Ashes to Ashes

The ashes I feel are in my lungs.  They are not a metaphor.  They give me a small feel for what cystic fibrosis might feel like, or maybe how my mom felt after losing the lower left lobe of her lung last summer.  Each breath burns my nostrils a little, and my voice has taken on a rasp. 

Last night I built a big fire in the fireplace, my remedy against the gathering darkness and cold of this November night.   It caught with vigor.   Within seconds, however, waves of smoke were rolling back toward me.  It took me a while to process how wrong this was, captivated by the gorgeous, silky billowing waves, like the fog that used to tumble over the mountains from the Pacific toward the Bay when I was in college.  "Down draft," my brain said. "This will pass." 

The smoke detector kicked sense back into me.   The house was now filled with smoke such that the other side of the living room was hard to see.  The flu, I thought with dread.  I texted our friend who dog-sat the night before.... "Did you by chance shut the...?" Her thought bubbles bounced on my phone as the smoke billowed forth.  "Yes, everything OK?" she replied.  I looked at the flames now lapping the top of the chimney with no place to go and the impressive arsenal of fuel I'd built below them.  Something short of OK.  Panic. 

By now the boys and dog had arrived on the scene.  Duncan began to shout instructions.  Fire extinguisher!  I grabbed some stick thing we keep beside the fireplace for this express purpose.  Couldn't peel the paper from it or find the string I was supposed to pull.  Useless.  Grabbed the next one, on the pantry shelf.  De-charged!  Nothing!  Think, think.  (Getting harder, nostrils burning, trying to push anxious children and dog to the door.)  Kitchen ~ last chance.  Read the instructions:  Pull off cap, yank out pin, point at fire, stay minimum 6 feet away... 

Pshrrrrrrrrrr!!!!   White foamy goop shot out, immediately dousing the flames.  Relief!  Though in my haste and protective instinct to block boys and dog, I stood more like 4 feet away with no heed to my own inhalation.  Out?  A few determined embers re-ignited and... Fire extinguisher empty!  "Water, Mom!"  Duncan runs to the kitchen sink to fill a mixing bowl.  "Let me, let me!" I shout.  I grab the bowl and fling it at the embers.  Now steam mixed with chemicals mixed with smoke and ash gurgle and billow from the angry gaping mouth of the fireplace.  Not enough!  Another bowl.  And ... we're out.

Our mantel now looked like one of those aerial photographs of a river delta after hideous poisoning by petrochemicals have made an ecological wasteland of once thriving intertidal waters.  Swirling patterns of ash and white foam and water.  Beautiful, a kind of ruination art.  The alarm, having fulfilled its purpose in alerting us to danger and saving our lives, had moved into Phase 2: Punishment, blasting us viciously for our ignorance. 

I scurried around to open all windows and doors.  Soon the house, which I had hoped to warm up to the temperature of a cocoon in the late summer sun now plummeted to about 34 degrees, or roughly the temp of sludge on the bottom on ponds where frogs burrow to wait out the winter.  Eventually, after much waving of Duncan's sweatshirt like a white flag of surrender, the fire alarm relented.  In the eery calm I surveyed the room.  A white dusting of ash everywhere.  Everywhere.  (To the far reaches of the house, I would discover this morning...)

Memories.  Emerging from an inn in Kyushu, Japan one morning while traveling with friend Tomoko, finding her car covered with what I thought was snow but was volcanic ash.  Wheezing while pregnant and walking Wiley Dog in the Hollywood Hills under gray skies and an apocalyptic-red sun while wild fires consumed mountains nearby.   The house I shared with roommates in Oakland when I was 26:  Waking up to the smell of smoke (no alarm) and eery flickering light under the door, opening it to find a wall on fire, a few feet from a Christmas tree.  Roommate Mara and I grabbed the fire extinguishers provided by our landlord; they both failed.  Reflexive, focus without feeling of fear, I beat the flames with an area rug while Mara gather up animals.  Suddenly pitch black, literally pitch ~ a greasy heaviness to the lungs.  Turning on the lights, a shocking solid white from floor to ceiling.  As the smoke dissipated to find black char around a floor heating unit where we'd learn later a fleece jacket had fallen and caught fire.  Delayed reaction, body quivering with fear as the what-if's flood imagination.

Sympathies.  With my cousins, whose historic summer home on Cape Cod burned this fall.  Oldest of same cousins, a volunteer firefighter who fought to save his own house from wild fires in Ketchum, Idaho the week after his twins were born.  A close friend who lost her father, a firefighter, when she was a young child.  With everyone in Napa Sonoma.  Countless people who know the particular force and terror of fire out of control.

I tossed and turned in the night, my lungs still laboring in house air still toxic.  I ended up sleeping with my windows open and the ceiling fan on.  At 6am I drank coffee outside in the Adirondack chair, greeting the morning stars before they gave way to the rising sun.  Never so grateful for fresh oxygen.  A breeze shook the white pines overhead, a sound that evoked the rustling of palm tree fronds at my grandparents' home on Key Largo, and an image of my grandfather's bare bum behind a bamboo screen as he changed into his bathing suit for a morning swim. Funny the strange tracks memory will travel.  Then a tender dream from my night of fitful sleep returned, impressions of a friend from San Francisco I hadn't thought about in months.  I didn't mind that it was 27 degrees as these thoughts rolled around.  I welcomed the cold and darkness I'd been running from.

I thought about how wildfires are a part of the natural cycle out west, and much of the damage they do is because they are not allowed to rage.   How much damage do I do when I'm not allowed to rage?   Western fires also crack open seeds for new forest growth.  Maybe I'm a seed.  I like this idea. 

Fire bears the weight of so many metaphors, pop songs, and Biblical significance.  There's a fire starting in my heart, reaching a fever pitch and it's bringing me out the dark.  Standing outside the fire... Life is not right, it is merely survived if you're standing outside the fire... Oh, I've seen fire and I've seen rain.  A bush that burns without being consumed.   Passion, anger, revelation, purification.  Which metaphor to apply?  Maybe all.  Maybe none - just something that happened, burning away abstractions.