Lessons From an Evacuation – or – The Old Dog Didn’t Learn a New Trick – or Did He?

March 2009 –  Terrie is on a short trip with some close girl-friends.  I am packing to get ready to leave for Alaska – meetings at Alaska Christian College.  The phone rings – yes, we still had a land line.  I check the caller id (this was a little different than today’s call information.) There was no address book to connect the number to and you weren’t warned if it was a spam call. You simply saw the number the call was coming from. I didn’t recognize the number so I ignored it and went on with my packing.  About 5 minutes later the phone rings again, same number.  I decide to answer it.  Trying to be the polite man my mother raised, I answer the phone, “this is Doug, may I help you?”  For a couple of seconds nothing, then I hear, “this is an emergency call from the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department.  Your area is being evacuated due to a wildfire burning nearby.”  Wait, what?  Evacuation?  Wildfire?  Now what do I do?  We didn’t have a plan.  Honestly we had never thought about it.  I had already packed a suitcase for the Alaska trip so clothes weren’t a problem although what you pack for Alaska in March is different from what you might want to wear in Colorado in the early spring.  My next thought was, grab the computer.  I still had an old desk top model which had a few wires to disconnect.  Nothing like just grabbing a laptop or iPad and throwing it in a bag.  There was the CPU, (for you youngins a CPU contained the mechanical hard drive and guts of the computer) an independent monitor that was about the size and weight of a microwave oven, and disks – for Pete’s sake don’t forget the backup disks!  I then thought about photos.  We had boxes and boxes of photos and video tape, spread throughout different rooms.  Today they are all digitized on your laptop, not 15 years ago. The pile started growing and I was stuffing it all into the back of Terrie’s SUV.  My next thought was her jewelry.  Oh man, where is all of it and what all should I take?  Feeling like a common TV burglar I grabbed a pillow case and started cleaning out her drawers and jewelry box.  My mind was racing.  What else?  What else?  Get the dog – oops we don’t have a dog.  Collectibles?  Terrie throws out anything that doesn’t move for two weeks so we don’t collect anything. Any of Terrie’s clothes?  Well, she replaces everything every few months anyway so why bother?  She will probably be happy if she gets to buy a completely new wardrobe.  By this time the back of the SUV was pretty well stuffed anyway so it was time to get out of there.  So now the question was, “where am I going to take the car?”  I couldn’t risk leaving it at the airport, loaded with all our belongings.  Fortunately, our sons were living in a condominium building in downtown Denver that had secure underground parking.  One of them had an extra parking spot and old Dad had a fob to get into the garage.  All I had to do was figure out how I was going to get to the airport from downtown.  Uber had not been invented yet but there was Yellow Cab so that was the plan.  Terrie was lucky.  She and her friends were somewhere in the Arizona desert having a good time, oblivious to what was going on a thousand miles away in Colorado while I was living out a nightmare.  The nightmare wasn’t just about the approaching fire.  The nightmare was that despite knowing we live in an area that could be impacted by a forest fire we had failed to prepare.  I boarded that flight to Anchorage not knowing if we would come home to a pile of ashes or what the situation would be.  Thankfully, when I got home four days later the house was still standing – the fire never even got close to us.  The good Lord had protected us and our neighbors despite my failure to prepare.

Fast forward 15 years.  It’s 1:00 AM on a Wednesday.  We were fast asleep and the doorbell rings – our doorbell is really loud so it woke me up immediately.  More annoyed than anything else I pulled up the front door camera on my phone (didn’t have that in 2009) and didn’t see anyone on the front porch so I quickly went back to sleep.  Sometime later, I’m not sure how long it was, the doorbell rings again.  At this point I am convinced it is kids pranking us and I am mad they have woke me up again (don’t confuse it with today’s connotation of “woke.). I peek out the bedroom door into the foyer and see a flash light shining through the sidelight next to the door.  My first thought is, “someone is going to rob us.”  They have been ringing the doorbell to make sure no one is home.  I keep a 9mm pistol nearby and was tempted to grab it when common sense got the best of me and I decided to go to the door. Rounding the corner into the foyer I could see the Deputy’s badge through the window.  I was groggy from sleep and not very coherent when I opened the door.  The first thing I noticed was the acrid smell of wood smoke.  Then I heard the Deputy say, “Jefferson County Sheriff.  Your area is being evacuated.   We want you out in 15 minutes! 15 minutes? I might not have reacted so quickly had I not smelled that smoke. That was a real wakeup call – the fire must be close.

We were experiencing an unusually dry summer which followed a pretty damp spring. The fire danger had been relatively low until the previous couple of weeks when the heat and dry conditions dramatically elevated the risk of fire. We have quite a bit of meadow surrounding our home and the hot dry conditions had turned the mowed portion of the tall grass into a crispy, golden carpet. The landscaped portion of the yard, closest to the house, was approaching the same appearance as the meadow. It had been hot enough that no amount of watering was going to keep the turf grass green. Still, I never really gave it much thought. Besides, forest fires are something that happen further up in the mountains, not in our comfy suburban area.

I quickly woke up Terrie, told her to get out of bed and put on some clothes – we were being evacuated. We looked at each other with some fear and some confusion and she said “what are we going to do?” I told her to grab her phone and iPad, her car keys and to get the heck out of there. With the smell of that smoke still fresh there was no way I was going to let her try to start putting together some things to take with her. I wanted her out of there and safe. I ran into my study, grabbed my laptop and computer bag and was on the way to the garage without thinking about much else. When I opened the garage door I could see the flames on the ridge above us. This was no drill, this was the real thing. I paused just long enough to see a tree “crown” – the fire jumping from an adjacent tree and exploding through the top of the next victim. Terrie was in her car, following me out of the driveway. There were several Sheriff’s Department vehicles positioned throughout the neighborhood as they continued their door-to-door evacuation efforts. On the way out I stopped near one of them and asked if there was an evacuation center set up – he told me where to go and we were on our way down the hill and out of the canyon.

We arrived at the evacuation center around 2:00 AM and were one of the first to check in. I was amazed at how quickly the center had been activated and was ready to help the residents of the nearly 600 homes that could be impacted by the fire. Obviously, the first responders were much better prepared than we were. All we had was the clothes we had put on, our electronic devices and our cars. No tooth brush, none of our medications, no change of clothes, no place to stay, no, no, no, no plan! It was a very uncomfortable, empty feeling. Terrie had a peace about her that told me she was totally relying on God to lead us through this little challenge to our normally quiet, safe life.

After a little discussion on what to do next we decided to find a hotel room for the rest of the night. Sleep might help clear the cobwebs of confusion resulting from the chaos of the last couple of hours so around 3:00 AM we found a room and tried to settle down and get some rest. From the parking lot of the hotel we had a clear view of the fire and although we were several miles away we could see tree after tree explode like enormous sparklers on the 4th of July. The fire that had been discovered by a Sheriffs Deputy on a normal patrol through the canyon had spread from 10 feet by 10 feet to close to 100 acres and “The Quarry Fire” was growing by the minute. There was no way to sleep – only tossing and turning as thoughts of returning to a charred neighborhood kept bubbling up despite my constant prayers to God for protection.

Not being able to sleep we were up and out of bed early, hungry, needing a tooth brush, a cup of coffee and some news about the fire. The events of the previous few hours seemed surreal, other worldly. We kept reminding each other we were safe and prayed for the safety of our neighbors, the fire fighters and our families.

I’m not going to go through all the details of the ensuing few days – we have all heard the experiences of other fire victims, survivors of tornadoes, people who have experienced all sorts of disasters. So many of those events end in tragedy and enormous loss. We were blessed – the little wind that was present around the fire had turned northwest, blowing the fire further up into the uninhabited part of the canyon and away from the majority of homes. We were evacuated for 5 days while the amazing fire fighters slowly gained control of the fire. When we were allowed to return home we were expecting to have some smoke damage, maybe some ash, who knew what else. There was none of that. There were signs throughout the neighborhood honoring the firefighters and the Sheriff’s Department. Spray painted on sheets of plywood they said things like, “We are here because you were here,” “Thank you Firefighters.” We have all seen those things on TV before but to experience it first-hand brings a crushing reality to the devastation many others have experienced.

So what are the lessons from all of this? The obvious is I didn’t learn my lesson the first time we were evacuated. Being 15 years older and supposedly wiser, this old dog had not learned a new trick. Despite that first warning I was not prepared. I had been complacent and because of it I had failed at my God assigned duty to provide for my wife. Yes, looking back on it now, we experienced a little inconvenience, being forced out of the comfort and protection of our home for five days. Big deal! But the realization that I had failed Terrie hurt. Lesson number 2 – I pray we never forget the lesson we learned from this ordeal about friendship. The numbers of people who reached out to us when they learned about the fire was amazing. Close friends, acquaintances living near-by, people we have known only a short time, friends from our past that we haven’t heard from in years. Virtually all of them came with offers for housing, concern for our wellbeing and assistance of all sorts. It was humbling, comforting, overwhelming and emotional. There is truly no way to thank them and explain to them what their expressions of support and love meant to us. The final lesson? We are OK. Not just me and Terrie. When I say “we”, I mean all of us. When we experience challenges like what we just went through there is a clear intersection of faith and human nature. It is as if the Holy Spirit works overtime to activate our spirit of concern for our fellow humans. Gone are our differences and in their place is heartfelt kindness that can only be an extension of the love our God has for all of us.

So yes, in the end, this old dog has learned a new trick! It’s not really a new trick but a lesson learned. A lesson I pray will stay with me, shape decisions I make and impact my relationships and love for my friends and others for the rest of my life.