Surviving Wildfires, Part 2 of 4

pic courtesy Christian BresslerChristian lives in Amarillo, TX. She's also one of my wife’s best friends. For the past couple weeks, the area’s been just crushed by wildfires. Last week, she and her husband were forced to evacuate their home with flames devouring their neighborhood. Their story will be shared here in four installments over the next four days. It's a lens through which to view a bigger tragedy ... and through which to find something unbelievable in such a time as this: Joy. 

Surviving Wildfires | Part 2 of 4
by Christian Bressler, as told to Brandon Sneed

With the fire devouring fields and homes, we waited fifteen minutes that lasted forever. Still no sign of my grandparents. I called their house again. Please don’t answer. Please don’t answer.

No answer.

I called Grandma’s cell phone.

“We’re on our way,” Grandma answered. “And Grandpa’s got the dogs.”

Oh, sweet relief.

They arrived minutes later, in separate cars. I learned that police had come to their home and forced them out. Before they left, they turned on the yard sprinklers and watered down the roof. It frustrated me then that Brady and I had no chance to do anything for our house, or get any of our things. Our house could be gone by nightfall. It could be gone now, for all we knew.

It’s okay, I kept telling myself. Grandma and Grandpa are safe. Our dogs are with us. We’re together. That’s all that matters.

And every once in awhile, I found myself actually believing it.

We waited a few minutes longer, watching the flames rage and burn, but we couldn’t take it much longer. We went to Canyon to stay with some friends. We stayed riveted to the radio and the television and the Internet, trying to learn more, but there was little more to learn. All they kept hearing was that Lake Tanglewood was under mandatory evacuation.

The hours passed. Our phones filled up with calls and text messages from people checking in. It struck me how bittersweet tragedy is: Even though we were going to lose everything, we saw how much we really had. We saw how blessed we were.

Hours later, we still knew nothing. We, like hundreds of other suddenly left homeless, could do nothing but wait in the dark. All we knew was that we couldn’t go home. We didn’t even know if we still had one.

Later that night, we decided to stay with Brady’s parents. On our way, we stopped by Wal-Mart for some clothes. We noticed we weren’t the only car with a Lake Tanglewood parking ticker in the parking lot.

At Brady’s parents’, we turned on the new again. The only update: Communities surrounding Lake Tanglewood were allowed to go back home. Lake Tanglewood residents, however, still weren’t.

As the night went longer, we didn’t sleep. We talked. Brady kept me from freaking out, and I found myself overwhelmed with gratitude at him. Without him, I would have been a complete wreck.

In time, we found peace. We came to terms with it all. We got okay with having nothing. Crazy as it seems, it was such a good place to be. We didn’t want it to be true, but we knew the odds. If our house was gone, if everything in it was gone, we still had our lives.

That didn’t help the hard news go down any easier. We later learned of another fire north of Lake Tanglewood that had wiped out a neighborhood, as well as a full dog kennel.

I finally just made myself go to bed. If anything, just to make time go faster. The devastation taking place was just unbearable.

I woke up every few hours, compulsively checking my phone for news. 3:30. Then 5:30. Then 7:30. Same thing, always: Residents not allowed to go back into Lake Tanglewood….

Eventually I got up to eat breakfast. It felt something like a dream. I was really sitting there, eating at my in-laws, unable to go home, waiting to learn that maybe home wasn’t there anymore. Meanwhile, it was Monday, and the rest of the world was moving as usual, with people going to work and to school. So surreal.

Well, we weren’t going to work that day. We stayed riveted to the news for the next couple of hours. And finally, we had enough. We were going to find out for ourselves. Forget the evacuation—we were going back to Lake Tanglewood.

We were prepared for what we found, yeah, but it still didn’t stop me from crying. 

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This is part of a serial story. For all blog entries telling this story, click here. 

Comments

[Katie]

nice cliff hanger! I want to know what happens!

Also, I would like another photo yo.