The Oregon Fire isn't in Oregon

There’s something tough about getting back to normal after an emergency.  It’s flat out uncanny to put up the coffee cups, start the laundry, and get back to the desk.  I’m sitting here playing Concentration with Connor, and realizing that I have none.  We had gone down to Sacramento to celebrate Dan’s birthday, and celebrate we did!!  (Tequila was involved). So we creebled back up the hill and were just pulling into our adorable and much missed mountain cottage when we turned a corner and saw a huge plume of smoke.  Not good.

 It’s been so dry here, that the slightest blaze, especially in a strong wind like we had last night, blows quickly into a wildfire.  Back in 2001, a wildfire had burned very close to the town and taken a number of houses with it.  Some of the folks chained three caterpillar bulldozers together and dug a firebreak around the town.  The winds changed and the town was saved.  Last night it started on the west side of town and blew pretty much  behind the high school and along the airport.  If there had been a lot of houses there, it would have been tragic, but back there is the dump, and the airport is a natural fire break.  Still, folks were nervous to see what would happen, but our local leaders and CalFire were on it.  They were calling it the Oregon fire, which I’m sure was confusing our New York friends, who were pretty sure we’d moved to Weaverville, California.   It still looked like Apocalypse Now over there, with bombers and helicopters dropping flame retardant, and folks moving around packing up or exchanging updates under the blood red sun.  If you’ve never seen a forest fire, it looks like a tornado sucked up smoke, opened up the ground, and spewed fire and fury.  I kept watching for flames on the nearest ridge.  I saw only smoke and that creepy, hellish sun.

A friend of my mother-in-law’s drove over to tell us that they’d evacuated one block over.  We grabbed the cats, shoved them in carriers, threw the backpacks and suitcases back into our green Honda CRV - the Road Frog - and headed up the hill to my in-laws.  You see, they’ve done this before.  Mom was packing up quickly, grabbing essentials, and us.  After a half-hour’s consultation on the direction of the wind and the burn, it appeared that rather than scooping across town, the fire was blowing NW to NE, and heading towards us.  I’m sometimes good in an emergency, but I wasn’t sure if we were staying there or leaving, and Mom was very clearly getting more anxious to leave by the minute.  So was I. 

Then Dan spoke up and mentioned that the town Supervisors were setting up evacuation at the grade school behind our house, so it would probably be best to evacuate back home.  We gathered Dan’s folks and headed over where with their truck and Papa’s police radio.  He also has done this before, but was hard to pry off his mountain.  I was glad that he were there with us, and his radio.  After a restless couple of hours pacing and listening to the street closures on the radio, we washed the child, put him to bed, and all started to bed down.   Mom and Papa were good sports and let us make them a bed out on the living room futon.  I think mine was the last light out, but as soon as the adrenaline left me, I pretty much passed out over my book.

We kept the cats in, so they danced on our heads all night.  Fig, the Siamese, was especially bad, moving in behind the curtains and talking and crying nonstop, like a hysterical Jerry Springer guest.  I woke about every two hours, but the first at 1:30, thinking someone was banging on the door.  It was just my father-in-law kicking a chair on the way to get a drink of water.  Poor man.  I came out of the bedroom like a jack in the box wielding a flashlight and pulling Dan behind me because I was sure it’s time to jump in the Road Frog and tear ass to Redding.  But no.  Just me, on high alert.  The rest of the night passed uneventfully except that each time I looked out the window, there was smoke in the streets and it smelled like fire. The cat finally settled down around 4 and so did I, then Bean crawled into bed with us, kicked us in the kidneys a few times (as a sleeping seven-year-old will) then settled into the boneless sleep of children. 

We slept til about a quarter after seven, when I couldn’t take anymore and got up to find Dan checking the emergency site on his phone.  All was well, it seemed, the fire had moved North, and we’d only lost one barn, no houses, the hospital hadn’t had to be evacuated, and no-one had gotten hurt.  The town was safe, we had coffee and toast, and everyone went off to work.

So I’m off to go empty the Road Frog and start the laundry.  Cause, well, the emergency is over, and if we do need to hit the road, we should probably do it with clean clothes.  Oh, and on a side note, it seems we need to refine our evac plan cause I was going to leave my computer and all of my photo albums.  I now get to empty the car and put everything back.  Glad it was a false alarm, but also glad that we were ready to leave so quickly, and with the essentials:  our family, our cats, a few family photos, and the envelope where I keep the passports, birth certificates, and Social Security cards.  My dignity, it seems, can be easily left behind.  Man, I’m tired, and now I’ve got to find a better place for the photo albums.

Bennie and the Jets

My grandmother, Carmen, was a bit of a self-proclaimed gypsy.  She traveled a lot, stole sugar packets from restaurants, and saved boxes and anything with an Owl on it.   She worked hard, she drank hard, and she loved hard.  She had five husbands, and one she remarried at the end of her life.  When I was five, though, she married Hiram Benjamin Bentine, or Bennie.  He was a dear, fussy old fellow, with a lemon yellow El Dorado, a good palate for food, and similar drinking and talking habits.  We moved in with them to help everyone out a bit – them with money for the house and my mom who was working nights -- with me.  I remember Saturday night bowling.  Lanes for kids were free after midnight – if you could stay up that long.  I did, and after bowling, we’d pile into the car and go to Sambo’s.  It was a very non-PC breakfast joint that stayed open all night.  We’d eat breakfast, drink coffee or more cocktails (mine was a Shirley Temple for which with copious amounts of pancake syrup I account my late-night stamina).  Bennie was good to me, spoiled me, let me climb into his lap and poke at his fancy buttons and shirt pockets.  I don’t remember what brand of cigarettes he smoked, but that he did so copiously.  He drank Old Granddad on the rocks, which I remember from a photo taken in Mexico of him (Old Granddad) sitting on some rocks (on the rocks).  It was the 70’s before we all became so self aware about the drinking and smoking we were doing.  We had a pool with a changing room, a great slide, and a wonderful overhung patio full of ivy.  We had horses. They had a big house, a great entertainment space, and catfights at night with flying shot glasses. That was my grandmother.  She could hit any man running or walking with a shot glass at 30 paces.  She was a pistol. 

Bennie was the cook at our house, and he was good at it.  He also did a lot of the shopping, as none of the rest of the adults were to be trusted with the selection of decent perishables.  He and Carmen were both newspaper people and gone all day during the Summer, when his daughter and I lounged by the pool with her friends while I fetched them sandwiches and sodas.  The weekends were lively parties with everyone home, including my mother, by the pool with the dogs, and barbeques, salads, and yes, more drinks.  One day I was invited to the shopping expedition for ribs and briquettes.  It was a short trip, and for some reason, I was invited along.  Maybe my Grandmother and mother needed to talk, maybe he needed to get out of the doghouse for something, or maybe I was annoying everyone underfoot as being the only five year old in the house will do.  But he brought me and we took off in that lemon yellow El Dorado to the store.  We wound through the affluent neighborhood, listening to the radio, with Neil Diamond, Roberta Flack, and Elton John.  “Bennie and the Jets” played, and being five, I thought it amazing that I was currently riding with a Bennie.  I thought the song was about him.  We said so, and sang along even to the piano parts “Bennie and the jets, duh, da, da, da, da, Dum, dum, dum.  Bennie!!”  if you’re five and in the car with a beloved grandparent, it doesn’t get any better than this.

It was years before I figured out which one of our albums was Elton John’s, I loved his flashy clothes, and his cool lyrics, and his mojo.  It was the theme song of the summer.  The pool, the ivy, the drinks and cigarettes, Elton John, and those mad, mad riffs, “Hey, kid!”

40 years later, I’m back in California after a Big Move.  That’s one where you give up your job, your life, your big house in the South, and move to a small Northern California town to raise your child and reclaim your family, sense of self, intellect, time, and your sanity.  I am procrastinating from approaching the local district office for substitute teaching work and the local colleges for adjunct teaching.  I just want to hold onto Summer for another week before I dive into remaking my professional self, the self that cares about grading papers, making money, and maybe writing an article on how we are or are not Academically Adrift.  I don’t want to do this just yet.  I want to think, I want to write, I want to go to Farmer’s markets, and I want to play with my child.  I am carefully pulling out of the parking lot onto Main Street, when “Bennie and the Jets” comes on the radio, fuzzy, a little distorted, as if the song had to come through from 1974 and land like a faded and exhausted butterfly in the cab of the olive green Honda CRV.   For a moment, I am five again, fearless and without worry, singing with a single tear trying to leak through my utmost bliss.

My grandmother died about two months ago from fatigue, loneliness, and a bit too much Vodka of a few too many evenings.  She was 85, though, and had a good run.  I didn’t always call her back, or friend her on Facebook, or write her enough notes, I know.  Her life was rough at the end.  She remarried husband number three, the tall, big, charming but terribly immoral Sean Connery looking fellow at whom she’d thrown a number of shot glasses in her stunning 30’s.  He’d died and left her the house that they’d shared, but being broke she’d taken in lodgers, including an aunt with questionable pharmaceutical habits, and a few of her friends.  It wasn’t pretty, and it probably wasn’t nice.  I sent her red Christmas gifts of silk and good perfume, but wrapped up in my own petty dramas, little else.  Bennie died of lung cancer years before and left her to rely on her friends and family.  They are sometimes fun, great in a crisis, but everyday life confounds them.  When I am here, I can forget for a moment, so much that I neatly sidestepped when I went to Grad School.  But I’m always going to think of Sir Elton John’s Bennie as my Bennie.  Oooh, you’re so spaced out. 

Perhaps, but time is starting to do this weird thing where it folds in on itself.  Supposedly, this is how wormholes are created, and the universe bends, but for mere mortals who are not scientists, it’s also how memories survive over 40 years of Lacanian theory and childrearing to become important about what has made up our imaginations.  One day, I’ll look up Elton John’s Bennie to see who he was, but for me, he’ll always be Hiram Bentine, cruising in a yellow El Dorado, with a borrowed grandkid, who thought he was so very, very electric cool.