We went through our files this morning, winnowing our records down to those we absolutely needed. For financials, everything older than 1999 went into the discard pile. Bank statements, canceled checks, credit card bills, ATM receipts piled up. Maintenance records for vehicles now junked, vet bills for pets long gone, offers of credit sent as inserts in bank statements, long-distance phone bills, reams of supporting documentation for the life Becky and I led in the 1990s. I could write a novel from those ledgers, but instead we discarded it all.
We could not simply recycle the paper. All that sensitive information! And at three sheets per cycle, our little shredder would have taken all day.
I burned them. I crumpled a few of my bank statements and lit them, put a sheaf of canceled checks above them in the barbecue grill. Neat paper does not burn quickly. There is no oxygen between tight-pressed leaves and so the flame peels the paper away sheet by slow sheet, curling and singeing each in turn, the flame carefully reading each page. Every few minutes I added more documents. Every few minutes I stirred the ashes, found blocks of neat, unburned paper beneath. Given air, the heated paper burst into orange flame, searing the hair on my arms. Paper burns brown and then black, and then it will stop burning, the thinnest possible sheets of charcoal, unless more heat and oxygen burn it further to ash. A layer of ash formed at the surface of the pile, and I stirred and the black paper beneath would turn sudden gray as though shocked. This was necessary. Though the charred paper was black before the final burn, the ink had not yet burned away, and in the right light those precious secret numbers were as plain as they had been before I struck the match, the last breath of memory and then ash.
In the month in which the oldest of those bank statements reached our mailbox, Oakland burned. Three weeks from now, October 20, will be the 15th anniversary of the fire. We adopted Zeke soon after, visiting the animal shelter looking vainly for a friend’s cat that had perished in the fire. Twenty five people died in that fire, and more than 2,800 homes destroyed, and complicating matters for the firefighting and cleanup crews was the fact that homes are more than just wood and steel and glass. Homes are full of material that is toxic when burned, garden chemicals and plastic pipes and paints, vinyl and lead and organics. A cherished painting ablaze could sicken those who breathe its fumes. Toys thoughtfully put aside drip fixatives and pigments into the groundwater as they melt. The essences of the victims’ property, thought carefully contained in their private homes, spread throughout the neighborhood.
One such essence spread farther than most.
The fire created a firestorm, hellishly hot air rising, the partial vacuum thus created filled by air blowing in to the fire, fanning it. Embers were cast for miles. Three miles from the closest edge of the firestorm, I spent the evening hosing down embers the size of chickpeas that fell on our wooden back steps. What wind could blow a cubic centimeter of wood so far into the air that it landed three miles away?
In the center of a firestorm, combustion has depleted the oxygen in the air. People in a firestorm risk suffocation as much as immolation. Let loose a sheet of paper in the storm and it might burn instantly to the charcoal stage and then no further.
And there were sheets of paper in that fire, millions of them. More than 2,800 households! How many stacked newspapers, phone bills, how many love letters and old photos and stacks of unfinished homework, how many libraries painstakingly assembled or bought a box at a time in neighbors’ front yards? It burned, all of it, in sheaves and manila folders and hanging folders, bound in card stock and bound in leather it burned. Words, still gleaming in black ink on charcoal, in English and Latin and Chinese and Arabic and Spanish, words rose into the sky and then thought better of ascending, fluttered down in shards over my neighborhood.
They landed for days. Cookbooks and potboilers, textbooks and journals and coffee-table albums came down out of the sky around me as I walked, whole pages on rare occasion but more usually in fragments, memory and care and thought fossilized in charcoal. I bent to pick up pages and they turned to dust. The mere act of reading them made them shiver, hurled miles from their home shelves and now crumbling at a stray breath, no matter how carefully I bent on hand and knee to read the black on black. Each crumbled, and the rains a few weeks later carried their ashes out to sea.
i was really worried about the fire coming again, a couple weeks ago. friends lost their houses, and others were in danger. the heat and winds brought up a visceral fear, now dampened by the fog and coolness.
one good friend lost everything—her books, letters, family photos. her husband lost everything—the designer house, his furniture, a car. they spent 3 years rebuilding, using the original plans, and then split. he wanted the house to be a shrine; she didn’t want their little boy to be in trouble for leaving fingerprints in the kitchen.
my friend gave me a gift close to 20 years ago—a ukranian easter egg she had made using wax and dyes. she lost the tools in the fire, as well as all the eggs she made and kept, and i don’t think she has taken the craft up again. she refused my offer to return the gift some years back, but perhaps this time she will accept.
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From a Londoner
Some years ago a tornado struck St. Peter, Minnesota. Many houses went up in splinters. A day or two later, while out running, I found a canceled check with a St Peter address. St. Peter is more than 60 miles from my house.
Nice post. My father lost his home in that fire, which got me thinking about fire in my part of the world, SoCal, and the possibility that climate change could make things worse. For more, check out:
http://achangeinthewind.typepad.com/achangeinthewind/2006/09/fire_in_souther.html