In the rush to flee the firestorm, many of us were faced with having to quantify and calculate the emotional and actual value of many of our possessions in an incredibly brief period of time. Now, living in an area with some familiarity with natural disasters, many of us knew the basics — ID, important documents, checkbook, medicine, pets — but after that was covered, what did people grab to potentially start a new life with?
I thought I had done pretty well. I was feeling smug about the artwork and family photos that were irreplaceable, and that I had remembered to grab my jewelry. Yep, pretty smug, until I realized I had grabbed absolutely no shirts; every other item of clothing, but no shirts.
The one I had been wearing was covered with all manner of unmentionable stains and smells from our frantic dash to evacuate our farm’s worth of animals, so a re-wear was not an option. My only choice was to grab one of my husband’s polo shirts, which due to some differences in anatomy fit me like Britney Spears circa 1998. And trust me, Brit and I have absolutely nothing in common other than being human females.
“Aren’t you hot?” I got asked a lot the next day as I wore my bulky sweatshirt to cover my shame.
I was talking to a friend who fled the Fountaingrove fires, and she related that she had been sure to grab her kids’ school uniforms, “because in my head, even in the midst of that, of course they’d be going to school the next day.”
She also related that she’d grabbed multiple pairs of shoes for her children and husband, but was pulling out of her driveway before she realized she herself was still wearing her bedroom slippers (she ran back in and grabbed a pair).
A big one I’ve heard from a lot of people, including my own family, is lamenting that in an age of near ubiquitous multi-car ownership in families, almost everyone who evacuated did so in only one vehicle, leaving the other to its fate in the flames.
I’ve heard a lot of self-flagellation and confusion over this action, “We have two drivers, why did we only take one car?” And yet the answer seems obvious. In times of danger, our primitive lizard brain takes over, and the lizard brain knows there is safety in numbers. “Stick together,” it commanded. “One car, so you are together!”
Sometimes the slowest antelope, or Toyota, gets left behind to ensure the survival of the herd.
We are collectors by nature, we humans, and all of us likely have a collection of something we would have had to consider taking or leaving. Another friend was helping his sister-in-law sift through the ash of her Coffey Park home and discovered her extensive collection of Disney character collectibles had melted into a crazed amalgamation of modern art. Donald’s foot jutting bizarrely from Mickey’s stomach, Elsa’s torso on the Tramp’s canine hindquarters. All pressed together into a strange sculpture of loss. My friend encouraged his sister-in-law to keep her new art piece. Last I heard, she was unconvinced.
“Things are just things,” people say. “You’re safe, and that’s what matters.”
While that is certainly true, I also think it’s easy to say when you still have things. No one thinks a thing is worth more than a human life, but that’s not much of a balm when my mother remembers that she lost the letters her father wrote her mother during the Korean War. Or a friend contemplates the fact that she had just finished re-flooring her entire home, which now smells like the inside of a chimney. Or you try to figure out how both of you are going to get to work with one car. Or you are a kid who no longer has toys to play with.
Things can be replenished, which is the good news, but they can’t really be replaced. You can get new dishes, but they won’t be your wedding china. You can get new toys, but they won’t be the ones that Santa brought that you had wished for all year.
Everyone left something behind. The lucky ones got it back, the less lucky didn’t. Either way, we now have a sense of absence, like the phantom pain of a lost limb, reminding us of what we took, and what we left behind.
