Tezos

Wildfire! The Aftermath

Creator

tz1Z8ppqiXFmqgsrksxKk5xwMu3XaCCmm5m7

Description

“I’m going to go back up as far as I can to see if the house is okay,” I told my Father, leaving him and Buster safely with the neighbours. I didn’t give him a chance to object -- I knew he would be concerned about my safety. We looked out for each other – that was another part of our unspoken pact, made two and a half years ago when we decided to live together. I set out on foot, running through the old-growth forest that bordered the south side of our property. The fire had passed over that section of giant ancient cedars and pines, burning only the treetops and some of the undergrowth. A good sign… maybe everything really would be okay at our place. The air had grown heavy and thick as I approached the bottom of our quarter-mile-long driveway. The view before me paralyzed me with the shock of an unwelcomed reality. A great ball of fire with deck rails punching out dominated the scene. Blackened poles and ashes covered the ground surrounding what had been the site of our dream home an hour before. Our house, garages, guesthouse and our little sailboat… all reduced to piles of tri-coloured ashes – specks of grey, white and black, still hot, with the stench of burned plastic, wood and paper. Every piece of Dad’s personal memorabilia, the history of our family and both of our lives… wiped from the face of our little piece of paradise – disintegrated -- in less than an hour. The monumental life-shattering aspects of this disaster evaded my consciousness for the time being. It was a bit much to digest in one helping. Surreal, in the most bizarre and unsettling manner possible. I didn’t know how I would tell Dad. I guessed I would just have to tell him straight up: we were now homeless. During the 10-minute walk back to the neighbour’s property, I stumbled along, not noticing the smouldering brush and trees around me as the synapses in my brain fired a multitude of questions to which I had no answers. What now? What do we do? What’s the next step? Sell out? Buy another place? Rebuild? We had minimal insurance through an assigned risk program that provided limited coverage for remote forest homes, but that wouldn’t come close to paying us for our entire loss, nor would it replace the priceless personal mementoes that documented our lives. Those were gone forever. Fire has to be the worst disaster to befall a person – everything is reduced to ashes leaving little, if anything, to recover. Floods or hurricanes usually leave a big mess, but things can be dried out and restored. Our fire erased volumes of family history and all of the certificates and awards that Dad proudly showed to friends, new and old. My office in our destroyed guesthouse stored my photo library of 60,000 images documenting Alaska life during my years growing up there, along with hundreds of clippings from newspaper and magazine articles I had written. All gone. Our identities, the records of our lives… expunged. We had been in our own little world at StarWind, the name I’d given the property. We had no phone service at that time, and the mountain retreat was off-grid – powered by an array of solar panels with occasional help from a gas generator. Dad loved to joke with people in town during power outages – he would laugh and rub it into the waitresses and store attendants, remarking that the lights were on at our place. Now we would be starting from scratch, right down to buying new socks and underwear. --- This image was captured on 35mm film, scanned, retouched and converted to monochrome to fit the mood.