Columns
No smoke without fire
By Sheila Osburn
18, Jun 2002 - 15:27

A Life altering experience! I am writing to you as if I was sitting in front of a campfire. But I am not - I am sitting in my house that has filled with the ever present smoke from the Hayman wildfire in Colorado. For a fleeting moment the campfire smell brings memories of past camping trips, but only for a second. Reality comes in and realizing where this smoke is coming from. I feel sick from this smoke, my kids do as well. One of our dogs too keeps pacing, she's smart enough to know something is wrong. Part Border Collie and part Belgian Shepherd, very smart, Bonnie is her name and yesterday she couldn’t settle down. The smoke took a toll on her breathing — she will be fine — but was just as uncomfortable as we were. Our Yellow Lab seemed to do fine on the other hand.



Yesterday, the winds in Colorado shifted very fast and came from the north. My husband was working on the ambulance at the time and called home and said get ready, a big yellow cloud is coming our way. We are not in danger from the fire where we live, but the smoke! Shortly after that phone call, a yellow thick haze moved into our city of Colorado Springs, ash was falling, the air was thick in our home from open windows and the air was thick outside. For me this was an amazing experience. I was inside our home, my eyes were burning, my throat hurt, our daughter was coughing. I don’t know if I am able to articulate the words, at that moment I looked outside and realized that we had no place to go. Obviously we could be somewhere that was closed up with air conditioning but it was the realization of looking outside and realizing that outside is not any better. We have many friends that live in a new area that is being evacuated they may lose their homes.

In the grand scheme of things this is not that bad, places all around the world have horrific disasters with a huge loss of life. Many of us were doing okay through this. But now to realize one person, a US Forest Ranger no doubt, set a letter on fire and started this enormous fire — I am angry, I don’t want to smell this smell anymore, I don’t want my throat to hurt, I don’t want my eyes to burn, both my daughter and I have asthma, not a good combination for conditions like this.

Where am I going with this? I have never been through anything like this on the local level, feeling so out of control on the one hand and at the mercy of this huge wildfire, but yet at the same time going on with life. I am writing this because it is a very interesting experience for me. This all is so mild in comparison with other disasters; I don’t want to minimize huge disasters. I guess what is different about this is that it is ongoing — it hasn’t stopped yet and our summer has just begun, everything is so dry everywhere. Yesterday when the cloud, haze crept in, you could visibly see it moving in, specks of ash falling and I kept telling myself "I can do this, I can do this”, and I did. On the bright side it is not often you get to take your entire home camping with you, so with this ever-present campfire smell then I suppose we can just pretend we are camping. As I told a friend when I am really old, I will get to say “I remember the wildfire of 02” This most definitely has been a character builder for me.

Our daughter is due to leave to Washington D.C. this week I wonder if when she opens her suitcase her clothes will smell like she has been camping. Maybe she can tell people we are true mountain people and live in tents around a campfire. Life goes on!

Fires ripe for dramatic increase



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