Article by Chas S. Clifton
Evacuation – November 2005 – Colorado Central Magazine
IN 2002, WHEN THE Hayman Fire rampaged southwest of Denver and the Iron Mountain Fire burned a swath along the Custer-Frémont county line, I took the first step: I gathered up my wife’s and my insurance policies, birth certificates and other vital papers and stored them in my office at CSU-Pueblo, figuring that those concrete buildings were safer from a forest fire than our little house in the woods.
In 2004, having endured yet another four-day power outage during a spring blizzard in the Wet Mountains, I hired an electrician to install a 120/240-volt receptacle on an outside wall of the house, with a switch and circuit breakers to go back and forth between a portable generator and San Isabel Electric’s power. Then I bought a generator big enough to run the water pump, the furnace, the refrigerator, and some lights.
When nearly three feet of snow fell late in January 2005, my new generator was still in its carton in the back of the Jeep. But we are ready for the next big blizzard.
However, when the Mason Gulch Fire crested a ridge near our house, power generation was not the issue. Leaving was. Despite our preparations the previous evening, it was impossible to plan things completely and rationally. Were we leaving for the weekend–or forever?
A dry lightning storm on Wednesday, July 6, 2005, had started a small fire that smoldered during the night on a ridge above the little valley called Babcock Hole. It was spotted early the next morning.
Mary and I noticed the smoke plume on Thursday morning and walked up the national forest road to see the fire for ourselves at about 8:30 a.m. We met Terry Baxter, the San Carlos Ranger District’s law-enforcement ranger, who gave us a brief update and then parked his pickup at the forest boundary to keep out vehicular sightseers. All day long on Thursday, air tankers and helicopters dropped water and slurry, rumbling in low over our house, diving and climbing.
After supper, when the Forest Service air attack was done for the day, we walked back up to view the fire. It had grown. No longer half a mile from our house, it was now more like a quarter mile away, moving through the ponderosa and Douglas fir on the crest of a ridge.
In the failing light, we hitched up our pop-up camping trailer, only recently cleaned out after a Western Slope fishing trip. I filled a portable file box with important documents (passports, investment records, and so on). Mary brought the cat carrier from the basement and put it by the door. Along the hallway we put our notebook computers, suitcases of clothing, and a box of food. The camping dishes, Coleman lantern, and other gear went into the trailer.
ONCE IN A COMMUNITY COLLEGE writing class, when I was talking about paragraph organization, I gave students this assignment: “If your home were on fire, but all people and pets were safe, what other items would you save and why?” Not surprisingly, more than half chose their family photos. The hold-outs tended to be self-employed types who wrote, “I would save my tools.”
For us, that meant the computers. The photo albums stayed on the bookshelf. So did all my cameras except the newest digital model. I took one shotgun, not to hold off looters but in case it would be all that I had for the next year’s hunting season. Mary threw in her winter coat and favorite dress boots.
Winter? This was July. Were we packing for next winter? I had mainly short-sleeved shirts and a denim jacket. I simply could not conceive of packing for the coming winter.
I called Colorado Central columnist Hal Walter, who lives farther up the road, and arranged to stay there if we evacuated, then took a shower, trying not to think, “Is this the last time?” Surely with nightfall the fire would lie down. It was already up on a rocky ridge, so it could not burn further uphill.
But it did something else. Mary woke me at three o’clock on Friday morning. Our bedroom window was filled with rose-pink light. Worse than that was the roar of the flames, now 400 yards away. Pushed by a dry breeze from the southeast, the fire was coming down the ridge, throwing hot embers towards a patch of beetle-killed pine closer to our home.
THE DOGS WENT INTO the back of the Jeep Liberty. Clothes and computers into Mary’s Wrangler. We wrestled the cat into his carrier–it took both of us, for he had caught the faint scent of panic–and he went into the Wrangler too. Somewhere in there the telephone rang with what we knew would be a recorded message from the sheriff, even though Mary only heard some clicks.
By 3:40 a.m. we were on our way. House lights were glaring up and down our road, and there was a low-pitched throbbing in the air from fire engines and tankers moving into the neighborhood. The rocky walls of Hardscrabble Canyon closed around us, and we could not look back.
*****
After Hurricane Katrina, Jesse Jackson, inserting himself into the crisis, tried to argue that people leaving the stricken area should be called “evacuees” rather than “refugees.” His argument was part of the tangled American discourse of race, but I prefer a simple, functional distinction. If you have a home to return too (or think that you do), you are an evacuee. If you do not, you are a refugee. One woman told a Denver Post writer of how she was hustled onto an airplane leaving New Orleans: “No one told us [where we were going] until we were strapped in.” That would feel like a refugee experience to me.
We had left our front door unlocked. I knew from past experience that the fire fighters would just break it down if they needed to come in. Later, I found a Castle Rock fire lieutenant’s business card on the dining table. (“The house was a mess. They must have thought we were slobs,” Mary said ruefully.)
The area was more smothered with law enforcement than I had ever seen: virtually the whole Custer County sheriff’s department, plus sheriff’s auxiliary volunteers. Still, I heard one story of a homeowner who lived on Highway 96 outside the security cordon seeing an unknown pickup truck pull into his driveway, a truck whose driver hit the gas and tore away when he saw that someone was at home. Would-be looters? Maybe so.
As evacuees, Mary and I had it easy. We had to go only ten miles. The weather was pleasant. We had our trailer with beds and a stove. Neither of us was teaching summer classes, so we did not have to clean up and go to work–and our jobs were still there waiting for us. Outside the fire zone, society was functioning: grocery stores, banks, and filling stations were there for us. Our cat, locked in the Walters’ tack shed with litter box, food, water, and occasional visits, probably suffered the most, since the dogs just thought they were on a camping trip.
Still I would give us a grade of B at most on our preparedness. We had our tools, work-related papers, and financial records, but had packed an odd assortment of clothes and departed without a couple of key cooking items. We remembered to shut off the propane, close all windows and curtains, pre-position some lawn sprinklers, and leave a ladder propped against the roof. But most of our good fortune was circumstantial.
AFTER SIX HOURS we learned we still had a house, and then it was a matter of watching and waiting, making a trip or two home to grab a few things when the sheriff let us back in, and then waiting again to be allowed to return permanently. I found myself unable to concentrate and enjoy the “camping trip.” Instead I walked the dogs or sat in a Westcliffe café with Internet access, writing blog entries to dissipate my nervous tension.
After four days, we came home. I carried out the porch furniture that the fire fighters had stacked in the garage and rolled up the hoses. The fire fighters had repositioned the sprinklers to spots they thought were better, scraped a fireline around the house, and cut down one juniper that they felt was too close. Compared to the animals in the forest, we got off lightly. A few days later, Mary saw a young mule deer buck, apparently in some sort of shock, wandering the burnt ground, and he almost walked into her.
*****
In 1960, at the height of the Cold War, George Leonard Herter, founder of the outdoor-equipment company that bore his name, wrote an idiosyncratic cookbook and guide to life titled Bull Cook and Authentic Historical Recipes and Practices. One appendix is titled “In Case of a Hydrogen Bomb Attack You Must Know the Ways of the Wilderness to Survive.”
GET OUT OF TOWN, he says, regardless of what the “would-be authorities” say. “Have a wood stove that can be set up in abandoned house or shelter.”
He continues with more suggestions: dried food, matches in waterproof containers, and .22 rifle with at least 1,000 rounds of ammunition for both small-game hunting and self-defense. “Bombings bring looting and the looting is done in most all cases by so-called friends who live near you. This is what happened in both World War I and II.”
Finally, after discussing medicines, Herter concludes, “Have 5 one-pound cans of tobacco. This is your fortune. If there is any food or material available that you need, the tobacco will get it for you when money will not.”
After Hurricanes Rita and Katrina, a lot of people have been thinking in print about “go bags” and evacuation plans. (A “go bag” is a backpack full of essentials, which depending on who is writing will range from photocopied financial documents to prescription medicines to serious firepower.) Jeff Opdyke, a Louisiana-based business columnist writing for the Wall Street Journal, notes, “When power is out, cash is king,” and says that he and his wife now always keep several hundred dollars on hand. Apparently he doesn’t know about the tobacco cans.
Opdyke writes too about how he and his wife have developed alternate family meet-up places, such as their children’s school, in case an emergency occurs when the family is scattered.
A blogger calling himself “The Freeholder” reminded his readers post-Katrina that “You aren’t a wild bear–you do not urinate/defecate anyplace you please,” and suggested ways of improvising a sanitary toilet.
Here in Central Colorado, our two biggest threats remain snowstorms and forest fires. In one case, you stay put — usually you have no choice. In the other, you may have to move out on short notice. In either case, you are going to be on your own, at least initially.
As I write this, five weeks after Hurricane Katrina, thousands of people are still in shelters while thousands of FEMA travel trailers and mobile homes sit in storage lots, supposedly because the correct trailer parks have not been built. And that is just one piece of the problem. Journalists speculate about Dust Bowl-style migrations by a new population of homeless, rootless, roving Americans, a “Southern diaspora” living in shantytowns.
There must be a middle line between a full-blown “survivalist” outlook and too much passivity. If the kind of social breakdown that George Herter discussed were to come to pass, five cans of tobacco and a .22 might not be enough. On the other hand, a household should be able to survive a week on its own: food, water, heat and light as needed, and security. Even when the system works and help arrives, it is not going to arrive in the first day or two. After a week, though, it’s a toss-up.
In the end, preparedness is more an attitude than a list of supplies. Lots of people out there have good suggestions. But before you get to that point, you need to have thought of other things.
If you are leaving home, where will you go? Do you have alternate ways to get there? Even if we had not had a destination, we could have taken our little trailer to some national forest road, but not everyone has that luxury. Do you want to go where everyone else is going, in the hope that help will come there first, or do you want to stick to yourself or stay with a smaller group? If you are staying, should you make contact with others or keep a low profile?
Certainly, the more prepared you are, the less likely you are to be swayed by mob mentality and the advice of “would-be authorities,” to use George Herter’s phrase.
AFTER THE HURRICANES, my sympathy in some cases was with the people who stayed put. Better a tent in what had been your back yard than a crowded shelter–assuming you have something to eat. During the Mason Gulch Fire, a couple of my neighbors refused to evacuate, and they were vindicated, this time. In my case, I wanted to get the animals to safety, and I decided to trust the professionals to fight the fire instead of staying behind with my chainsaw, garden hose, and pulaski.
Ever since the last big blizzard, which dumped 30 inches when six or eight were predicted, Mary and I have a rule that the vehicles are moved to the bottom of our long driveway, next to the county road, as soon as six flakes have fallen. We have gasoline for the generator, lots of firewood, and a new stock of food for the winter.
As for forest fires, I keep on trimming trees and making sure that the driveway looks accommodating to fire engines. We keep the trailer parked so that it is easy to hitch and go. We try to think ahead.
But those are the predictable and localized disasters. Bird flu? I don’t have a clue.
Chas S. Clifton teaches writing at Colorado State University- Pueblo and has lived near Wetmore since 1992. His blog entries about the Mason Gulch Fire are at http://natureblog.blogspot.com/
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