New Mexico Burning

A fire burns along Albuquerque's bosque in 2009, only a few miles from downtown.
Usually, it's some idiot who drops their cigarette.

Every couple years or so, we have a late winter and early spring so dry, the state literally goes up in flames. Eleven years ago in May, the entire town of Los Alamos, birthplace of The Bomb and currently home to more nerds per square inch than the lunchroom at MIT, burned right to the ground thanks to a blaze that started off as a simple controlled burn. Within days, 48,000 acres were scorched rotten, 400 homes were reduced to tinder, and the U.S. General Accounting Office ciphered up the damage at over one billion dollars. The fire was so consuming the smoke plume reached all the way into Oklahoma, as shown by a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration photo taken from the air.

Whether from dry lightening or human stupidity, doesn't matter, the end result is all the same. Fire sparks, flames fan, property is destroyed, lives devastated.

Those of us who live in rural places, at the edges of wilderness so overgrown one can hardly walk a forest floor anymore, live with sucked in breath in the months between the time the snows stop and the summer monsoons begin. We're told to make sure to craft a "defensible space" around our properties. To have hoses at the ready, brush cut, and all potential fuels removed from our gutters. To have a meeting spot in mind for our families, and places to go for our animals. Around here, that means more than a dog and cat or two. It means horses and chickens and goats and llamas, too.

And even though we live almost some portion of every year with this nightmare pushing at the edge of our brains, S.B. and I don't really have an evacuation plan. Get dressed, put the dogs and their food in the Jeep, a shotgun on the floor, the pistols in the glove compartment, and . . . what else? The photo albums? My father's paintings? My jewelry? The computers?

S.B. jokingly said to me last night, "If our house burns down, then can we move to Georgia? How about Tulsa?" For some reason, that pissed me off, and I told him not to bring that bad juju down on our heads. But then it got me thinking . . . if life as we knew it was about to go up in smoke, what would we do? In the technicolor quick fire flash of panic, when life is on the line and property threatened, what from my and our former life would I absolutely take with me to help navigate impending disaster? I have no idea.

What would YOU take?