(Map of the Black Forest conflagration in which nearly 500 homes were destroyed. Photo Modis on earth image by Google).
I wish I could say it is good to be home, but it is not home, not precisely. The unit had all the lights on, a profligate waste of energy strongly encouraged by my amiable Realtor.
Actually not encouraged. Demanded. “It shows to best advantage that way,” he said, once I had re-charged the phone that had died while I was on the jet and was re-united with the family of man and the National Security Agency.
I had resigned myself to missing a dip in the pool due to the cascade effect of the delayed flight out of Chicago that was to scoop us up in Denver and deposit us all once more at IAD. As it turned out, the Polish lifeguards were throwing themselves an impromptu party, and they gracious allowed me to get a plunge in the crisp water.
It was good not to have to think, and just let the animal joy of the water take me over. There had been plenty of time to think, since the jet was an hour delayed, and the cascade continued through the afternoon and into the dusk.
When eventually we lurched into the air, the Captain had to take it around to get the 737 pointed east, and sitting on the starboard side of the jet, I could see south to the Black Forest area that had been scourged by the fire. I could not see any distinctive plumes of smoke, so I was encouraged that the firefighters had got things pretty well contained.
The smoke from the initial blaze blanketed had Denver on Wednesday, the air acrid as I limped through the jetway and the mountains to the west cloaked in smoke due to prevailing winds.
The smoke-cloak gradually abated through Thursday, with blue skies returning as the winds shifted to out of the SSW, I presume, but even as I drove by heading south on Friday with the fire only 30% contained, the plume was drifting east.
There was almost nothing to see as the Front Range faded behind us over the curve of the earth. I was glad that this crisis seems to have passed.
The psychological effect of the fire is as astonishing as the physical manifestation. “If it bleeds, it leads,” is the old saying about the news, and the emotional factor was real even far from the area under immediate threat. The linkages- people who wanted to rescue horses, pets and livestock- was real and many mobilized to help.
They wanted to provide refuge for large animals being evacuated from the fire area. Last I heard, when I returned the rental Caddie, was that people had been permitted to head back into the area and some dogs and horses were being accounted for. Important tip: spray paint your cell phone number on your horses if you must let them go.
Scary stuff, though the process of fire and regeneration is completely natural and cyclic. Except for the causality of it all. There was rumor of arson as the cause, not something natural like a lightning strike. That would make the two deaths a matter of homicide, and something I thought about grimly as I watched the endless prairie sweep by out the window of the Boeing.
The fear and destruction brought to mind the effects of the firestorms visited on the cities of Japan and the Third Reich.
I recall reading about them in the host of paperbacks about the war that Dad collected and I read voraciously as a kid, and revisited with Mac as he described the process of avoiding the strategic targeting list provided to Curtis LeMay in his mission to bring the Home Islands under the flight boots of the 21st Bomber Command.
As usual, Washington had some idea that strategic targeting would dismantle the Empire’s war machine, but that was not getting the results needed to force capitulation.
(Major General Curtis Lemay, 1945. Photo US Army Air Forces.)
LeMay cooked up “Operation Starvation,” which concentrated on the mass destruction of Japan’s urban areas and the elimination of their ability to import food. “Iron Pants” summed it up this way:
“Killing Japanese didn’t bother me very much at the time….I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal….every soldier thinks something of the moral aspects of what he is doing. But all war is immoral and if you let that bother you, you’re not a good soldier.”
The 21st’s raid on Tokyo of March 9th-10th, 1945, killed perhaps 100,000 men, women and children and also destroyed 16 square miles of the city, including all categories of infrastructure contained therein.
I do not have to infer or interpret anything, since I know what Mac thought because I asked him. It did not bother him overmuch, either.
We eventually got back on the ground in one piece- not quite sure I appreciated the missed-approach by the Captain, which caused us to circled around Fauquier County, and the long cab ride back into town.
I wish I could say it was good to be back, but the place is set to show at its best advantage and I am reluctant to touch anything. Then there was the stuff at the office.
Like rumors of fire, I was forced to confront actual reality once I was back on the ground at Dulles, but decided to put it aside until this morning.
Regrettably, here it is. Ready or not, here we go.
Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com