Fire!

Monday while shopping in town, everyone started yelling,
"Get out! Get out!" I stabilized my stance and thought, I don't feel any shaking... What else is there besides earthquakes around here? When I got outside there was mayhem in the streets. People were yelling, "Fire! Fire!"

As I crossed the street, I saw what they were on about. The entire block was on fire. Smoke was billowing high in the sky with flames shooting up into the smoke, high above where any buildings were. It was an awesome and terrifying sight.

It was that feeling you get when you watch the power of nature--that feeling I had when I watched Hurricane Charley uproot a massive oak tree behind my friend's house.
As I watched, I cried, wondering what it must have been like to be an eyewitness of the twin towers going down in NY. What I saw reminded me of pictures I had seen, even though this was miniscule by comparison.

I ran to the car, grabbed my camera, turned it on, and saw these awful little words on the screen: No memory card. I was so mad, but what could I do? I stood by with the heat on my face, watching as the island's one firetruck, with men in t-shirts emptied the contents of the truck in a few minutes. It was like using a syringe to put out a bonfire. Apparently this fire was not so big for the history of this town. An electrical fire in the midst of a bunch of matchbox buildings is like setting a bomb off.

Since the whole town shut down, I went back the next day to finish my shopping. The streets were crowded with people and tonka trucks. It had rained over night and almost 24 hours had gone by, but there was still smoke rising from the metal piles and even some little fires holding on for those who had missed the fireworks from the day before.


Families and store owners were sorting through the rubble, pulling out skeletons of yesterday--sewing machines, a bicycle, a kid tugging at a generator... Entire businesses were lost. Families have literally lost everything they owned.

Fortunately no one was physically hurt in the disaster, but how do you pick up and move on from something like that?













When I was in elementary school, we learned a little song that was sung in a round. It keeps going round and round in my head:

Scotland's burning
Scotland's burning
Look out, look out!
Fire! Fire! Fire! Fire!
Pour on water!
Pour on water!

Pray for rain, pray for rain is more like it.