The Fire
I’m sitting outside on the patio, under an awning at Iconik on 2nd street in Santa Fe, eating steak tacos. The sun is hitting me just enough so that sweat is running down my calves and into my shoes. I am craning my neck so that more of the sun hits my face. I want all the sun I can gather from this September day. Fall is coming. Fall is here. And I still want the sweat and the heat. Bring it.
I am eating lunch with my long-time Santa Fe friend. We have stayed friends over the 14 years since I first moved to New Mexico — through massage school and midwifery school and now our shared interest in depth psychology. As our time together comes to an end, I turn my phone on. Yes, I keep my phone in airplane mode most of the time so that I am not constantly exposed to the radiation of my cell phone and also because, I don’t like to be bothered when I am hanging out with people that I love.
As I turn my phone on, I start to see multiple texts come in — it seems like more than usual. There is a text from my wife, my two friends who live on the farm with us, a couple of neighbors and even one of the handymen who works on our property. They all say the same thing: FIRE. COME HOME. CALL HOME. I see that these texts are already an hour old so I speedily dial our landline back in Ojo Sarco. Indeed, there is a fire that has broken out in Las Trampas and El Valle, about six miles up the road from our farm. Ojo Sarco has been warned that evacuation may be necessary. We are on “set” status. The only status after “set” is “go”. Our friends in Las Trampas, who have a seven acre farm and homestead, can see the flames from their backyard. As I hang up the phone with my wife, I more than start to panic. At the minimum, it is going to take me over two of hours to get home. I think about just driving straight home as fast as I can, but we need supplies. We need food and if the fire comes close enough, we may need water if our well pump goes down.
Back on the farm, the team is preparing the house for the fire in case it decides to come closer to us. They spend the afternoon taking in all the patio furniture, front door mats, curtains, piles of wood and wooden benches. They move everything away from the propane tanks. They sweep the porches and clear the debris out of the garage. They fill up trash cans with water and bring the hoses close. They put on long pants and boots, they get our walkie talkies out, they find the headlamps and spare batteries and place them on the kitchen table. They take the valuables out of our bedroom — important files, special books, wedding rings. Everything is collected in the main house — the structure we will defend if the fire draws near.
I steady my focus and head to the local food coop. I am going to need all my attention for this job. I have to buy food for all four of us living on the farm right now. I lag two shopping carts behind me as I clumsily make my way through the store. There is no sign of fire in Santa Fe. People are smiling and laughing. There is no smoke, no ashes falling from the sky. Don’t they know that our farm is in danger? Can’t they tell that I’m panicking as I bag these avocados? I ask my wife to update me every ten minutes — I need to know what is going on. I talk with a couple of neighbors back in Las Trampas and Ojo Sarco. One asks me to bring her two six packs of beer — her favorite Mexican brand — which I agree to. This comforts me a little bit. I mean, how bad can it be if neighbors are asking for beer? Or maybe that means, the fires are really bad and they want to celebrate their last night standing with their favorite cerveza. One neighbor is 40 weeks pregnant, her home siutated on a long dirt road with no other houses aroun. She is curious if she should head up to Taos for the night in case her doula cannot drive the roads to get to her house. The other neighbors are watching helicopters lower their buckets down into the pond next door and pour the water onto the fire. In a matter of moments, we are a community chain of texts and messages, checking in on one another and offering help here and there. A farmer friend from outside of Santa Fe offers to bring his horse trailer up to our property if we need to get our animals out. My cousin offers his home in Pojoaque if we need beds to sleep in away from the fire. We have almost made it to the end of summer without the presence of fire on our mountains, but in this last sweep before the fall rains and winter snow, we are asked to become intimate friends with the raging warmth.
As I drive home, I have to take the long way through Dixon. The High Road to Taos, up to our property, is already closed off to through traffic. I drive up through Española, impatiently sitting through the afternoon traffic, taking deep breaths as I peer out into the East and see the ominous billows of white and black smoke. There is a fire alright and I am driving right into it. As I drive the dirt road that connects our farm to the small town of Dixon, there are more cars than usual. Trucks and horse trailers filled with animals are driving fast on the dirt road, kicking up dust and rocks as they swerve past me. People are starting to panic. Residents from El Valle and Las Trampas are evacuating, they are getting out. There are planes and helicopters overhead now, dumping water and fire retardant on the flames in the forest. There has been no lightening in our area because the monsoon season has been non-existent. This fire has the smell of a prescribed burn gone wrong, although every fire update we read says the causes for the fire are “still under investigation”.
As I turn into our driveway, I am so grateful to be home. I cannot help but burst into tears as I greet my wife in the driveway. The feeling of being separated from our animals, the farm, the land and my people in times of a crisis, is not a feeling I enjoy. I did not like being far away. I did not like having to focus on the price of cream while everyone back on the homestead was preparing for the fire. I need to be able to see, touch, taste and smell our farm in times of crisis. I need to be able to put my hand on the bleeding wound and wrap the turniquite around it myself. I need to be able to ask the farm, “Where does it hurt?”
I see all the work the farm team has done. Our structures are prepared for fire, we are ready for it. I know that in choosing to live in the West and in choosing to live in the piñon and juniper forests, fire will call our name. When my wife and I were choosing a place to live and a place to buy, we knew that we would have to cuddle up with one of the natural disasters that this county is prone to. Tornados? Hurricanes? Ice storms? Drought? Wildfire? We knew that in choosing the West, we would in part be choosing to make friends with fire — or at least choosing not to make an enemy out of it. And, this is not the first fire we have seen. When we lived in Sedona, Heathar put out a fire in our backyard with a shovel and our landlord until the actual fire crew showed up. I imagine that over decades, we will gather more knowledge and expertise about this wild and reckless friend. I can’t say I’m excited about it, but I’m less scared than I used to be.
That night, the four of us (the current farm crew) walked down the street to our neighbor’s house. We carried two, 6-packs of beer to them to honor their contribution to fighting the fire. Michael had been out that afternoon on the front lines, bringing supplies to the fire fighters: peaches, corn chips and lime soda. We shared a moment of shock and surprise with Michael and his wife, all of us feeling the gravity of the fire so close. We agreed to keep our phones on that night in case we needed to communicate quickly with one another. As night descended on the small valley of Ojo Sarco, I stood up on our porch and watched the fire. I could see the glowing, orange embers of the fire in the distance like an angry lighthouse. We slept with the fire at our feet that night, praying that it stayed far enough away so that we could remember our dreams.
As the days passed, the helicopters and the planes became fewer and fewer. They were corralling and containing the fire. Our breath became deeper and our feet became heavier. We knew we would not have to run. We knew we would not have to fight. We put the patio furniture back out on the porches, we put the hammock back up in the tree, we let the chickens run wild. We were free, for now. There would be no fire coming for us today.
There is only part of me that wants to flee into the swamplands of the deep south, where it is so boggy and full of water that fire could not ever take a breath. There is only part of me that asks right before I fall asleep, “Is there anywhere we can be truly safe?” But there is a bigger part of me that knows — the floods will come and the droughts will come and the fires will come and we will know what to do. We will adapt. We will change. We will create. We will invent. I can trust in this. I can trust our capacity for this kind of living.
I remember one of my professors from graduate school who told us his story about living through the fires in Ojai, California in 2018. They evacuated their property, sure it was going to burn to the ground in their absence. The fire ravaged their fields but their house remained standing. Their house that they had built with their own two hands, their house that they had dug the foundation for and buried poems beneath the concrete they poured — it was still there for them to come back to. They were shocked that their house did not burn, when so many others around them did. He showed us pictures of the fields in the spring, regenerating themselves. He showed us all the wildflowers that came to replace the flames.
