We'd been asleep several minutes when I heard sirens, a few minutes after midnight. I opened my eyes and wondered why the white curtains in our bedroom window were glowing salmon. I looked out the window, and saw the fire engine coming down the street, and in the street, hoses.
"What is it?" Din asked. I told him, I couldn't see, and walked to the next room, whose window faces east, and pulled back the curtains.
"Oh my god," I said, staring literally into a wall of flames, maybe 40 feet away, flames 90 feet wide and shooting more than 100 feet high, and swirling. "Oh my god..."
"Holy shit," said Din, running for his sweatpants. I pulled a sweatshirt over my nightgown and we opened the front door. There were already 50 people on the street, looking toward the corner, where the church was on fire, and I mean, on fire. (Video here.) There were at least five fire engines, and more coming, to try to get a handle on the flames, which were immense and violent and looked unconquerable. And they were really, really near our house.
"We gotta get the hose on," said Din. He pulled it into the backyard, I turned it on, and then went to wake up Tafv. I showed her what was going on...
"Oh my god," she said, coming outside with me.
"Look up," said Din. We did, and saw sparks and embers swirling 300 feet in the air, and raining down, like the digitized finale of some movie, except they were real, big hunks of orange ember falling in our yard and on the roof and in my hair.
"Mama," said Tafv, pointing to the church spire, fully on fire now, an arrow of flame shooting toward the heavens. It was just surreal. The fire did not abate; cars in the street melted and the siding on houses peeled; and after a neighbor told me a grandmother and two grandkids had had to scale their back fence in order to get away, because their front door impassable, and another said she'd heard a "boom" right before it happened, it was 40 minutes later, and the flames had not died down despite the 80-foot cranes throwing arcs of water, I wondered whether I should put our computers and important papers and a change of clothes into my truck; whether our house, four houses down from the blaze, would somehow go.
It didn't. By 1:30, it was mostly smoke and smoke and smoke. At two, we were asleep.
I was up at 6:00. The firefighters were still there, as were the news trucks. I saw the melted cars; the news crews; the jagged brick walls, all that is left of the Morning Star Missionary Baptist Church, an active church where there are funerals several times a week, and weddings, and on Sundays, singing that I can hear while I am still lying in bed.
I asked a firefighter if he knew what had happened. He said, not yet, and then, perhaps because he'd been imperiled for six hours six hours and now needed to talk, he told me about his kids; his property; his frustrations. We spoke about George Bush, and the problems with Iraq, and how the neighborhood we were standing in was gentrifying, but how that was kind of good; there was less drug activity, less street crime.
"I remember in the 70s, when MLK, which was Union back then, was nothing but hookers," he said, something my husband had also told me.
He told me about other epic fires; pointed out the curtains inside a neighbor's window that had curled and singed. I thanked him for being here. He told me, he's been doing it 30 years. His name is Drew, and you can see the heroic work he and his fellow firefighters do for us here.
photo courtesy of KOMOtv
I got some photos this morning, Nancy. Incredible and sad. http://www.flickr.com/photos/vj_pdx/sets/72157594521426218/show/
Posted by: vj | February 06, 2007 at 11:30 AM