Hot Water

                                                                                            2,440 words                                                    

Hot Water

            Blowing the past in, the tea kettle shrieks. Or screams. Totally in keeping with today’s current events, even as the herbal tea itself is supposed to calm you. But nothing’s calm now; nuclear war is back on the table. Enduring droughts and 1,000-year floods and eerie wildfires are served for free. We are used to — maybe even crave — cringe-binging, gorging on disasters. Sometimes a tea kettle shrills it all. I used to think it was just me being a disaster: now I know it is everybody else.

Not your mom’s tea kettle. How I miss the gentleness, the goofiness, the respect, the possibilities of water-borne goodness, of the used-to-be blue water planet. We huff about, less than dust, probably terminal. And I am transported, on a tea trolley….

My family used to kneel to drink cool water from generous gushing mountain streams, splashing, refreshing — one of the high points in venturing into the Colorado high country. Then, we had magic that wasn’t communicable and 50 ways to deadly. Not the diseases and body parts and World War II sunken ships now exposed by drowning drought. How come history never repeats the good parts? Wack-a-doodle-do.

We used to be different. When you think about it, water describes our days, in so many ways, defines and proscribes where we live, details and prescribes our bodily functions and conditions. Water holds life’s hands.

After all, humans are at least 60-percent water, and blood is 90-percent water. Almost 100-proof. What happens when the well runs dry and the dust bowl swirls and threatens?

When you’re a kid, and mostly protected from it, all this potential botheracious weather-invasive and Earth-ending stuff seems merely like a get-out-of-school-free day. I remember events starting out as fun, as many disasters do. Kind of imaginary-friendlike, preparing playtime stuff. Huddling in the basement (not Bob Dylan’s, where he’s mixin’ up the medicine) as a kid, waiting out the tornado warnings in Louisville, Kentucky. 

            “Look out kid; It’s something you did; God knows when; But you’re doin’ it again.” Thank you, Bob Dylan.

            We’d sit on the screened-in back porch, in Kentucky, half-open to the elements, sniffing the storm, agog at the lightning scissoring the hellish heavens, between the wavering black- cherry tree boughs. And whatever the hobgoblins, we always had the adults for back-ups. Never thinking there would be the passages of storm we’d have to weather and survive, Dorothylike, no more Kansas. Trial by tornado-lightning-fire-earthquake-flood — what can rival the upheavaled end of a parent? But in those days, like everything else, adults were endless, flowed freely.

We’d wonder at the churlish choosiness of nature and the random conspiracy plots that always thickened.

            Of course, we were the kind of girls who had once been scared to death by an older sister who snuck up on us while we were overnighting on the back porch, said “Boo,” and nearly caused our own ground lightning storm. Not so odd as it sounds. My aunt was actually once followed around from grounds to buildings by a hoop of lightning. I’m glad I didn’t inherit the lightning-following gene; I got the magic mosquito attractant, and that’s bad enough, thank you.

            We read Nancy Drew and saw S-O-S messages written in the airy woods behind our houses, flashed by those literary lightning bugs, who incessantly lighted up the dark and our imaginations. 

            So, tornado warning, lightning, earthquake, firestorm, flood all started out innocently enough, as fun, not knowing the flip side of nature, where she rocks and rolls you into the rammalammadingdong of bad insurance agents and roiling nightmares of the damned, where you are knocked nearly down and could be out for the count, leveled, if not for the strength of soul survival, the kindness of strangers and friends, and the occasional good deed of the government.

            Flash forward. As a grown-up (supposedly), I used to enjoy the more-than-occasional earthquake, from the heat of southern to the grape of northern California. We talked of “earthquake weather.”  I always congratulated myself for surviving the kings of earthly rock ‘n’ roll and in somewhat of an unfreaked-out style (as chic as I could attempt to be). That was until the Northridge corker rocker, Jan. 17, 1994, at 4:31 a.m. Some things change everything. Like the later 2012 and 2013 Colorado fires and floods, and the 2020 wildfire evacuations I also got to endure. Who knew there would be such fun in store? And that there wouldn’t be anywhere safe anymore? And that we could become the ugly brown planet? You certainly don’t plan on those things. Or we didn’t used to have to. 

            When you are perched in a trailer, atop a hill, on a corner, and are pitched about like a rowboat in an angry Pacific, you just know you’ll end up not happily. It certainly seemed like we were in the watery soup that morning, as I grasped the bucking Brahma mattress for dear life, screaming like I wouldn’t, couldn’t, stop.

            Mind you, I come by my disaster reactions honestly. My great-grandmother once observed that it was a very bright day in their 1930’s cabin along the South Platte River in Colorado. The roof was on fire, and the cabin burned down.

            Topanga Canyon in California was also famous for its drought-blasted wildfires, one of which I was evacuated from while my parents were visiting. Since I was at work, my parents became the lucky saviors of the two kitties and had the lovely task of bundling them into the car and then checking them into a motel. The kitties decided to hide in the bedsprings, causing a gigantic search the next morning. My mother never found the experience of watching helicopters dipping buckets into the ocean to douse the hillside fire as awesome as I did, and perhaps would rather have been in the bedsprings with the kitties.  

            It’s amazing how creative you become during times of challenge; coping skills are truly underrated. In the many weather-related crises I’ve weathered since then, I’ve discovered that topping the list of the greatest of all modern inventions is indoor plumbing. I know this because, after spending months schlepping slop buckets to the porta-potties in the cold Colorado winter in 2013, after the 100-year-flood hit that fall, wiping out roads, homes and creating a “no-flush zone” many residents cited as the most unmentionable of fallouts, it was truly a day of celebration when we could achieve that first flush of victorious freedom again.

            After each disaster, you think, “Well, gosh, how did I survive THIS? And just exactly what did I learn?” And go on your merry way. My merry way remains cluttered with my evacuation stuff.

            On June 23, 2012, I was pre-preparing for evacuation from a Colorado wildfire (loading the car trunk with important papers), as I saw the firecloud come up over the mountains in Estes Park, from Boulder. That apparition belonged to the now-infamous Waldo Canyon Fire, which raged from June 23 through July 10, consuming 346 buildings, causing 2 fatalities and 6 injuries, and was human-caused.

            In another unearthly firestorm, my mom had left the planet Memorial Day of 2012, so this gnarly turn of events was definitely adding insult to injury. I didn’t expect the danger to be coming from inside, though, but that’s how it always happens. A friend called June 23, asking if I knew whether my then-91-year-old father was all right. I said I thought so and told her I was preparing pre-evac and she said to stop, get on over to his house, because that’s where the fire was NOW. I grabbed the puppy and raced down Marys Lake Road in Estes Park, seeing flipping, heart-grabbing orange flames and black smoke where it never should be, in the direction of the hill my father’s home of 28 years occupied, along with cherished neighbors, lovely Ponderosa pines and furnace fuels for howling-hungry wildfires. The Woodland Heights fire was racing, scorching and gobbling 27.3 acres, 22 homes and 2 outbuildings.

            I explained to a deputy guarding the entrance to our drive that I had to reach my father, and he kindly allowed me to go up a parallel road (that goes to Rocky Mountain National Park, which the wildfire had closed, too). At that point, I saw a knot of neighbors, and thankfully, my father. Puppy and I arrived and my father tried to convince me all was well, as tears dripped down my frazzled face. He had been out with a garden hose trying to wet down and protect the area. The fire raged to within 30 feet of our garage. It was right next to one neighbor’s home, and she and the home remained unscathed. I still can’t imagine how. Good karma, perhaps. We still get chills in cracklin-crisp weather, and the haze over the mountains makes us lift our noses, like animals, sniffing for danger. 

            In 2012, nervous nail-biting awaited the arrival of the air crews here, and wild cheering when we first saw them appear and drop their lovely loads of fire-retardant. And we didn’t have to watch our home, our lives, burn. 

            But we couldn’t return home for about a week. So, my father and I camped out in my tiny condo (he insisted on curling up in a sleeping bag on the floor, being a World War II vet and that’s just what his generation does, serves, accommodates, helps). Again, how we made it through is one of the great mysteries.

            It was not like coming home, with Daddy sacked out on the living room floor, together with his oxygen condenser, and the puppy for company beside him. But it was like coming half-circle, back to the days of the screened-in back porch and protection. We’d already confronted the boogeyman, who’d said a big Boo! And we’d made it through the fire. One fire at a time. Perhaps that’s all you can ask for.

            If humans won’t change, then nature will change us. She has no doubt, no compunction, no compassion regarding climate change. Nature is real, and what’s happening. No amount of religious gobbledygook confuses her issues. Drought? We got it. Wildfires, they’re here. Fabulous floods — here, have some water! Worst winter ever, no problemo. Overpopulation? Duh!

            As the Rolling Stones sang in “Gimme Shelter:” “Oh, a storm is threat’ning my very life today, If I don’t get some shelter, Oh yeah, I'm gonna fade away....Oooh, see the fire is sweepin' our very street today….The flood is threat’ning my very life today. Gimme, Gimme shelter, Or I’m gonna fade away.”

            So, when the rains came to Estes Park that first day, Sept. 11 (yeah, you got it), 2013, I thought merely, “Oh, good, oh well. We’re in a drought. Go, God, go.”

            Well, God went for it. By the third day of thundering-hooved rain, “Rocky Mountain High” took on new meanings, as we watched the roiling waters rise. 

            You reach a wet understanding of Third World countries, as you become cut off from the rest of the Earth. Never before have I not had an escape route, no matter how closely guarded by the National Guard. But little Estes Park, in all its beatific serenity, surrounded by the tall Rocky Mountains, was its own island. The only way in or out was problematic Trail Ridge, the highest continuous paved road in the country, presenting its own challenges. And then, ta-dah! Highway 7 opened to delivery trucks. Magic. One resident cried when she saw the first Safeway truck. You have no idea what you miss, when it’s not there.

            Some residents were forced to take another mode of transportation, the helicopter zipline, ferrying many mountain-strong folks (the eldest being a spry 93) and their companion animals to safety. The National Guard had learned from New Orleans’ Hurricane Katrina, with its abominable animal abandonments. Rescuers purposely and honorably saved all living things. Heroes aplenty.

            Living like a refugee must be weird beyond words. I was a refugee within my own condo, without plumbing for several months. It’s amazing what one can learn to do with a plastic tub and one arm! 

            To be a survivor, no matter of what or how, is truly a strange and wonderful thing. Somehow, you find the silver lining — even in a plastic slop bucket. 

            Maybe Robert Frost was right about the end of the world. Fire and ice.  James Taylor sang, “Oh, I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain.” Amen. But not the end. Yet.

            After having seen all that, how can we not know “a change is gonna come”? You don’t need a weatherman. All you need is to survive one disaster, to know which way the wind blows.

            A poem I wrote, whjch received honorary mention in the Estes Valley Library’s first annual commemoration of the historic wildfire of 2012 and flood of 2013, speaks of some of the unspeakables:

            “life really does that flashing thing before your eyes,

as you prepare to evacuate, running before fire, flood,

everything coming at you, all your life that was,

stormy villains coming to get you, to take you away, haha,

in a hail of blazing, swimming fury, bullets of flame and mud.

you go against the current, the grain, the fuel, everything,

what? remembering that darned checklist of what to take

with you in an emergency….

oh and all the people that go with all the memories

of all the things you’re abandoning….

you’ll always have wherever-it-is,

not exactly paris,

not exactly bogey,

but some swagger, nonetheless.

but matching socks? a toothbrush?....

we are emblazoned, emboldened

by a furnace of muddy flood.

we need a bigger ark — too much stuff to park

and too many outings — hark!

‘we’re on fire now!’ and a ‘flood of memories’

flame with surging, purging, urgent meanings,

dug from the bright deep, our souls to keep.

as long as we remember ourselves, each other,

our family fur babies,

we are not doomed….

we emerge heroes,

on the other side

of fire and flood,

seared, bathed in

tears, sweat, and blood.”

Many of those rescued had lost most of everything, even watched their poor homes hanging from cliffs, before the water took them entirely. Being a refugee in your own country, in your own little town, must be sad-weird. Circus acts and the dance of life!

So now, along with the joyful movie musical Gene Kelly, I’m dancin’ and singin’ in the rain (thankful for the everyday summer showers).  And prayin’ it gets where it needs to be instead of where it shouldn’t so much, merrily, musically, mystically, magically, transcendentally, with a kettle whistling time for glee.

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