Smoke and Ashes

This afternoon, I was sitting at my desk, training a new employee. It dawned on me I was smelling smoke, and for a fraction of a second, I just assumed someone had burned their popcorn again. Then I recognized the smell of burning brush. I immediately logged onto a local news website and discovered that a brush fire was burning about 3 miles from our office, and we were directly downwind - the smoke had come in through the A/C. The headache that had been threatening all day suddenly emerged to the front of my head. About 40 minutes later, I took a break and got up to walk around a bit. That's when I realized the headache was turning into a migraine - I was getting nauseous. I went to the boss and said, "I'm getting a migraine." He said, "Go home!" So I left work an hour early, knowing I needed to get home before the full migraine hit, and knowing that the freeways would be snarled because of the brushfire. Sure enough, it took me nearly an hour to drive the 10 miles it took me to clear the smokestream, all the while, watching large pieces of ash hit the windshield and break into tiny pieces. It took me two hours to get home (all of 35 miles).

It's amazing the memory our nasal passages have. It was 1980 when I had my Close Encounter with a brush fire. I was volunteering at a week-long summer camp for children and adults with developmental disabilities. We were staying at a private residential school in the foothills in Riverside County. My group was at "Music", outside, when another one of the counselors and I noticed that there was smoke coming up over the ridge above us. The other counselor left to tell the camp director, while the rest of us gathered our campers and told them we were going on a hike - to a football field about 1/4 mile away from the blaze. The camp director evacuated the buildings and had everyone down at the football field fairly quickly, except for a few campers that had to be physically removed from the dorms (some people are awfully cranky when you wake them up from a nap!) We stayed down on that field, leading 175 people in camp songs, for hours. Finally, we got the all-clear from the fire department and heading back to the buildings. As we entered the dorms, I realized that the flames had actually burned all the way up to the building - a short brick wall and a sidewalk were all that had separated the dorms from the brushfire.

Later that evening, after our campers were mostly in bed asleep, a group of us counselors were hanging out on a hiking trail, blowing off some steam and the stress of the day, when another counselor came pounding down the trail toward the buildings, yelling, "There's a hot spot!" That's when I began to panic. I'd held up during the initial fire, even though it was my first experience with anything like that, but the thought of waking up 80 developmentally and physically disabled people and evacuating them was more than I could face. Between the stress and the smoke still in the air, I ended up having a mild asthma attack. Fortunately the Fire Department showed up quickly and put out the glowing tree trunk, and we didn't have to evacuate anyone.

Twenty-seven years later, I still recognize the smell of burning chaparral almost immediately, and my first thought is always of that teenager yelling, "There's a hot spot!" Fortunately, it's not accompanied by a sense of panic.