Jimbo and the Fire

The side of town that I grew up on got hit pretty hard by wildfires in October, 2003. I was in high school at the time. I remember the thick smoke that covered the entire city for a few days and the ash that drifted down like snow. Many people could be seen in public wearing dust masks or bandanas over their mouths and noses. Others roughed it out and spent a few days coughing occasionally or avoided going out doors. The smoke didn’t bother me a terrible lot, being at the time a smoker of cigarettes (a little math reminds me that by this month I’d only been smoking for a short while).

I lived with my parents a little way into the hills, and brushfires in this time of year were common. This particular fire we could watch from our back deck if we looked a mile  to the north, and we could see plumes of smoke rising from another fire to the south. That was as close as those fires got to us.

My younger brother Nate had recently been hired by a friend of his named Jim. Jim was a plumber who lived in a small but densely-populated community a little ways into the mountains. In anticipation of fire season, he had instructed Nate to clear brush from around his home and between his house and his neighbors’ houses. Then, within a week, the wildfires came through and burned nearly every house on street, excepting Jim’s. He credited this to the great job that Nate did clearing the brush.

After the fires, Jim set out to help his neighbors clean up in every way he could. He got an idea, and drove his work truck from lot to lot to turn on the main water lines at the street so the people sifting through the remains of their homes could have water, both to clean and to drink. In order to do this, Jim would cut the line right after the main valve, splice in a reducer, a pressure regulator, an elbow, a couple feet of pipe and then a spigot for the people to connect a garden hose to. This proved to be a great service to the community.

The task was great, though, as many homes had burned (a quick google search tells me that 2,232 houses burned down in this fire). Jim set his two older sons to work up one street, he and his younger boy started up another, and he had recruited Nate, my dad, and I to aid in the effort. The work was humbling; we had a sort of reverence toward the people who’d just lost everything material in their lives, in many cases including the family pets. We would approach a home and make friendly contact with the people there to explain what we were going to do and how it would help them. I was young, and not good with words, so I let my dad do the talking. I remember at least one person tell us to leave.

We did this for a fair part of the morning, then skies darkened and there were reports of a coming storm. The authorities issued a flash flood warning. Though it wasn’t raining yet, people began to panic about mudslides. Most of these neighborhoods were carved into the sides of mountains, most of the vegetation that held the hills together had burned completely off, and most of the exposed earth was covered in two inches of loose soot and ash. If the rains came, anything salvageable in these homes would be buried and lost.

Jim came and pulled us off the plumbing project; now we were going to help the people by giving them sandbags. Someone (the local Home Depot, I think) donated a truckload of sand and dumped it at a park, along with empty sandbags, and Jim put us to work shoveling sand into the bags. This was simple work. One person would hold the bag open, the other would shovel sand into it, then it would be tied off and set into a pile by the road. Jim took his work truck and drove out to put them in place. A few other volunteers came by, perhaps eight of us in all, and we made happy work of it. Someone came along passing out sandwiches.

After shoveling for a couple hours, feeding hundreds of sand bags to Jim to deliver, we were interrupted by some kind of official, who looked at our pile of sandbags beside the road and declared it was enough. I like to remember this guy wearing a suit, though that part is probably false. He thanked us for our work, said that everything was under control, and that we could go home now.

We didn’t stop working, of course, because there was plenty of sand left and Jim would be expecting more sandbags when he came back. The official insisted, in a friendly manner, that our work was done, and still none of us stopped. Jim came back, eventually, and he and his boys hopped out of the work truck and began filling it full of sandbags, as they had done repeatedly for hours. The official walked over to them and said something like, “You guys are welcome to take some sandbags, but you should replace the ones you take.”

I think Jim pointed over at us and said, “Those guys are making more right now.” I don’t think that the official knew that we were friends of Jim, or that we were there because of him.

I remember the official explaining to Jim that we’d met our quota of five hundred sandbags and that we were done working. We knew that no one had counted how many sandbags we’d filled, that we were not stopping any time soon, and that no one had said anything about a quota. Apparently, the official wanted a stockpile of sandbags, ready to use when the rain started, instead of to preemptively place the sandbags in strategic places around the town as Jim was doing.

Jim replied that we needed tens of thousands more sandbags, and that we would work until we ran out of sand. The official didn’t like being disrespected, and began to get pushy. Jim pushed right back. Now, Jim was a large man—stocky and strong—a rough, working man, rather intimidating to strangers, and he was not afraid to get physical. The official was thin and pale, a little older, too. When Jim exhibited some force, he immediately locked himself in his car and called the police.

There was some discussion among the volunteers concerning how to proceed. I remember a stranger saying, “I think that one’s just a bureaucrat and the other guy actually knows what he’s doing.” We kept shoveling and Jim kept loading his truck.

Eventually, a cop showed up. By this time, the official had driven away and Jim was out placing the sandbags. The cop sat in his car and watched us. We would glance over at him occasionally. After a few minutes, he got out, walked over, picked up a shovel, and began filling sandbags with us. This pleased us a great deal, especially when he said nothing to Jim when the latter came back for another load.

But, a little while later, the official came back with a few cops, and they stopped Jim. They asked him a lot of questions, and in the end ordered him to discontinue the sandbag work. When he quit, so did we, though there were hours of daylight left and still a sizeable pile of sand.

We heard that McDonald’s was giving away food in the community center, so we headed up there. They had big boxes filled with cheeseburgers and were handing them out. Someone said that Outback Steakhouse had donated some, too, but it was gone by the time we got there.