a quiet reckoning with the ashes

I've come to think of Colorado Springs as my hometown for a lot of reasons.  Most of my friends live here; it was my first home after Christopher and I were married; 4/6 of my children were born here; it was where I first fell in love with living in a city. 

When we lived within the city proper, I used to wake one of our children at random at about 4 in the morning during the summer, and we would set off, bleary-eyed into the urban wild with our walking sticks and a flashlight, to discover our neighborhoods before the sun came up. We covered miles of territory, my kids and I, and talked through anything and everything. We felt safe inside the quiet bustling of a city about to awaken and so charged with energy. It was almost magical, and it was everything I ever wanted out of living in a city.

A little over a week ago, my precious city became ravaged at the edges by the worst wildfire in our state's history.  We all watched helplessly as the fire seemed to tumble down the mountainside like a hideous lava flow, toward the homes of friends, and strangers, and the very heart of our community. With sick tears draining fast from terrified hearts, we snapped hundreds of pictures--the paparazzi of the damned, unable to turn away. Thousands of us drove aimlessly but furiously around town, driving ourselves deep into the choking smoke, desperate for any scrap of information or a better vantage point. The air was a thick stew of charred forest, until an altogether different smell began to swirl ominously through town: the acrimonious bitter stench of burning home. Someone on the radio said you'd never forget the smell of a burning house, and I wondered what he meant until Tuesday evening, when that inescapable, thick-as-tar smell permeated everything for miles and shrouded the sun. Despite the awful burning and the thickness we all felt in our chests, we stayed and stayed and stayed, watching from our perches all over town as house after house surrendered to the killing flame and was no more. It was our own little apocolypse right on the edge of town, more fascinating and frightening than anything many of us had ever seen or known.

The rapidly passing days have carried the fire away from our doorsteps, and the valiant efforts of scores upon scores of courageous firefighters is only now truly coming to light, as images surface of thousands of homes spared from the encroaching inferno. We drove over to the scarred area of town last evening, and we clearly were not the only ones who couldn't keep themselves away from a closer knowledge of the terror that was. There was an eerie juxtaposition of residents, trying to pull their lives back together and act normal again, coupled with the almost reverential caravan of people on a nearly holy pilgrimage to the heart of the disaster. We drove down a few streets where the homes were untouched, and then turned down a side street where every house looked just fine until the third one on the right, nestled between two unscathed houses, and razed to the ground. The feeling that overcame me was not unlike seeing my dead grandfather in his casket at the funeral home when I was nine years old; I had known it was coming, but the shock, sadness, and abject awkwardness were unavoidable and overwhelming. Tears welled up again from that place in the heart that holds shame, and fear, and sorrow, and I couldn't resist the  grief for these distant neighbors of mine, now bereft of so much. 

As we drove on, we'd catch a view here and there of blackened hillsides, fences, grass, and the occasional house, and it was staggering to think that there were literally hundreds of destroyed homes up in the hills that we couldn't see, that we'd been breathing in for days whenever we walked outside. The smell lingered heavy, even as the cooling rains began to calm the air. There was an odd peace, I suppose--a deferential quiet on that whole side of town, like the ground itself was in mourning and was swallowing up all the sound. It felt wrong and unholy to even be there in the middle of what was happening, but we felt so drawn to pay our respects to the dead grass and the departed trees and the bodies of the homes scattered like fallen soldiers on the hills. There weren't any words we could have offered, even if we could have found them, and so we just stared, or didn't stare, whichever seemed more to honor the fallen world over on that side of town. 

After our solemn procession through partly-ravaged streets, we drove back to our own untouched neighborhood in the forest, grateful for the cooler, cleaner, sweeter-smelling air of night, but left with an indelible sense of the scale of the tragedy that none of us ever truly thought could happen. We felt so sharply the conviction that we would rebuild our community, we would begin to repair the tattered threads of the indomitable spirit that defines us, but that was tested and torn during the past unbelievable week. Mostly, we left with a deep sense that the fire did something amazing: it burned into the very soul of our city, and left  a communal solidarity etched into us forever.    --Teri.