacks and cutlery. “If she were to take one of those forks and stab you in the neck...”

It’s presented as a light moment. But when the attack finally came in 2022, something very much like it happened. “He was stabbed in the neck, you know," David Remnick told Preet Bharara. “A quarter of an inch, one way or another, he would’ve hit his carotid artery and he would’ve bled out immediately.”

Elsewhere, Rushdie describes coping with what, in ordinary circumstances, would be considered writer’s block. His inability to focus and create is completely understandable. Yet he overcomes it and writes several new books, along with various shorter pieces.

Rushdie’s protectors insist that he take a pseudonym for them to use. That way, they explain, if they inadvertantly refer to him in a public place, it won’t give anything away. He comes up with Joseph Anton (after Conrad and Chekhov), and because of this pseudonym (presumably), Joseph Anton is written in the third person. In places it confused me –  the he did this and the he said that got me a little mixed up. But you back up a sentence or two, and are straightened out.

A longing to be free of 24/7 security is one of Joseph Anton’s through-lines. Toward the end of the book Rushdie, by then in hiding for seven years, reflects on this. It “might not just be a phase of his life ... the rest of his life might be like this.” A few pages later high-ranking counterintelligence types tell him of Iran’s “long-term plan to find and assassinate” him.

And sure enough, the attempt to murder Rushdie happened in the long term: more than three decades after the fatwa began. It coincided with the rising tide of fascist intolerance in the United States (and globally). There are book bannings and the suppression of free thought and intolerant fundamentalism – the very elements that nearly cost Salman Rushdie his life.

Salman Rushdie was attacked by a man younger than the fatwa itself, someone brainwashed into believing words printed on a page are so dangerous that the person who wrote them must forfeit his life. Rushdie is fortunate to have survived, though Remnick told Preet he is now blind in one eye, one of his hands doesn’t work right, and he must surely cope with PTSD, among other aftereffects.

Yet (to pivot slightly) even as I write this, some think tank reports that a seventeen year, global decline in democracy shows signs of turning around. “This is, I think, some glimmer of hope,” says the president of Freedom House, which produced the report.

Be that as it may, Joseph Anton is a powerful book that deserves to be widely read. Next up on my reading list: The Satanic Verses.