Life on Argon Part 10

Current mood: angsty



Things We Lost in the Fire



Picking up where we left off in part 9. Cathy and I were hell bent for leather (well bent banana?...private joke) speeding our way East on Apache Blvd, heading for the lazy black plume hanging in the sky. "That's us".


We pulled onto Sycamore Street and glanced down toward Argon. Police cars are dotting the landscape, the yellow tape is strewn. Every now and then when we would return home from an errand, I would quip to Cathy "No yellow tape, guess all is well in the neighborhood."

I giggle nervously and comment to Cat that this time, there really is yellow tape. Morbid Levity my specialty, always.

We can't enter onto Argon proper because of the barracades, so we leave the van parked by the curb. We enter into the circus that a housefire quickly becomes and start heading for what's left of our house. Sure enough, Debbie was spot on. There must be at least 5 firetrucks filling the street. Firefighters are scrambling in and out of our home, several are on the roof cutting venting holes. The top of our house is starting to look like a flaming checker board. One firefighter is using a pole with a large hook on the end to pull down the ceiling in the carport, and quickly gets a cascade of flaming boxes of christmas ornaments for his efforts. 15 years of Hallmark up in smoke. The collector in me starts to calculate the value of the melting ornaments like the meter on a taxicab. Ka-ching.

At this point several of our neighbors realize that we have come home, and start comforting us immediately. No one was home when it started. The kids are safe with Grandma. A lot of "Thank God"s get muttered as neighborly support I never quite realized we had makes itself known. These people actually care about us. That's nice to know.


About this time, the media shows up and starts interviewing the crowd. "Are the homeowners here?" One of my neighbors gently guides me behind him and tells the reporter that no one has seen us return home yet. Makes me a little misty, they're still doing their best to protect us during the crisis. Cool Beans indeed. For once I'm not really in the mood to be on camera and interviewing about how I feel about my life going up in flames. Knowing me, I'd probably have responded that I was going to Disneyland. (Ironically enough, that's one of the things I did do with the family in the aftermath of the fire...)

Cat and I finally make our way to the fire chief and identify ourselves as the homeowners.

The chief informs us that the house is pretty much a total loss. "I'd call it a 98 percent burnout" says he. I immediately think of my buddy PC at the post office, whose father is a retired NYC firefighter.  "Which means that about the only thing that will be left is the foundation", say I. He smiles and nods. "It's going to look like a lot of things survived the fire, but trust me, anything that was plugged in when we started pouring water on it is fried. TV's, appliances, video equipment, even the frickin' AVON Frosty the Snowman. Hell of a power surge goes through the whole electrical system. And what the fire doesn't get, the heat, smoke, and water will finish off. Look on the bright side though, in 8 months you'll have a brand new house to live in". By this time, most of the major flames are getting under control, as the neighbors start to regale me with tales of just how high the flames were shooting at their peak. Several tell me tales of the sounds of two major explosions in the attic. Sounds like flashover to me. One of my neighbors is a retired firefighter and concurs. He gives a fascinating breakdown of what's going on as Mesa's finest is chasing flame back and forth through my attic, trying to finally get it knocked down. It will turn out that this was what made the house fire so tough. The fire investigator would later tell me that as soon as the fire was put down on one end of the attic, the other end would flare back up. Oddly enough, the damage doesn't look so nasty from the front of the house. The back side, however was a totally different story.


One of my neighbors, Cesar, tells me about the start of the fire. We don't know how it began, although that would be made known soon enough. Anywho, one of the kids in the neighborhood came banging on Cesar's door..."Danny's house is on fire!" Cesar took off down the street to see if he could help. He told me that he went around to the back and saw that the entire backyard was already in flames. The plastic raingutters that I had installed were melting right off of the eaves, dripping little bits of molten petroleum product on the back porch. The whole back half of the house is engulfed. Thankfully, he realized this was much more than a gardenhose could handle. I tell him that I'm grateful he tried to put the fire out, but I'm even more grateful that he wasn't hurt.


About this time, I'm guided over to Connie's house, where I make a few phone calls to let friends and family know that we're all okay. The house is history, but we're alive and well.

As I wander back outside, family starts to show up. Several of my nieces and nephews appear, looks of concern and relief that we're okay on their faces. Smiles and tears start to blend as they embrace us.

The fire chief lets me know that we will be able to access the house soon. The fire is out, the electricity is shut down, which is good, 'cause the water is almost knee deep right now throughout the house. Well above the electrical outlets. The ceilings are pock marked with gapping holes and pink insulation is everywhere. The holes reveal the charcoal wonderland that is my attic. The chief repeats his warning about the condition of the inside of the house. Things look like they might be salvageable...they're not. Wooden furniture will soak up the water like a candlewick. The smoke smell gets into everything. Glasswear has been fired like it was in a kiln and becomes extremely brittle. The list goes on...

Larry asks Cathy what's in there that's most important. "Our Wedding rings"

The boys dive in and on our guidance, find Cat's jewelry box containing our rings. Nita works with the girls, passing some of our clothing through a bedroom window. She figures if she can get it cleaned soon enough, maybe some of the stuff won't be ruined. Some of the items include the Christening clothing for our kids, and as it turns out, she is able to save them! The importance of family really hits home that day. I've never been prouder of all of them, than I was that day. My brother is quite a bit older than me, and his kids are closer to my age, so I tend to think of some of them as siblings, and some as my own kids.

Today, I'm very grateful for their love and concern.

The collections, alas, are mostly toast. My complete run of X-Men from 1 to present day, as well as 20 some odd comic long boxes were at ground zero. Most of my post war Lionel, American Flyer and LGB garden scale trains are unrecognizable blobs of bakelite and plastic and wires. The heart of the fire came blasting through the arcadia glass doors like a blowtorch, incinerating the two huge bookcases filled with books and Princess House Crystal. The glasswear exploded from the extreme heat, and shards are embedded in the opposite wall.

The carnage is fairly complete.

As I finally get a chance to talk to Dallas, our fire investigator, about the origins of the fire, he informs me that it was arson. I'm floored. "You're shittin' me!"

He explains how they examine the patterns of the fire, trace the origin points, follow the path that the fire follows. The fact that I'm such a big collector of things removes suspicion that I started the fire. "Really?" On yeah, you didn't remove anything before the fire began. You lost quite a chunk of your collections. You still had all your family pictures on the wall. We see this all the time. If you had anything to do with the fire, you would have removed most of your collections in the first place. The thought had never crossed my mind.So who the hell started this mess? Dallas has his theories already. "I'm pretty sure the kid next door is behind it." John Michael? The mind boggles. "He's the little guy that alerted your neighbors down the street that your house was on fire. He's telling a story about seeing three teenagers jump over your fence and light some cardboard boxes on your back porch. I think it's bullshit. I think he did it."


I really don't want to believe that John Michael is responsible. But I remind myself that Jim and I had to fence off part of the side yard next to his house, because we caught him building little bonfires and burning them under our citrus trees a few months back. Mayhaps the little shit was responsible after all. He is a bit of a demon seed already at six years of age. He butts heads constantly with my son Danny all the time.

And, as Dallas points out, the kids parents were home at the time of the start of the fire.

Why would he run down the street, to alert an adult that was 10 doors down instead of his parents right next door. Wouldn't getting help as fast as possible be the most logical step, unless you were trying to cover your ass because you knew you were behind it in the first place? I liked the way Dallas thinks.

Years later, the little shit would taunt my sons constantly that he burned our house down and got away with it. My youngest, Andrew, would remind him that not only didn't he get away with it, his family got sued by our home owners insurance company since John Michael was deemed responsible. That, and the statute of limitations was still within the 7 years, and our family could still bring a civil suit against his family for the amount of contents lost that exceeded the cap on our insurance. (We lost over $225,000 in contents...who knew we had so much crap? The insurance only paid up to $75,000) That usually shut JM up for a while.

In retrospect, we should have sued them anyway. We didn't at the time, because of the good feelings that the neighborhood had instilled with all the concern and help that was offered initially. That was about to change.

Having your house burn down, and then rebuilt, furnished with all new contents...it's a real adventure. That's my family's motto. Every bit of adversity thrown at us, it's just one more challenge, one more adventure. In a warped sense, it was almost like hitting the lottery! Things We Lost in the Fire...not necessarily the material goods, but the changes that were about to impact our life on Argon Street. We lost a whole lot more that day than we would realize for some years to come. Stuff, well, you can replace that easily. The insurance company gives you a nice check and you go shopping! But the paradigm shift that was about to hit with most of the people that we associated with on Argon Street?


I never really saw that one coming.


To be continued...