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I piled cheese on the bread, plopped lunch on the grill and looked out the window. Smoke! OMG, that’s smoke! When you live in the mountains, smoke a quarter mile away might as well be in your yard. It was hot outside. The air was deathly still. Nonetheless, updrafts live on mountainsides.
Right then, that smoke was below me. If that smoke was wild, the updraft would bring fire straight to me. I figured I had ten minutes of safety left, before I’d be fighting fire or running for my life. I was on the phone with 911, when the bright orange flames broke through the dark smoke. It’s wild I told 911 and hung up the phone.
Two, maybe three minutes had passed since I first saw the smoke. That fire was burning brush and moving fast. I turned off the stove, grabbed my car keys, ran outside, shut off the propane tank, and grabbed the hose.
It does not matter how prepared you think you are; you never are. I did not have time to waste, but it took me 10, maybe 20 seconds, to decide where to take my stand. From the deep recesses of memory, or instinct, my brain shouted wildfires feast on wild grasses. Okay. Good. I was not panicking. I was still thinking. Fire moves fast in an uphill draft and slows down, on the downside. There was a gully (aka a holler) between me and the fire. When the fire reached that gully, it would slow down, but the second it hit the bottom, the…
