| Second Week |
[Nov. 16th, 2018|10:36 pm]
rejectomorph
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There have been times in my life when nightfall has depressed me, but that hasn't happened for decades, until now. The disarray contributes, but perhaps the filthy air is a bigger factor. It is not only unpleasant to breathe and to see, but toxic. It is now mostly smoke from vegetation now, but I think I might be having aftereffects from the toxic smoke the first day, when the town and the contents of its buildings was burning, not to mention a considerable number of cars. All that stuff people keep in their garages and garden sheds, all the chemicals used in construction, all the plastic— rushing on foot to reach the evacuation center after being forced to abandon our cars we must have inhaled vast quantities of toxins.
The State's fire agency has posted an interactive map showing buildings destroyed in town. I have watched every day waiting for them to reach my street. Today the came very close, showing the south side of the road at the end of my block, but my street remains one of the few places not yet surveyed. I know the odds that the house has survived are vanishingly small, but until I get confirmation that it is really gone I just can't seem to move on. I'm stuck in the denial and bargaining phase, and I'm anxious to get beyond it. What I'm really anxious to do is quit feeling so dazed, but that's likely to take a very long time. |
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| Comments: |
I've been watching that map, and it seems like they just kind of stopped surveying one street over.
I imagine that part of what you are experiencing has to do with the loss of your routine, and everything that goes along with that. I kind of wonder if that might be a bigger loss than all the physical stuff that burned.
I hope you are able to find out about your house soon, so you can know, and be able to start figuring out what's next.
This afternoon they posted photos from the east side of Pentz Road, and from a place on Rock House Lane which was at the head of the alley behind my house. I see no surviving structures in the background of any of those photos, so it looks really bad. I was hoping at least one or two houses on the block would survive, even if mine didn't, so there'd have been a place for any of my cats who got out of the house would have an unburned place to take refuge. A few buildings of a charter school a few hundred feet up Pentz from my house survived, but I don't know if the ats would have gone that way.
Nobody has been able to take me to either of the main places they are taking rescued small animals (Chico airport and Oroville old hospital) and they aren't posting anything online, so I still don't know if any of my cats were lucky enough to get out.
Thoughts of things in my house that were destroyed come to mind frequently (photos, books, records, old notebooks with journals I kept decades ago, etc.), but mostly I've just been thinking about those cats. I'm heartbroken about them and horrified at the thought of what they might have gone through.
Years ago, kids broke into my partner, Nightsky's, home when he was up in Alaska and burned it to the ground.
He still grieves his lost boy scout stuff, family pictures and his mother's hutch and rug. Well, there is lots more. I don't know what he would have done if he lost The Little Dog, too.
Be kind to yourself. Nightsky and I would be heartbroken in your situation and struggling just like you are.
The fog will clear and you will start making decisions. Let it come in it's own time.
Oh, and see a doctor! | |
