Protocol for Disaster

In the event of a wildfire, Mom said to save the photographs first. They hung in framed clusters around the living room and kitchen. We weren’t a painting or a knick-knack kind of family, we were decidedly a photo family, with frames of polished wood or, later, those cheaper plastic ones from Walmart. Mom didn’t care much about the frames. What she really wanted was to keep the memories free of dust.

In one of her favorites, I’m maybe three or four, naked except for a Power Rangers t-shirt and yellow galoshes. I’ve heard of mothers embarrassing their sons by lugging out photo albums when their dates arrive, but Mom put them front and center, no lugging required.

The reminders about saving these photos grew more urgent as the years went on. By the time I was in high school, drought had been parching Colorado for more than a decade. My part of Colorado isn’t the Rocky Mountains part. It’s the rugged, tumbleweed part like what you see in old Westerns. I couldn’t remember a time before scarcity, those bygone years of enough. I grew up in a desert of thirst, watching reports on stream flows like other kids watched cartoons.

My family relied on well water. The prospect of its running dry became less a matter of if than when. Collecting rainwater was against the law in Colorado, so Mom saved the runoff from our showers to keep what few plants she could grow alive.

Dad didn’t seem as concerned with the lack of water, or the ever-growing tally of fires. He read the Bible every day and believed every word, which as I understood meant that God loved and looked after him.

“He holds close the ones who hold Him close,” Dad would say.

Dad’s Bible was bound in black leather with gilded pages that shone like treasure. He kept it by his bedside, marking certain passages with sticky notes. What Dad believed, he believed with all his heart. I didn’t feel particularly close to God but hoped I was safe by association.

The parts I knew about the Bible mostly concerned the rules. They seemed the most applicable to a boy learning the ways of the world: thou shalt not swear, thou shalt not brag, thou shalt not eat too much, on and on. It was a lot to remember. An entire chapter talked about what a person had to do in order to survive in His presence. It seemed vital that I live up to that standard. As an only child, I bore the full weight of my parents’ love and expectation. Whenever I got good grades or won a baseball game, Dad would say, “God has truly blessed us with a beautiful son.”

Mom never said so, but I don’t think she kept much faith that the Bible would save us, at least not from a fire. She made sure we had a plan. We rehearsed the steps of this plan like elementary school fire drills, one of the differences being that with a wildfire, there’s no alarm to warn about danger. We had to be self-sufficient. We lived ten miles from the small town of Craig, on twenty acres of sagebrush and sheep. The municipal fire department didn’t train much for wildfires, and most of them were volunteers. If anyone was going to save us, it would be the Bureau of Land Management Hotshots—a fiercely trained crew but stretched thin during wildfire season. That meant, in all likelihood, any saving would be done ourselves.

“Repeat after me,” Mom said. “Step one: save yourself. Step two: save the photos. Step three: save whatever else you have time for.”

The steps established a hierarchy of importance. If circumstance didn’t allow, forget step three, even step two if necessary.

“Step one is the only step that matters,” Mom said, but Dad liked to joke that if it came between him or the photos, the steps might get rearranged.

There was no stay-and-fight part of the protocol, not against a wildfire. I was charged not with protecting our house but with saving as much of its contents as possible. Loss became a given—the risk one took for living in such a beautiful place, or the penance to pay for what we’d done to it. Mom kept our birth certificates and social security numbers inside fire-proof safes in a basement closet, along with three suitcases packed with clothes and toothbrushes.

Come summertime, smoke from the west choked the air that used to be the reason sick people moved all the way out here. The smoke cast our sunsets an ominous red, the horizon a matchstick burning, devouring the distance between us and danger. Every day brought increasingly dire air quality alerts. The retired coal miners and veteran smokers hooked up to oxygen masks had to stay indoors, along with kids and the elderly. Everyone else could take their chances.

“Apocalyptic,” became the description of choice, often paired with a reference to this or that movie. Exactly which movie depended on the age of the person doing the describing. For me, it was War of the Worlds, the Tom Cruise version, which I know isn’t about wildfires, but I remembered clearly how the aliens reduced their victims to ashes, how Tom Cruise’s character wiped like snow the ashes from his face, and how it took a moment before he realized where they came from. Others had their own frames of reference, but most of them were movies or books—stories we thought of as fiction that now shared an unsettling resemblance to reality. Stories were how we made sense of what was happening.

News outlets called the summer before my junior year one of the worst on record. Snow, Colorado’s primary source of water, quit falling in March. By May, the entire state suffered drought conditions. People compared the forests to tinderboxes waiting for the tiniest spark to ignite. It got hard to keep track of all the wildfires, each with their own names: Lower North Fork Fire, High Park Fire, and Waldo Canyon Fire. The infernos got closer by the day, closing in like a pack of wolves. Mom took some of her favorite photos from the wall, released them from their frames and tucked them into the fireproof safes.

One of the most bewildering things about that time was how normal our day-to-day lives remained in the wake of such profound destruction. Dad worked in the coal mine, like his father and his father’s father. Mom worked for the Bureau of Land Management, keeping the mines accountable. Life in Craig revolved around coal. The power plant dwarfed the rest of the buildings in town, its smokestacks visible even from our house. I’d grown up on tales of coal bringing prosperity, but as I watched the smoke rise from those stacks, all I could think was how much they resembled the smoke from all those fires on the news. “Climate-fueled disasters,” they called them, before switching to images of power plants just like our own.

Afternoons, I spent working as a lifeguard at the local pool. I watched families dive into water, wipe water from their glistening faces, splash water carelessly onto the concrete, where it evaporated in seconds. Watched also, in secret, a boy from my grade. He had brown, curly hair and a smile like sunshine. He sparked a thirst in me. The harder I tried to ignore it, the more urgent the thirst became. I sat helpless in the lifeguard chair, captivated by the way his muscles swam under his smooth skin, terrified by what Dad would say if he knew.

~

One morning before my shift, a lightning storm struck a neighbor’s field, about a football field away. It hadn’t rained in weeks. I watched from the porch as a thin line of smoke rose toward an already smoke-strangled sky and kept watching as the smoke curled into a cloud, gathering strength and growing darker. Soon the stench of it reached me, that familiar sting in my nostrils like a spice in the air. But this wasn’t like those other fires far away. I could see the hunger of it. My stomach lurched as sparks shot up, followed by flames.

When I called 911, a woman’s saccharine voice told me to remain calm, and where were my parents?

“They’re both working,” I said.

She asked other questions: Could I see the fire? Was it near any houses?

Where we lived, near didn’t mean what it did in cities. Our ‘next-door’ neighbors lived a half-mile away.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s near my house.”

“How near, honey?” the woman asked, the softness of her voice tinged with urgency.

“I’d say a couple hundred yards.”

“OK, well that’s better than a couple hundred feet. Just hold on a moment.”

I waited in silence, assessing. We lived on a hill surrounded by dry grass and knee-high sagebrush. I’d been binging wildfire videos that summer and knew how the flames could spread fast through low-lying vegetation, moving with the speed of the wind. A gust jingled the metal chimes on the back porch, carrying with it the bitter stench of burnt grass.

Finally the woman said, “I’ve alerted the authorities. Now they said it may take a while, they’re out on another call but will be there as soon as possible. In the meantime, you best be getting out of there, you hear?”

Next, I called my father. It went straight to voicemail. He was working underground at the coal mine an hour south. I called my mother, but she was underground, too, on a mine inspection.

My ears rang. This was it. Holy shit, this was it. Mom’s steps repeated in my head. Step one: save yourself. I looked out the window again. Now the smoke rose so high that it blocked out the sun. The wind blew straight towards me like something personal. A moat of high grass still stood between the house and the flames. There was time, I decided, for step two: save the photos. I ran to the bookshelf. I stuffed two tote bags full of albums and rushed them to the door. Next, I grabbed the fire-proof safes and the suitcases, hauling them one by one up the stairs.

As I ran back and forth between the house and the plow truck we used only in the winter, the flames continued their charge. By the first suitcase, they’d reached the foot of the hill. By the second suitcase, they’d started climbing, brush by brush. If the wind kept up like this, I had maybe ten minutes to jump in the truck and peel away. For myself, I grabbed books: The Hobbit, On the Road, and Where the Sidewalk Ends. I looked around my room, trying to accept the loss of everything inside: baseball trophies, clothes, a leather journal I kept hidden between the mattress and the box spring where I wrote what I couldn’t tell anyone else, in particular my thoughts about the boy from the pool. A part of me hoped the fire would take them. That my life as it was would be destroyed and I could begin again, as bright and pure as the flowers that bloom out of ashes.

I started to feel guilt for even thinking it, but there wasn’t enough time. If the flames curled around the hill they’d reach the gravel driveway, the only way to the road, and what would I do then?

In the plow truck I repeated the steps. I’d followed them and then some. But now what? Where was I supposed to go? We hadn’t devised an escape plan. It was one of those details you don’t realize is important until you actually put a plan to work. I didn’t even have my driver’s license yet. But whatever, all that mattered was that I put some distance between me and the fire.

As the keys clicked into the ignition, I thought of Dad. Before I could convince myself otherwise, I rushed back inside. The Bible eyed me from his nightstand, its gold letters shining in the strange glow from outside. I crammed it in the center console and waited at the wheel, worrying the keys, staring at our home, already mourning its loss.

Then it happened.

Just as the flames licked our fence, the wind switched directions. I watched as the fire turned north toward the road like it had changed its mind, sparing us without so much as a nod goodbye. Carefully, I took the Bible from the console. Was this a sign? A warning?

Dad called it a miracle. He was proud of me. I’d proven to him that when times got tough, I could get tough, too.

“You’re becoming a man, no doubt about it,” he said, squeezing my arm. “Got to get more meat on those bones, though.”

After that day, I noticed Dad reading the Bible even more, talking about it at the dinner table and on the long drives to town. As for me, the fear of that day eventually subsided, and my thoughts were replaced by the boy at the pool. I tried not to picture the curve of his mouth or imagine him in the tiled changing room, his fingers tugging at the elastic waistband of his swim trunks. I tried to be strong, like the man Dad saw in me.

I started staying up later and later after my parents had gone to bed. I searched for articles online about my condition, listing my symptoms and scouring biblical interpretations, looking less for explanation than permission. Finally I allowed myself to look beyond sites named various arrangements of “bible” and “faith” and “holy.” It was then I saw, for the first time, the lips of two men clasped together like a confirmation. The image stirred a great longing in me, uncontrollable and growing by the day, and to tamp it down I recited over and over the lines of Leviticus: Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is an abomination.

A scar of smoldering earth traced the fire’s path toward our house. But we were safe, or so we told ourselves.

~

Disaster comes in all sorts of sizes. Big ones make the news, but it’s the small ones, the personal ones, that hurt the most.

Ten years after the fire, I went on a drive with my father. We drove toward the coal mine where he worked, now on the brink of closing. People in Craig mourned the inevitable shutdown of the mines and the power plant. The threat of wildfires paled in comparison to the imminent loss of jobs and tax revenue. Many had lost loved ones in the mines or had shed their own blood in the dark of those tunnels. Now they felt like enemies of the state. They raged against a country that had taken so much only to blame them for the mess that remained.

Dad wanted to show me the mine in the hopes I’d perceive the situation like he did, that for once since I’d left Craig, we could see things eye to eye.

It was an August evening, the time when horses trotted to their barns for fresh hay. We drove with the windows down, inviting the stench of diesel and manure. The radio played, but with the air rushing in it was hard to distinguish the songs. Since Dad insisted on country music, the breeze was fine with me.

“I need to tell you something,” he said, rolling up the windows, the closed cab making that suction kind of silence that feels like holding your breath.

Dad liked to save the serious talks for driving, as if the wheels set the truth in motion. I think it also had to do with the lack of fast exits. If Dad had something he needed to tell me, it usually concerned either my job or my love life, and both got awkward.

In the last decade, I’d moved away from Craig and gone to college. I met someone there, a young man who made me feel like how the boy at the pool made me feel. Except this time, I wasn’t helpless or scared. I introduced myself. We got dinner, then another dinner. After three years of dinners, among other things, we moved in together. We made a habit of ordering takeout on Tuesdays, getting cocktails on Thursdays, and arguing every other day about how best to load the dishwasher.

For work, I reported stories on the environment, in particular about the importance—no, the necessity—of putting an end to the coal industry.

There was no protocol for any of this. Dad and I navigated our changing relationship about as well as the town faced the end of coal, stuck too deep in disbelief to make progress. I often wondered which was harder for him to accept: that I was gay, or that I was an environmentalist?

Dad cleared his throat and said, “Sometimes I look back. At old pictures of you. And I get to thinking, you know. I think about how you’re gay in that picture. But I don’t know it yet.”

He stopped. Rubbed his chin. Kept his eyes on the road.

“There’s one photo in particular,” he said.

It was taken in late spring, a couple of months before the fire. The two of us had gone swimming in the Yampa River. Water flowed plentiful and cold then, still fresh from the mountains. In the photo, I’m standing on a rock, dwarfed by canyon walls. I know it well. Because of that photo, I’ll never be able to forget how my hair used to look almost exactly like early Justin Bieber’s.

Dad went on, “You’re looking down at the water, and I don’t know, I guess I wonder what you were thinking about. Were you thinking, ‘How do I tell my dad?’ It’s just something that stays on my mind. Dumb crap, probably.”

“It’s not dumb,” I said, bewildered by the tenderness in his words.

My father and I defined our relationship by the time before and the time after I came out. For him, everything prior to that night was straightforward. I was his son. I dated girls. Mom kept her wedding dress in the closet on the chance that one of these girls might be the girl. Lots of couples in Craig met in high school, married after graduation, bought a house and settled down. The mine allowed this life. This is what he knew, and what he knew was crumbling.

In the years after coming out, we fought about everything from elections to music. We tried to see past our differences, but it was hard when what separated us were the things that seemed to matter most.

The road traced the edge of a cattle ranch. An old farmer drove a tractor through his field, a trail of dust following him. Ranches like his were disappearing. That life had always been hard, and the drought, now in its 20th year, made it nearly impossible. Some had sold out to fracking companies, others to rich people from the city who didn’t know a heifer from a steer. Change churned up the land with the indifference of the tractor’s tiller.

“I suppose what I mean is that I know we ain’t seen eye to eye a lot,” Dad said. “It’s like when you was little, I remember us being close, real close. Every Sunday we’d watch the CMT Country countdown together, you and me. And now?”

“I know what you mean, Dad,” I said.

He took his eyes off the road and looked at me. I noticed the tears in them, swelling.

“I can’t change what’s happened,” he said. “But I want you to know that I love you. I want us to be able to talk again, like we used to. About anything.”

“Me too,” I said, and for a moment it felt like we were finally on the right track, like maybe this would be the conversation that healed the damage from all the others.

Taking a deep breath, he said, “I’ve been reading the Book of Revelation.”

He described the Biblical prophecy of a struggle between the forces of good and evil. Corruption will run rampant, it foretells, the righteous will be repressed. Darkness will overwhelm the world.

“A lot of the things going on, it’s like it’s happening,” he said.

“Apocalyptic, you mean,” I said.

“That’s right, and I think it’s very important you know that.”

I remembered, then, one of the first things Dad said to me after I came out. It took a day or two for him to say anything at all. We stood in the kitchen, the dining table between us, and he said, “I just don’t want you to go to Hell.”

I came to the realization that we did, in fact, agree. Something terrible was happening on a scale we couldn’t fathom. And we saw in each other the cause of this destruction.

We were at war, though we didn’t dare admit it. I was part of the force putting him out of work, destroying the industry on which this rural town, my town, depended, in the hopes that kids wouldn’t have to grow up stuffing family photos into tote bags, retreating from one disaster after another.

We paced either side of a line neither of us drew but couldn’t erase. The more we walked it, the longer it stretched. By the logic of his Bible, I was an atrocity—in allegiance with the evil overtaking the world. Yet I was also his son, his flesh and blood. How could we reconcile these disparate truths?

Our love sprang from a story in which a father gives up his only son to die for the sins of the world. When Dad wished for me a different life, one in his image, it was born of this love, as harsh as it was pure. But I didn’t tell him any of these thoughts. When I imagined where that conversation would go, I pictured a boy lying in the cool grass at night, trying to make sense of the stars.

For almost two hours we drove—the same two hours Dad drove to work, sometimes before dawn, sometimes after dusk, depending on the shift. The road navigated a valley where the creek had gone dry, and the hay had been cut early. The lines of hay traced the path of the tractor, shining in the evening sun like yellow-bricked roads, except these led not to the Emerald City but to the other end of a barbed-wire fence.

We rounded another corner, and the mine came into view. Dark piles of coal waited to be loaded into train cars. A handful of guys walked out from their shifts, faces smeared in coal dust. I recognized their exhaustion, the way they winced as they climbed into their trucks. It was the same burden I saw Dad carry every day to provide the kind of life for me he never had, a life he tried to sculpt with every prayer and sticky-noted page. The life he still glimpses in those plastic Walmart frames.

The glory of a photograph is its power to preserve. They keep the things we’ve lost, remind us of what used to be, and what used to be doesn’t suffer the corrosion of still existing. Only the past can be perfect, and what’s perfect is never true.

There wasn’t much to see. The sun fell against the horizon and sparked an orange glow across the dry grass. We drove a minute or so beyond the mine before turning for home, watching the light drain from the valley like a bathtub and listening to the songs we used to sing together.

Back at home, I stared at the photo Dad mentioned, taken in a time before the fire, before coming out, before a lot of things. I don’t know what I was thinking at the time. It would take three more years to say out loud the truth I felt that summer at the pool. There’s only so long you can run from a fire before you wonder how it would feel just to let it take you.

But in that photo, I am the son that Dad always dreamed of—the son I will never be.