Like a House A’Fire
Larkin roused me from sleep a few minutes ago, demanding that I get up because the “house across the way” was on fire. She had already called 911. In a daze, I went to an east window and didn’t see anything, then went to another room and looked to the north. I flung open the window and just stared. Less than a hundred yards away, eating at a fir tree, was an incredible tower of blackly orange flame against the night, with the occasional explosion.
We’ve been here only three months and don’t know who lives there. Lived there, certainly noone lives there now. We joined a few neighbors in less than complete dress on the cold and misty street. By the time any of us were out there, it was beyond anything that any of us could do, we’d have to wait for the firetrucks. But I don’t have much hope that much of anything was saved, when I first saw it there was clearly no way to save the building, and not much chance of saving anyone or anything left inside.
One of the neighbors said it was a shop or a barn, and that the house next door was on fire too. The angry tower of flame I first saw, and the taste of the smoke that filled the street outside, suggested oil and tires, but I have no real idea. I just know that there was nothing a regular homeowner could have done. No garden hose was going to slow this down. Incredible power was at work as we huddled on the edge of the activity, unable to see or change what was happening, stunned. Awful, staring through the darkness into the gates of hell.
Maybe a quarter hour later, the flames are gone, the billows rising from the site are the white of steam. The night is lit by halogen floods and the flashing red lights from the firetrucks that ring the block. Those who know what to do in the face of such conflagration are mopping things up.
If I Were King, I would have been just as powerless.