Monday, November 24, 2008

Conan & Cerro Grande

I have been lucky in that the last fifteen years or so when I have taught here in the west, Ann Erdmann has been able to come along occasionally. Ann and I have been best friends since the summer of 1957. Her family moved in across the street from my family and the friendship began. Our lives took different turns. She, her husband, and son moved to Cheyenne. My husband, son, and I stayed in Littleton until Mike's profession took us out of Colorado for years. After living in NJ, Utah, a short stint in Colorado again, and then to England, we settled back in Colorado and I started traveling and teaching embroidery. Whenever Ann could, she took off work, left her family in Wyoming, and went with me to exotic locales, like Casper, WY, Littleton, CO, and Los Alamos, NM.

One of the times we were in Los Alamos together, I was teaching a two-day pilot class called Millennium Technology. It was using computers and printers to print images on fabric and then to stitch on them. It was a fun type of class with a lot of bustle and movement. We were lucky to be able to have the class in the offices of a small computer server company. One of the people taking the class and her husband owned Virtual Los Alamos.

Ann and I were staying in Wanda Anderson's house while Wanda and her husband were in Albuquerque looking after their grandkids. I had often stayed with Wanda, so we were well acquainted. While we were there we were to look after her cat, Conan, a big steel- gray neutered tom.

So Ann and I drove to Los Alamos that fine May Friday and tootled up to Wanda's house, watching an ominous-looking smoke cloud in the sky looming over the western sky. The US Forest Service had started a "controlled burn" in the national forest up above Los Alamos a couple of days before. It had been dry and windy, and the burn had gotten a little out of hand. But no one was to worry--the US government was taking care of the situation.

Saturday morning we started the class. We were in the front part of the offices surrounded by computers and computer equipment. The class went well on some levels and not so well on others. Just keeping the equipment running was taking away from my teaching time. On Saturday afternoon after class was let out, Ann and I listened to the news reports--and they were not good. The fire had grown and was spreading, though there was still no danger for Los Alamos. Helicopters and fire bombers were in the area taking their ten of thousands of gallons of water and retardant to the fire. Meanwhile Ann and I took care of Conan, went out to supper with the girls, and had a good night's sleep.

The next morning, Sunday morning, we woke up to the slight smell of smoke in the air. The atmosphere had a bright hazy quality that turned everything a yellowish tint. We turned on the news, but the stations were still saying that Los Alamos was not in danger, that the wind has just shifted the blowing smoke, but we were all going to be just fine. So Ann and I petted Conan, ate some breakfast and went back to class. All that morning all we could talk about was the fire and the smoke that was obscuring half of the sky. At noon, when we went out to lunch, we saw many people standing outside with binoculars and cameras looking west. The planes and helicopters, there seemed to be dozens of them in the sky, continued to drop fire retardant and water on the mountains directly to the west of town. We could see the flames on the crowns of the mountains.

In the afternoon, ash started dropping on the town. We heard it clearly on the metal roof of the building we were in. So far the ash was cool. We continued with the class. Some of the people had good designs that they were stitching on. Ann had an image of a palacio in Venice that she had photographed the year before. She was embellishing that image with colored threads. Very nice. Another woman was working on a scene with a pelican and and a dock, and some others had family pictures. We sat and stitched, smelled the smoke, listened to the planes, and heard the ash fall on the roof.

The class was out at about four-thirty. Several people in the class made a date to meet at 6 to have dinner. Meanwhile we could see higher flames coming down the sides of the mountains definitely traveling east towards us. Aircraft were still rumbling back and forth between the mountains and the airport east of town. It was beginning to get pretty scary. Evacuation plans were starting to be discussed.

When we came out of the restaurant, The Hill Diner, after dinner, the western sky was quite dark with a bloody sun barely glimpsed through the smoke. The air was sometimes choking with the drifting smoke. And alarmingly the noise of the airplanes and helicopters had stopped--it was now too dangerous for them to approach the fires--the winds were whipping along the flame fronts.

Uneasily Ann and I went back to Wanda's house. I was exhausted and the prospect of driving out that evening was not a pleasing one, so we decided to stay as long as we could. Maybe we could drive out in the morning, sticking to our original plans. Besides we had Conan with us. But this was not to be. At seven we got a phone call from a woman I had not met. She said she was a friend of Wanda's and knew we were there at the house. Her husband was head of the one of the evacuation teams and we should leave as soon as we could. Just after the phone call, the TV said that the evacuation of the northeast part of Los Alamos was in progress. That, of course, was where we were. We called Wanda in Albuquerque, ninety miles southeast of Los Alamos. She said that she was on her way back to Los Alamos and we were just to put Conan in a closet, make sure he was comfortable, lock the house, and leave. She would be there in about an hour and a half. So we packed the car--it was now almost dark, called Carole Rinard, our good friend in Los Alamos, to let her know what we were doing, and drove off.

Three thousand people evacuated Los Alamos that night, all from the same area where were were. The lines were long. We had no trouble getting onto Oppenheimer Road, but it took more than half an hour to get down to Trinity Drive where we turn left to leave town. Meanwhile to our right the flames and smoke were an eerie wall and backdrop. Ashes were dropping more steadily than ever.

We finally made the left turn and were heading down Rt. 502, the knife-edge highway--all other routes in (well, the other two) were blocked by the fire. Just as we were getting to the place where there were no buildings on either side of us, there was a pause in the traffic. I had been white-knuckling the steering wheel and my heart rate was high. Just then from the car in front of us, we saw a small flame being thrown out of the window into the underbrush at the side of the road. We gasped and then oddly, we started laughing. It broke the tension. Imagine someone starting a forest fire to the east of Los Alamos the same night--just a careless smoker.

Ann and I drove on down the knife-edge road laughing and carrying on. The flames were whipping at our backs. Smoke was dense in the air. Where the intersection splits off to the north towards Espanola, we were the only car from the thousands on the road to take it that direction. All the rest of the cars headed towards Pojuaque, and on into Santa Fe.

After more adventures trying to find a hotel to stay in Espanola, we wound up at Ohkey Casino and Resort for the night, on the north edge of Espanola. It was pleasant enough. Curiously the desk clerk had heard nothing of the fire or the evacuation of Los Alamos. A strange thing to us. The next morning we got up and headed on north. It was a hazy, sunny, and warm day. The winds were whipping tree tops as we drove on up the Rio Grande towards Taos. Just north of Taos, the weather changed and as we trundled on into Colorado the rains started. We were wet all the way back to Denver.

In the aftermath of the fire, part of Los Alamos was destroyed, The flames came within twelve feet of Wanda's house, obliterating and sterilizing her back yard, but the house held with its tin roof. Conan lived through the evacuation and fire, but died a week or two later, possibly from the stress of the ordeal. I knew several people who lost everything. Now the government no longer calls them controlled burns--they are prescribed burns. And if the wind is high or the vegetation is dry, there are no burns. How sensible.

I never taught the class again--it was too complex for me and too charged with emotions. Ann and I did again meet in Los Alamos where I was teaching last February. The class was again a pilot. We were in an old meeting building right on the edge of one of the mesas that make up the town. Halfway through class, smoke began curling up over the canyon wall. We could see it and smell it. Deja vu all over again. It was nothing--someone burning wood trash below on the canyon floor. There was a fire truck standing by. We were safe. Ann and I smiled at one another and we continued the class.

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