Fire does not burn on equal ground

I felt it like a premonition.  Driving along the north Spokane corridor the week before the fires, the fields looked so dry it seemed they could ignite themselves.

As it turns out, they had a little help in the form of a butane lighter.  Amazon advertises them for “candles, grills, and more.” “And more” in the hands of the alleged arsonist made it a weapon of mass destruction.

When the alarm on my phone said there was a severe fire weather alert for Saturday — the wind, too, was becoming a weapon. I hoped no one would deliberately set a fire.  People can be so cautious, so careful.  It takes just one to be the opposite.

Now many are left in grief.  Going through a wildfire evacuation myself — in Alaska's Miller's Reach Fire — and having multiple friends who lost homes, this is not completely unfamiliar to me.  Like the earth that has greened again, so has the landscape of their lives.

But that was 30 years ago. There has been time.  In the beginning for these friends there was nothing.  Losing a home is so much more than losing a shelter.  To not be able to walk in your front door for peace and privacy assaults your very self.  There is nowhere to go that is yours — that has your unique cast.  Suddenly it is almost a backward slide to dependency.  Wanting to provide for your own needs, but needing somebody else to step in.

The one scene from the Alaskan fire that sticks forever was Edie — sitting on her couch in her plastic “house”—an extension cord running to the television she was watching.  She was wearing a jacket as the days were cooling.  To enter her opaque plastic refuge, I opened the clothespin holding the flap that was her door.

This was her temporary summer solution.  Habitat for Humanity eventually arrived and built her a home.  She and her teen son were homeless no longer.

Fire doesn't care what it takes.  There is a proverb about it.  “Fire that never says, 'Enough.'”  Slowly, my friends learned to live without the physical memories.  They talked their histories.  The butane lighter in the alleged arsonist's hand last Saturday swept the proof of lifetimes from the hands of hundreds.

Starting over is not going back to where you were and creating another beginning.  There is no “where you were.”  It's gone.  Losing a home — and beyond that, an entire community of neighbors — is inventing something from where you stand.  Or moving out altogether—on feet that seem leaden.

When you are younger — as among my Alaskan friends — the enormity of loss is cushioned by the time ahead in which to adapt to a life change.  If it were to happen to me now, I don't have that.  Just like I can't make an old friend anymore.  My book of time is the condensed version.  Fire does not burn equal ground.

In all the practicalities, the necessary hands-on service — there is one essential to not overlook.  It unites us as human beings in any crisis. “Weep with those who weep.”

Carol Shirk Knapp is the author of "The Preacher's Kid" column.