Raising Wild

by Michael P. Branch

  After what seemed a very long time, the fire captain came over to talk with me. When I asked if they could save the house, he answered only that they would do their best. I waited for a more hopeful prognostication, but none came. The visible flames were extinguished, he said, but the fire was still smoldering within the floors or walls, and they had not yet located it. This sort of fire could blow up quickly, he explained. I asked him about our pets—two dogs and a cat—and he reported that Darcy, our old dog, had been found cowering beneath the water truck, but that the puppy, Beauregard, and Lucy the cat had not been seen either inside or outside the house.

  At some point my father arrived, and the two of us stood together in the cold, staring at the house, watching firefighters rush in and out, listening to the sound of chainsaws, receiving no assurances. My dad was the primary designer of our passive solar house, and he worked tirelessly as our general contractor when it was built. It was as efficient, creative, and beautiful a home as any desert rat could ever hope for—the result of a multigenerational collaboration in which every member of our family was deeply and personally invested. Hannah was an infant when we brought her to this place, and it has been Caroline’s only home. This was the place where we had built our shared life together—the place our stories came from. And now, as we stood silently out in the cold, thick smoke billowed from beneath all sides of the roof.

  While I was battling the fire on my own, Eryn was making sure the girls were safe. Hearing me shout from upstairs, Eryn called 911 and reported the emergency. She then dropped her phone on the hearth and ran to the kids’ bedroom, where both girls were sound asleep despite the blaring smoke alarms. She first woke Caroline and instructed her to “give Mommy your best monkey hug,” a neat trick by which Caroline can hold on to you with the vice grip of her muscular little legs. With Caroline firmly attached, she then woke Hannah, took her by the hand, and led the girls quickly out of the house, where she sat them on a railroad-tie wall out in the cold February night. Now having a moment to gather herself, Eryn realized that the girls were barefoot and wearing nothing but their pajamas. She told Hannah to put her arm around Caroline and under no circumstances to go back into the house.

  “I am coming back, but you two stay together no matter what. And don’t come back into the house. That’s your job,” she told them. Then Eryn dashed back into the girls’ bedroom, pulling their robes off the dragonfly-shaped hook on the back of their door and snatching the first shoes she could grab from the closet, which turned out to be the two little pairs of bright green cowgirl boots we’d bought for Hannah and Caroline on our last family expedition across the Great Basin.

  Although Eryn had been gone only moments, by the time she ran back outside Caroline was scared and upset, and Hannah was hugging her little sister and comforting her. Caroline is fortunate to have such a caring, loving big sister. After all, the girls had gone from a deep sleep to being awakened to the sound of alarms and hauled out into the dark night without so much as putting their shoes on. They were disoriented and cold. They didn’t know where their dad was.

  When I appeared with the truck, Eryn brought the girls around the corner of the house in their green cowgirl boots and red bathrobes and piled them into the idling pickup. She then drove down our dark, muddy, half-mile-long driveway, fielding a battery of fearful questions from the girls. What was going on in the house? Why wasn’t Daddy coming with us? Was he going to be OK? Eryn’s answer to all these questions was to say, over and over and with great confidence, “Dad always knows what to do.”

  When Eryn reached the bottom of the driveway, she jumped out and propped open our green farm gate with a rebar stake. Then she drove out onto the gravel road, spun the truck around, and backed it up so as to face the road and be just beyond our driveway—a position from which she intended to direct emergency vehicles. During the long wait for help to arrive, she realized that she didn’t have her phone, or her glasses, or any warm clothes, or anything at all for the girls to read or play with. And there they sat, with the truck running and the heater blowing, headlights tunneling into the darkness, waiting in the breathless silence of the desert night. The remote location of our house and the hilly topography in which it is nestled prevented her from seeing our place or hearing anything from it, and because she had no way of knowing what might be happening up on the hill—except to know that I was there alone and that there was a fire—it was an agonizing wait.

  It was during that lonely, frightening eternity in the truck, waiting for help and knowing nothing, that Eryn gave the girls a gift she has also given me: a magnificent strength born of love. Her courage and poise calmed Hannah and Caroline, helping them navigate this difficult and chaotic experience. As Eryn hugged the girls on the old truck’s bench seat, she explained to them that some people would be driving out to help up at the house and that the first one to spot the flashing lights would be allowed to honk the truck horn to greet the helpers. Then she turned on the radio and suggested a family sing-along, which she used to buy time between repeating, in response to Hannah’s worried questions, that “Dad always knows what to do.”

  At last the girls spotted the distant flashing red lights of an emergency vehicle barreling up the gravel road. Eryn declared the competition a tie and told the girls that they could both honk the truck’s horn as soon as she started waving a friendly hello to the helpers. Then Eryn climbed out of the truck and stood in the middle of the road, in the middle of the desert, in the middle of the night, and flagged the fire truck with a “friendly wave” that was actually a desperate gesture toward the mouth of our driveway, into which the truck sped without slowing down. Climbing back into the pickup, she then told the girls that it would be important to greet every vehicle in just that way and also to observe the number and types of vehicles so they could report to me later exactly what they had seen. Caroline was especially enthusiastic about the game, and so Eryn and the girls repeated their honking and waving another half-dozen times over the next half hour.

  Soon, however, the eerie silence fell once again, and while many emergency vehicles had raced up to the house, none had come back down. The last of the vehicles to arrive looked to Eryn like an ambulance, which redoubled her concern. Because she had no phone, could not leave the girls, and did not want to expose them to whatever emergency operations might be going on at the house, she was once again stranded in the dark without support or information.

  At only six years of age and possessed of a naturally buoyant personality, Caroline had no trouble playing along with Eryn’s games. Ten-year-old Hannah, however, was a great deal more worried, her concern fueled both by her greater understanding of the seriousness of what was happening and also by her naturally caring and fretful disposition. When Hannah began to cry again, Caroline jumped right in to help out.

  “Hannahbug, don’t worry. An awesome fireman came to my class, and he was a daddy too! It’s all good. You can really trust these guys!” Then Caroline did something that was as remarkable as it was mundane, something that was quintessentially Caroline. First she retrieved my broken sunglasses from the side panel of the truck door—cheap shades I had shown her the previous day when one of the lenses popped out and couldn’t be refitted—and put them on. Then she took a bright orange ice scraper from the same door panel. And then she threw her head back, curled her lip, transformed herself into a six-year-old Elvis, and began singing passionately into the ice scraper microphone: “You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog / Cryin’ all the time!” She rocked out until her big sister, still crying, also began to laugh. And once Hannah had laughed good and hard through her tears, Caroline concluded with a drawly “Thankyah, thankyah vury mush.” Hannah had comforted Caroline out in the cold, and now her little sister was returning the favor in her own inimitable way. I still consider Caroline’s cover of “Hound Dog,” performed in my truck that night, to be one of the greatest acts of resistance and resilience imaginable. Although I did not even witness it, this is my most poig
nant memory from the night of the fire. It plays over and over in my mind, especially in times of stress. I have kept the broken sunglasses and orange ice scraper microphone to remind me of that moment, of its spontaneous, albeit transitory, triumph over circumstances beyond our control.

  After another hour or hour and a half of waiting, a second sheriff’s deputy rolled up. Eryn was able to flag the officer down and ask him to radio up to the site for information. He did so and reported that I was safe. In that moment Eryn cried for the first time that night. Soon afterward my mom and dad arrived. When Hannah asked why her grandparents were driving out here in the middle of the night, Eryn replied simply that “G and G always come when we need them.” We later learned that a neighbor who picked up news of the incident on her police scanner had recognized our address and called my parents, who rushed out from town as quickly as they could.

  “I see you girls will do anything to get a slumber party out of me,” said my mother, coolly normalizing the situation for the girls. “Let’s the four of us go back to town and have hot chocolate,” she suggested.

  “Great idea,” added my father, with his signature calm. “You girls can sleep at our place while Grandpa goes up to check on things. I’ll give your dad a lift to town.”

  It would be another three hours before the firefighters were satisfied that the fire they had chased through the bones of our house was fully extinguished. Thanks to their expertise and efforts, our home was saved. I used my father’s phone to call Eryn, update her briefly, and tell her that we hoped to be back in town by daybreak. No, I hadn’t been able to locate Lucy the cat, but I had found the puppy, Beau, far out in the desert and had put both dogs safely in the garage for what little remained of the night. I asked if there was anything she needed from the house.

  “My phone and my glasses, if you can find them,” Eryn replied. “That’s not important,” she added, “but please be sure to get the girls’ valentines off the kitchen counter. They really want to give them out at school tomorrow.”

  The next morning, after dropping Hannah and Caroline off at school with their valentines and having discreet conversations with their teachers about what had happened, Eryn and I drove with my folks back out to the house to meet the insurance agent and fire inspector. By the time we arrived, the part of the scribble den floor that had not burned away had already been removed. There were large chainsawed holes in walls and ceilings throughout the upstairs and plenty of visible water damage, but the place didn’t look as bad as I had feared it might. We even found Lucy the cat hiding behind the headboard of our bed, where she had weathered the fire’s storm. Looking down through the missing floor of the scribble den to the room below felt odd, but all things considered, I found myself thinking that we might come out of this OK.

  “This doesn’t look so terrible,” Eryn said to the insurance agent, hopefully. “What do you think?”

  The woman hesitated, choosing her words carefully. “Look, I can see that you guys are coping. I think that’s great, really. But at some point this whole thing is going to hit you. I just don’t want you to be surprised.”

  As Eryn continued the conversation with the agent, I gained a better appreciation for what “this whole thing” would mean. Because of extensive smoke damage, every piece of electronics in the house—including the wristwatch I had worn while fighting the fire—would have to be thrown out. Any furniture not made of solid wood or tile would also have to go. Every inch of carpet would have to be replaced throughout the house, and the wood floors, which were water damaged, would have to be sanded and refinished. Every wall and ceiling would need to be scrubbed and repainted. Every piece of clothing and bedding would have to be professionally cleaned. Every single book would need to be hand wiped to remove fine ash and then treated in some kind of ozone chamber to remove the smell of smoke. Water damage had destroyed many of my papers and manuscripts. The items that didn’t have to be either discarded or professionally cleaned, which were few, would be hauled away to storage during the many months it would take to complete reconstruction. As for reconstruction itself, most of the stone hearth wall would have to come down, as would the walls in the study and the room beneath it, neither of which would be safe to enter during reconstruction. The entire wood stove system would have to be replaced and substantial rewiring done in several rooms. The only room in the house that had escaped significant water and smoke damage was Hannah and Caroline’s bedroom.

  Before I could process this information, it was time for a debriefing with the fire inspector. Eryn and my mom continued talking with the agent while my dad and I went upstairs so the inspector could walk us through his findings.

  “Your fire started here, under the floor,” he said, pointing to a hypothetical spot in the immense hole that now gaped where floor struts had once run. “Then it spread laterally, along the joists. This was a true sill-to-sill burn,” he added, showing us the charred ends of timbers adjacent to both the interior and exterior walls of the room. “The ignition source was associated with the wood stove system.”

  “A chimney fire?” my dad asked.

  “Absolutely not. This is one of the safest stack and chase installations I’ve seen. And look at the condition of that pipe. No overheating there. The fire was caused by the wood stove system and started under the floor. Somewhere in the firebox or joint or pipe, there must have been a leak that released a small amount of heat that rose and gathered under the floor.”

  “Yeah, but I wasn’t burning the stove hot last night. I’ve had it hotter hundreds of times. Besides, how could a little hot air start a fire?” I asked.

  “It’s more a matter of time than heat,” he answered. “You burn this stove every night for four or five months a year for eight or ten years. Even if we’re talking a pinhole, over time the timbers get so dried out that their combustion point is lowered. This fire wasn’t caused by overburn in the stove. Just a straw-that-broke-the-camel’s-back situation.”

  “What about the leak, this pinhole? Can you tell where it was or what caused it?” I asked.

  “Nope, we’ll never know. That’s what I’m putting in my report. That we’ll never know.”

  “Never know?” I asked in mild frustration.

  “Listen,” he said, with a hint of sternness in his voice, “I’m a forensic fire specialist, and I’ve been doing this for a lot of years. If there was a way to know I’d know. It was just bad luck.”

  “So if nothing could have been done to keep this from happening, it could happen again?” I asked.

  “That’s right, but this sort of fire is very rare. It’s a million-to-one chance,” replied the inspector.

  “It was a million-to-one chance this time too, right?” I asked.

  “That’s right,” the inspector replied. Then he hesitated for a moment before looking directly at me. “I hear you stayed on the fireground.”

  “Yeah. Me and a couple of dinky extinguishers and a bucket. Doubt it did any good.”

  “You see that,” he said, pointing to a massive post that had charring within a foot of it. “What does that hold up?”

  “Everything,” said my father.

  “Right, everything,” repeated the man. “The entire structure of both roofs. That post burns, the whole place comes down. You got more water on this than you might think. Clear signs that you cooled and slowed it. It didn’t hurt that you’ve got so much blown-in insulation in this floor—that helped slow it too. But no question that what you did here saved the house.”

  A few minutes later I walked outside with the inspector, shook his hand, and thanked him for his time. Before he climbed into his truck I wanted to say one more thing.

  “It’s bothering me that this was just some kind of bad luck that I can’t do anything to control. I mean, if it happened before, it could happen again, or something like it.” I paused, searching for words. “I’ve got kids.”

  “Yeah,” he said, in a tone of genuine sympathy. “I know.” Then he climbed into
his truck and pulled its door shut. He looked at me through the partially opened window, as if it was he who now had something to say but wasn’t sure he wanted to say it.

  “Look,” he continued. “I said that you saved your place. You did. But you shouldn’t have. You know how often a civilian is killed in a house fire in this country? I do, because I’ve seen it. Every two hours and forty-two minutes. That’s 24-7, 365, no time off for holidays.” Then he started his truck and drove away.

  The experience of a traumatic event can result in a variety of stress-induced symptoms, among which are memory loss, flashbacks, and increased worry about the safety of loved ones. But the most fascinating in a long list of stress effects from trauma is fragmentation, which is produced by the inability to tell the story of a distressing event. This incapacity to narrate the experience may be caused by any number of factors, including a desire to avoid painful recollections, an inability to discern meaning in the event, a concern about judgment from others, or an uncertainty about how to represent oneself in the retelling. But in our inability to tell a story—in our fear that we may get the story wrong, or that we might misinterpret its significance, or that its telling will cause us to reexperience a painful event—we risk allowing the story to tell us.

  Of course my retelling of what Eryn and the girls went through while I was fighting the fire is a narrative reconstruction. After all, I wasn’t with them. But I must explain that the story of what I experienced while fighting the fire is also a reconstruction, one that has been halting and uncertain and that remains unfinished.