I Dream of Fire
Sometimes in the middle of the night recently I wake up because I just had another fire dream. Or nightmare. Either one always brings me to full consciousness, almost as if my psyche wants me to hold onto as much of the dream as possible.
With almost the entire city I grew up in burned down, of course fire is at the forefront of my mind. But I have only had reoccurring dreams/nightmares when my mind has been severely traumatized. Like when I would wake up screaming every night in the days following 9/11.
How can I be so traumatized when I am sitting in my unburned and safe home, writing this because I have WiFi and electricity. Warm now, because after a week of living with no heat or hot water the gas company hooked me up. From my windows I see nothing burned by the all consuming flames that barreled through at speeds that are usually measured in hurricane strength, not brush fire strength. The fire was stopped close, way too close. One street over a neighbor lost a backyard studio but the house remains. Another neighbor had some charring and burning of his back porch and yard but the house remains. A row of decorative trees, once kept trimmed into a point, now stood like hulking black skeletons, bent and twisted.
Drive one more block to the first main street, and there, the utter and complete devastation begins.
When I was allowed to return home after the fire, most streets were still blocked off by the National Guard and sheriffs. When I got to a street I could turn onto, everything looked normal. Until it didn’t.
See all those little red houses? That’s where the lives of so many were upended and all they once knew was snatched from their hands. Usually only a chimney can be seen, cars turned into burned out hulks, make and model unknown. Familiar stores and restaurants where you ate or celebrated or broke a heart in were gone. My elementary school burned down. My daughter’s kindergarten through 3rd grade school burned down alongside the historic church that ran it. A summer camp I went to as a young girl burned down. Decades later my daughter attended a summer camp in the same location. So many friends and classmates and colleagues homes burned down. So many memories of living life are reduced to ashes.
I grew up here, so wildfires are nothing new. You are trained very early on to know the smell of a brush fire and would immediately look towards the mountains or up at the sky for smoke. I have even been evacuated before, but the fire did what a fire is supposed to do. It stayed in the foothills, burning upslope. This fire, this newfangled fire, burned downslope due to those hurricane force winds.
Ask a fireman and he’ll tell you fire burns up hill. That’s their behavior.
Due to climate change, I do believe Mother Nature is flipping us all off right now. As I write this, New Orleans is being buried in a record breaking amount of snow. That’s southern Louisiana, not southern Alaska. 2024 has been declared the hottest year in global history. Flooding from Hurricane Helene swept homes in North Carolina away, sadly some with people still inside.
Yeah, this shit ain‘t normal. This planet is giving us a wake up call, and those in power are behaving like ostriches, heads firmly thrust into a hole. I won’t say which hole but you can use your imagination.
I’m not going to go into a rant on climate change (not yet). I am using my writing to process and understand and grieve. Speaking is very difficult for me right now, because my traumatized brain is not in the mood to cooperate and coordinate with my mouth. I lose words, use the wrong words, or I just can’t find the words at all. For some reason I am able to say what I want and need to through writing.
I often sit at my window staring at the centuries old oak tree in my yard, wondering how many fires had it survived. The color of the leaves seems muted, but it is a semi-cloudy day today. Or the color could be dimmed because my mind is wrestling with an overwhelming amount of feelings. I realized as I was healing after 9/11 that when I am depressed, not just sad but majorly depressed, all the color and light my brain processes is muted and darkened.
Though in my dreams I still dream in vibrant color.
Dreams of opening my front door, only to see orange flames blocking my exit from my home. Dreams of reddish flames formed into what can only be described as fire topiary, with rounded and oblong shapes dancing in front of burning homes. Dreams of walking around my city, as if everything is normal, yet flames are everywhere, but we are all oblivious to the danger.
Dreams of fire.