The Fire Loses Reality

Monday, June 27, I lost complete touch with the fire as it disappeared behind a fog of smoke and a dearth of information.

It wasn’t just the closing of the lab and the evacuation of Los Alamos that threw me back to the emotions of the Cerro Grande fire. It was also the combination of bureaucratic timidity and media incompetence that meant no information.

Last time, Washington politicians arrived. Whenever there was a press conference, the locals came out for the pictures, then scurried after the retreating bigger wigs. They had no time for their constituents, only for their own networking opportunities.

The major networks sent crews. The local reporters, hoping to be the next Dan Rather, hung around them, hoping for a bit of notice that could translate into a contract that might mean a better job. They were too intent on currying favor to actually cultivate sources who might tell them about the fire.

The local reporters who actually tried to cover the story around the barriers set by the lab were suspended. One had the temerity of using his press pass to bring family members into the evacuated town to record their responses to seeing their destroyed home. This was considered an abuse of power to favor cronies.

There was one, it may have been the same, who reported more of the rumors that were swirling outside the sterile press releases. That voice too disappeared.

Now the forest service blog has been usurped. It carries all the official press releases and describes the strategies (not the actions) of the fire fighting managers. The fire is reduced to a daily map showing its extent. It no longer is described as active or inactive, running or crowning or whatever else we’ve learned fires do.

And people I talk to complain. They don’t know what’s going on. They can’t connect the geographic references used by the media with the landmarks they know. The press is doing nothing but repeating abstracts of press releases.

And, if you live in Santa Fe, instead of down in the valley, you can’t see anything either. All you know if your throat is sore, your eyes gummy. There’s a layer of ash and charred pine needles in the yard. The sun is red, the mountains are gone. But nothing can be learned.

I grew so restive that afternoon I fled the office at 2:30 and headed north.

The sky are grey, visibility limited. You could see nothing of the fire. It felt like I was rushing to get home before a snow storm closed the road. When I made the turn west towards my house and the fire, suddenly the sky are bluer, the distance clearer.

Topography is everything here. Running parallel to the road north of Pojoaque is a geologic formation, a monocline, that’s barely visible from the road and carries a name as obscure as the many others used on maps that have been puzzling people trying to learn where the fire it.

Unnamed and unseen by most, it’s still enough to channel the weather, to keep rain away from the dry area to the east. For a storm indeed was passing through.

Around 4:40 I began to feel a few sprinkles, could see lightening to the west of the Black Mesa. Then the winds resumed and I could smell the smoke. Within twenty minutes the sounds of thunder had moved north, there was only water pocked sand in the drive.



By 6:15 the smoke was creeping out of Los Alamos, a heavy brown presence. Beneath, the grass turned dark gold. To the north, the sun turned red. The air was still.



The smoke continued to move to form an arch over my head that would turn into a skull cap when the light faded.

The sun sank behind the Jemez turning the sky red with its own reflection, more brilliant than the fire.

Then darkness. South towards Los Alamos there seemed to a narrow white line. It seemed to pulse like the northern lights, but that could have been an affect created by smoke distorting my view.

I could no longer tell mirages from reflections from reality.

Top picture: Sun setting in the Jemez, June 27 about 8:15pm.

Middle picture: Smoke to the east, June 27 about 6:55pm.

Bottom picture: The grass to the east under the cap of smoke, June 27 about 7:48pm.