I keep seeing this shit all over today, from Trump and others, and I just keep thinking--burned into the back of my eyelids, I dream about it, is this twenty-second video clip I saw when LA was on fire last year. I was born in Anaheim, so the fires hit me hard. I saw video after video of my home on fire, I was checking base with a dozen Californian friends every day because nobody was sure where they were going to end up, and in the midst of this wailing horror, where I would wake and sleep and both would feel much the same, came this video.
It was a hillside, viewed across a gully. The recorder was on one ridge, looking out over the hills. It was late at night, and that mattered not at all, because the picture was ablaze with light. There was so much fire.
Fire's noisy, you know, if you haven't seen the recordings coming out in their hundreds from that nightmare. Fire roars, it screams as it devours all the oxygen it can get to and makes it into more of itself, so at first I couldn't hear the airplane. When it appeared, engine roaring, very low over the ridge, there was only a moment to understand what it even was before it dropped its payload of water on the burning hillside, and all at once the picture went out. The fire went out. The screaming brightness was replaced with gentler dark. In an instant.
The airplane was one of the Canadian Super Scoopers, piloted by a Canadian fire pilot of incredible skill--you know what kind of mastery it takes, to fly a plane that size, that low to the ground, at night, in a place where it's being buffeted by horrific and uneven fire-spawned updrafts and turbulence, carrying a payload of over fourteen thousand pounds of water, and then to dump that weight and still be able to fly straight instead of being suddenly slammed around by the weight change? And this was a person who with others like him had come to California to fight a fire that had nothing to do with them, for no reason other than human fucking decency.
When I saw the video the first time I burst into sobs. I have cried more than once thinking of it since, feeling again that incredible relief as the light went out. My home was on fire. I couldn't be there to do anything about it; it doesn't belong to me anymore. And here came brave strangers to save it.
I just can't stop thinking about it today.
