Contained

A week ago, I sat down in front of my television to watch football, not because I wouldn't normally find myself there anyway but because I was looking for some distraction. For days leading up to that evening, my mind had been full of images of the fire burning hundreds of miles away in the canyons above my home town. I tend to keep an eye and ear out for all things Boulder, and after nearly twenty years of living next to the Pacific Ocean, I am still far more comfortable with the geography of the front range of the Rocky Mountains than I am with the Bay Area.
When I first found out about the Four Mile Canyon Fire, I was relaxing at the end of a long holiday weekend. In my mind I tried to picture the roads and terrain that might be affected. I used Al Gore's Internet to find images and maps that would help me comprehend the scope of the fire's progress. I remembered my own experience with forest fires, particularly the time my mother took my younger brother and I over to Barker Dam to fish one afternoon because she figured if the fire that was beginning to creep its way toward our mountain cabin found its way over our little hill, we could always hop in the lake. Happily, that never happened, and the trees on our property suffered more from the dreaded pine beetle and my father's chain saw than any nasty conflagration. Even that time when my dad errantly dropped one particularly tall Ponderosa on a power line. He took off, and decided to blame it on "those meddling kids" if asked. Happily, there were sparks but no ignition. Another tragedy averted.
The people in Four Mile Canyon and the surrounding ten mile radius weren't so lucky. While there are no reported deaths associated with the fire, at least one hundred and sixty-six homes were lost. I called my mother periodically over the next week as the flames continued to rise, and even though in my mind I knew that she was safe, I had that impulse to take her fishing near a lake.
And so I sat there, on my couch, waiting for the NFL season to commence and take me away from my worries across the Continental Divide. Then, just before half time, the slow news crawl appeared at the top of the screen: "Explosion near San Bruno, residents being evacuated." Slowly the story began to encroach on the importance of the Vikings and Saints rematch. A gas pipeline had exploded, sending a fireball a hundred feet in the air and eventually an entire neighborhood was destroyed in just a few hours.
I got some advice from a friend: "Turn off the TV." I confess that it's not in my nature. I tend to stare into the fire until I understand it, or at least I try to. In both cases, Boulder and San Bruno, it is almost certain that some human made an error in judgement, not unlike cutting down a pine tree too close to a power line, and then the natural force took over. Impressively. The people who lost their homes begin the long process of rebuilding their lives.
The Saints ended up beating the Vikings, but fire was the winner that night, as it is so very often.