Sunday, July 8, 2007

Light my fire


So last night I'm trying, again, to fix the plumbing on the field house, it's not working so i decide to give up and get the cheat grass out of my shoes. There's a storm blowing in and i relax under a tree and enjoy the breeze.
Something is wrong, off, strange.
Instead of wet hot dirt, i smell grass and wood. Burning grass and wood. The sky is overcast and the sun is going down so i'm not sure if there is any smoke, but i smell it.
Sure enough, a short while later there is a huge boiling smoke cloud North of us. But it's a few miles off and fire is a fact of life out here, so we don't sweat it too much. We update the backed-up data and read a book.
Few hours later it's still burning, you can see the red glow over the ridge even though it's now about 11 pm. But it doesn't seemed to have moved much and the smoke is blowing east instead of south where we are. So i go to sleep, but I think ahead enough to set my alarm for two hours later. Death from smoke inhalation doesn't sound appealing to me.
I wake before the alarm goes off. Look out the window and what to my wandering eyes should appear but a raging fire moving right down the ridge.
Time to go.
I wake up C and we begin to hurriedly pack up the essentials. Wallet, check. Cell phone, check. Laptop, check. Samples on ice, check. Of course, in our haste we pick up a few needless things, the printer?, banding kits?, empty water bottles?. But forget some essentials, phone charger, toothbrush, actual data sheets.
As we're finishing up the fire crew comes tearing down the drive. Seriously, time to go.
At the end of the drive we look back up the canyon and see the flames eating their way up and down the preserve. Ever seen a wildfire hit a juniper? Very impressive what with flames over 30 ft in the air and all.
So we skeedattle, but we can't head north into town b/c the fire has jumped the road and it's gnarly (direct quote from fire crew). So we have to head south to nothing. Seriously, nothing, for over 70 miles, then you come to a tiny town in Nebraska. No room at the inn.
So we pull over on the side of the road and watch the world burn for awhile. Happy B-day C, never forget this one will you? Then, we decide to loop around the long way and go to the red cross shelter the locals told us about. 60 miles away, most of it on gravel, and it's about 3am now. woohooo.
We finally get there, but now there's the problem of the precious, precious samples we've slaved to gather over the last two months. They are fragile and must stay frozen or it's all been for naught.
A kind soul at the shelter offers the freezer space at his church and next thing we know we're in the basement of some random church with the preacher's son tucking away the samples at 4:30 am. Life is very strange sometimes.
By the time we're settled on our cots at the convention center/red cross shelter it's after 5.
We pass out for a little while then get up before 7 to see what we can find out.
The morning is spent twiddling our thumbs and listening to the locals talk about the destruction before we hear that our place is somehow still standing. The fire stopped at the edge of the driveway, missed the house by scant meters. Things are such a mess down there though it will be days before we can get back in.
So now we're at a hotel room in town with hot running water, electricity, wireless internet and cable.
A night of pure luxury after a hot, ashy, dirty, sweaty, anxious, LONG, day before.

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