Anatomy of a Disaster

Anatomy of a Disaster

I’d done it many times.  But this time, as I opened the door to our Honda back home in the States, I noticed the dark stain on the driver’s seat.  It wasn’t from coffee, there are those too, and it wasn’t from accidentally dripping barbecue sauce from some Arby’s or McDonald’s rest-stop sandwich.  No, not this.  This was something altogether different.  Seeing it brought back the memory of the moment when we had received some horrific news, horrific at least to us.  This was just one of the many events that triggered this memory of personal loss.  Seems it happens often, many times during the course of a day in fact, beginning most often while lying in bed, semi-awake, that prompts me to get up to escape the reality.  At other times I’ll think of some item, usually something rather minor like a favorite video or book, only to realize they’re gone, and the memory of what happened comes rushing back, a memory prompted that particular day by the sight of ground-in soot on the driver’s seat of our car. 

A calamity like we’d sustained was usually confined to TV and involved “other people”.  A trite phrase, no doubt, in a world of global awareness.  Far removed from our lives, some disaster like a hurricane, earthquake, tornado, or flood, whatever, would occasionally get our attention on the tube.  Distant and certainly tragic, they nevertheless had no immediate effect on us.  In this instance, that catch phrase, “This could never happen to me.” just didn’t work or offer any comforting sense of security.  On this occasion, luck had abandoned us.  It was our turn to experience the stinging reality of the loss of everything we owned, save what we had in our suitcases.  

When disaster chose to strike our home in the States, we were in Italy.  The day had started promising enough, an election of momentous significance had just concluded.  It was evening then.  We had just walked into Double Jack’s Gasthaus, a pub in Calitri fashioned after a German style beer garden. 



As we waited for Bruno, Jack’s owner, to arrive with our order of a Black Russian, a Negroni, and patatine (fries), I noticed that my cellphone was beeping.  It seems that when we’d crossed the threshold into Double Jack’s, we had entered a WIFI zone and my cellphone began chirping as it received updates.  One was from my daughter back home.  Persistent, she’d called us on WhatsApp five times and her repeated message asked us to call her immediately.  Something was badly wrong.  Repetitive, open ended messages like hers couldn’t be good, they never bode well.  Something had to be wrong and we immediately thought of our grandchildren. 

I called her straight away.  I couldn’t believe what she was telling us.  Thankfully, it wasn’t about the grandkids at all.  It was about our house.  Our lake home was on fire!  A fuel truck making a delivery had been involved, propane or oil, she didn’t know which, and there’d been a fire.  Had there been an explosion?  Was the driver injured, possibly killed?  More questions than answers surfaced, far more than could be addressed on the scant information provided.  She had been called by the police department.  They had called her from the contact information I’d provided in the event of an emergency whenever we’d go away on long trips.  She said they wanted me to call them and provided the phone number.  She was leaving right away.  My imagination went wild.  We just couldn’t believe it.  Her words struck me with a feeling like nonother I’d ever experienced, a mixture of shock, disbelief, and adrenaline.  I’d always been so careful about fires, going so far as to put flammables, like gasoline, outside under a tarp and pulling plugs from the wall outlets whenever we planned to be away.  I couldn’t eliminate the risk of fire entirely, only hoped to diminish it some.  I prayed it was just a small fire and had been extinguished quickly.  The truth about what had really happened was clouded in a fog of confusion.  If there are any casualties in a disaster, the first is always named truth.  There were just too many unknowns at this point, prayer would have to suffice for now.

WhatsApp wouldn’t do.  We needed to get to a phone ASAP, call the police, and find out what was happening.  I used my iPhone in Italy only for internet reception and photos.  We relied on locally purchased flip phones for phone calls.  Regrettably, just when needed, my Italian phone wasn’t set up to call directly to the States.  It was then that Maria Elena thought of Titti (T-T).  She was a friend of ours who called her daughter in New York often.  Thankfully, she had the capability.  That’s where we needed to go.  We never got our refreshments.  People must have noticed and wondered why the stranieri (foreigners) were running out of the pub.  As we rushed passed the bar for the door, I recall calling to Bruno in my abbreviated Italian, “Bisogno di aiuto, fuoco” (Need help, fire).  I wasn’t paying attention as we drove to Titti’s.  I was preoccupied with vacant thoughts of what had been and what to do now, confirmed as Bianca’s gears whined in an appeal for me to shift.  Lurching along, somehow we made it there.

Thankfully, Titti lived nearby in a high-rise apartment in the modern part of Calitri.  Doubly thankful, it wasn’t too late when we arrived to disturb her evening.  She was still awake and answered our ring from the downstairs entry.  She could sense the urgency in my voice and didn’t hesitate to buzz us in.  I can recall my index finger trembling as I entered the international code followed by the number we’d been given.  Please God, make it better, like when mom would kiss away my injury and wipe my tears.  After an interval of extra strong heartbeats, it soon passed and my hand steadied.  I wanted to know but was just as hesitant about getting the news.  Any way you looked at it, it had to be bad - small, medium, or big bad.  I got through to the police department and they passed me to the fire chief.  It was big bad.  Although the chief tried to console me, our home was a total loss.  When the firemen arrived, the blaze had already spread into the roof and our home was engulfed.  As in any disaster, where the initial response transitions through various phases, in this instance, our situation was so far gone that trying to save our home was out of the question.  They were quickly into containment, preventing the fire from spreading through the forest to neighboring homes.  Weeks later, we were to learn that if the fire had occurred one day later, high winds would have made containment impossible.  As it was, the town street at the end of our access road was closed and five neighboring towns had responded with equipment including tanker trucks, since there were no handy hydrants in the area.

We have no idea how it was determined but we also learned that the fire had smoldered for hours before taking off.  When it finally got serious, it had been burning for hours before the firemen arrived.  It took that long for it to get large enough for someone to notice it above the treetops.  It was even visible from downtown, two miles away.  By then it was too late.  There had been no fuel delivery or explosion.  There had been a fuel truck all right, but it had been passing through the area on the main road and had noticed smoke billowing above the forest canopy.  The driver had reported it to the fire department.  Unfortunately, by then, the fire had been underway for an estimated three hours. 

Its cause was never definitively pinpointed but when a checklist of likely causes was eventually eliminated, it was attributed to the catch-all basket of an “electrical problem”.  Since it was getting cool, maybe some creature looking for a winter home had chewed a wire.  After all, we lived in a forest.  The fire and insurance inspectors even went so far as to say it began in the vicinity of our master bathroom.  No doubt, a ton of wood pellets stored in the garage on the opposite side of the wall only added to the conflagration. 

In over twelve years of Italian travels, we have learned much about the country, its people, and along the way, about ourselves.  In the meantime, we’ve made many friends, which following the fire, proved a blessing and promoted our initial healing.  In the days that followed many of our Italian friends came to visit.  In grief-stricken fellowship, they’d arrive at our door, some in tears, to express their condolences.  They would ring our doorbell and in ones and twos tell us how sorry they were to learn that we had lost our home.  The news had spread, and hat in hand, they treated our loss as though someone had died.  Something had.  The Italian sense of family is more than admirable and characterizes their social makeup.  Under their comforting umbrella of family, they had reached out to us in a time of tragedy to provide a much-needed emotional safety-net in those early days.  For our part, we were still in shock with yet denial, anger, and depression to cope with.  I was angry that I’d not been there.  If I had been home when it happened, I believe we would have caught it well before the fire had consumed our home, especially when it had smoldered for hours.  We’d have heard the smoke alarms, found the cause, and if not extinguished the fire ourselves, would have called the fire department.  Instead, with no one there to hear their wail, the alarms did their duty and blown until they’d melted. 

Our personal Armageddon had taken place a week before our scheduled departure from Calitri.  Why God couldn’t it have waited?  We thought about changing our tickets and returning immediately, but for what purpose?  There was really nothing we could do at that point.  We could grieve only so long.  After a few days, we began to think about the future.  That got us beyond what had been, to what could be.  A new dream began to emerge.  Our first thoughts were to sell the property, but during that remaining week in Italy, with time to think, the seed of a plan emerged.  We loved our fourteen acres, so after settling down some, we dropped all thoughts of selling.  We would rebuild, but with a twist.  Unlike some Phoenix rising from the ashes, we would let those ashes lie.  In its place, we would modify an adjacent building, actually our carriage house garage, that had been untouched by the fire.  It already had a finished apartment and the essentials necessary to get us on our feet again.  Thinking it through helped move our minds beyond the sadness.  We had always been builders, why not one more go at it?  We began with design ideas which kept us busy through the winter, well into 2017.  Gradually, a layout began to emerge, and we went from there.  The proceeds from our house insurance would hopefully make our plans become reality.  The knowledge of eventual compensation for our loss was like morphine and helped make the pain bearable.  A new adventure emerged.  

 

As I write this, the therapy afforded by time takes the form of building that new home from concrete to curtains.  The project has been underway for over a year.  We have kept busy making the numerous decisions involved in building a home, visiting the site, and basically trying to stay ahead of the contractor.  When he’d asked us about windows, fixtures, flooring, appliances, the bathroom layout, …, we were prepared.  This we had experience with.  With fire?  No.  Our garage-apartment is gradually being transformed into a home.  In fact, we’re getting closer for this is sheet-rock week!  The remains of our original home have been removed right down to the foundation, its footprint covered with soil as a fitting internment in a graveyard of buried dreams.  It has become relegated to memory status now as I find myself repeatedly saying things like, “Oh that?  It was lost in the fire.” or “It melted”.  Even pictures of our home, along with twelve years of photos of our Italian adventures, all on backed-up disks, are no more.  They, along with an external hard drive I thought myself so clever to have as an added safeguard, “Oh that?  It was lost in the fire”.  Our dreams that had evolved into a very special home are now relegated to memories.  Only in our minds can we still walk the rooms of our former home, viewing the furniture, passing through the great room and its wall of books, eyeing pieces of art like “Louiselle”, a two-foot, art deco bronze statue, or hesitate to examine the Italian scenes that filled our walls along with a host of memorabilia that surrounded and comforted us.  Beyond its arrangement lay the specter of life’s events that had unfolded under its roof, the good times entertained, and the lives lived. 

In these, hopefully the final throws of recovery, writing and sharing these words, like building anew, may hopefully prove cathartic.  When we returned from Italy and emerged from the airport terminal, but for the items in our suitcases, we had little beyond a garage in an ashened forest.  That makes for a strange feeling, something we hadn’t felt since 1969 when, newly married, we drove cross-country to Oklahoma, our car filled with our few possessions, our heads filled with ambitions for what lay ahead.  Then, we essentially had each other and the opportunity to forge a life together.  In the relative blink of an eye, the scene transmitted to us via a phone call, we have apparently gone full circle, back to the beginning, given a clean slate, thankfully along with insurance money to start anew.  We thought our forest home, a place we refer to as “Longsought”, would be ours forever or until for whatever reason, we had to give it up.  After all, we’d cut it from the forest ourselves, beginning with the quarter mile entry road.  It was a place we said hello to on entering and goodbye to on leaving.  Little did we suspect that weeks earlier it would be our last goodbye.  Funny, Maria Elena had prayed for an answer to a nagging concern of hers - as we grew older, how would we ever be able to leave the home we had built for our retirement, loved, and filled with a lifetime of memories?  How could we even pack-up and for the last time say, “Goodbye house” and drive away never to return?  One destructive spark had apparently eliminated that concern along with fifty years of life’s possessions.  As if in answer to her prayers, her concerns were resolved.  There would be no need to pack, no conscious final goodbye.  Prayer it would appear, can trigger powerful responses to the extent that we better be careful what we ask for since you can’t be certain how your prayer will be answered.  On a lighter note, if this is truly cause and effect, I’ve counseled Maria Elena to be careful when she talks to the Almighty.  Mare’s idea to essentially downsize had come true, the solution, however, had been overkill.

Getting back to the soot, it remains only to explain how it got into our car.  Our daughter had immediately left work and was on site within hours. 

She’d taken our car parked at her home.  By then, but for the smoldering remains, the fire was out.   In the days that followed she rummaged through the debris in the hope of salvaging anything that may have survived.  In one instance, hinting at what had been, she was successful in recovering a valuable necklace.  Over the next few days she and our neighbor, Mary, worked to remove items stored in the basement, the only area relatively intact, but for water damage and soot.  In the process, she inadvertently got soot on her clothes which was then transferred to the car seat, creating an indelible reminder only a seat cover can now hope to conceal, though as with any trauma never totally remove.

Adventures take many forms.  This experience had been a particularly dark adventure like none other in our lives.  In the scale of things, ours was small potatoes, only making the local weekly newspaper, equivalent for all intents and purposes to reading of a stranger’s death in the newspaper’s obituary section.  Just another of those “other people” misfortunes.  Some know how it feels to lose a job, fewer the loss of their homes.  Whether you call it a “man-cave” or her “she-shack,” a home can become part of our identity approaching the level of our careers and jobs.  As superficial and shallow as it may be, we are known not necessarily by who we are, but for what we do.  Petty though it may be, this may just be part of being human.  Yet being known for something, and who we really are, are different.  We were still the same people after the fire, but we felt bare in a social sense - almost all that we'd created throughout our lives, up in smoke.  But as a friend recently shared with us, "Who we are shouts so loudly, what we say can't be heard."  My dad said it this was, "Always remember who you are and what you represent." Not even a fire could take that away from us.  When calamity removed our social identity blanket, essentially making us homeless, but for a garage and Casa Calitri half a planet away, we needed help.  We found it and re-grounded ourselves in our global family and in the ability to dream again.
 

From that Rogue Tourist

Paolo