Forged By Fire
Disaster shapes us:
We are stronger.
Your voices are proof

Three Strikes

Does lightning ever strike the same location twice? Probably not, but does it strike the same people?
Try three times!
Losing our home to fire called up two previous nightmare scenarios with fire in our lives: one, back in the ’70s, involved a freight train loaded with propane that jumped the track and blew up behind the office warehouses, which were part of my husband’s business at the time. Fortunately, no one was hurt or killed, though the site of hundreds of burned out storage spaces resembled a World War II bombing aftermath.
The second strike was on a simple lake cabin sixty miles from Dallas where we and nine other families, all good friends, spent many happy weekends. Our children and theirs preferred the muddy water and woods to their city homes, and when an arsonist burned two of the cabins – one of them ours – the now-grown children felt robbed of their childhood.
The third strike was the recent Durango Valley Fire. It totally destroyed our mountain home and three other nearby houses. The third strike was the worst.

In the early 1980s, after years of battling various serious illnesses, my husband retired from his business and decided to follow his dream of living in the mountains. Flat, hot Texas had never much appealed to his Upstate New York heritage. We had frequently visited friends who lived at Falls Creek; we were enchanted with that area, compelled to buy a rim lot with a million-dollar view of valley and river. I recall standing on a stump, looking right, left, up, down and thinking (I now realize, with arrogance) that nothing could ever spoil that view.
We finished our home in 1985. Because of another unexpected illness, we did not get to enjoy our house until the summer of 1986 but the 16 years that followed were all we could have wished for.
Our aerie, almost a thousand feet above the valley, was a dream location. In the beginning, we nestled among the ponderosas and gambel oak, then, fearing fire we thought could threaten us from below, we began to clear the eastern slopes. Although fire danger was always in the back of our minds, we worried little, enjoying the four seasons with their plentiful winter snows and summer rains and the golden days of autumn. We skied, we walked, we watched the deer and elk cross our land. We laughed at Abert’s squirrels gamboling in the trees, bemoaned the rock squirrels that ate up every summer flower I planted. After afternoon showers, double rainbows stretched north and south over Missionary Ridge, and early September snowfalls painted Silver Mesa white over the distant evergreens and golden aspen.
Winters were magic. We’d go to bed and during the night awaken to a soft silence of falling snow turning the wooded slopes into a dazzling fairyland. Forest animals and birds were all about, even in deepest winter: pine siskins chattering in the firs and Stellar’s jays squawking at the deer over an apple on the ground, or bird seed fallen on the wooden deck. The deer liked the seed better than the birds liked it and would clomp onto the deck fearlessly to get it. One early morning we had a visit from a bobcat chasing a terrified rabbit, only the bobcat more resembled the supposedly, at that time, non-existent Colorado lynx. Another night, 30 elk bedded down in our south meadow on their way from the heights above us to the river bank far below. In summer the black bears made themselves an unwelcome, marvelous nuisance.
There was more to Durango than the surrounding wonders of nature. We quickly discovered and became acquainted with friendly residents, both native and transplants like ourselves. There was the great advantage of Fort Lewis College, of churches, a hospital, banks and shops and restaurants for every need and desire. There were numerous opportunities for excursions to historic Anasazi ruins, for jeeping to ghost towns on high mountain trails, for hiking through fields of summer wildflowers, canoeing the Animas, and skiing in the winter snow that, until recently, seemed more than sufficient. Best of all, with the advent in 1987 of Music in the Mountains, there was music, music, music. We named our house Mountain Music.
Nature is a great humbler and a teacher. In our naiveté we think we can control our physical environment building homes in flood plains and on river banks and ocean beaches. And on steep slopes in a forest. We never thought a fire would get us from the west and only cleared the east slope. The wind took care of our bad judgement.
Tornadoes, floods, hurricanes and mudslides reshape man’s space at will, often with total destruction, sometimes not. Fire, especially a forest fire creating violent weather as it burns, the kind of fire which burned our house, leaves ash, twisted metal, rotten concrete, blackened, hollow trees, scalded earth and little else. It was the
kind of fire that makes us realize the impermanence of our existence, living our lives surrounded by the things we accumulate – shiny things we line our nests with, like two-legged packrats.
The people of Durango have been so caring to us it calls up tears to think about the offers for lodging, meals, and comfort we have received. This is a special community. It will bounce back stronger and more beautiful than ever after this summer’s devastation. The trees and flowers and grass will return and, if we’re lucky, so will the rain and snow.
People will return to build their homes in unsuitable locations, maybe even those who have been
struck by lightning three times.
There will be a difference. Instead of always having “other things to do,” and failing to pick the apples off the tree when we thought “all the world was full of apples,” (as local poet Charlie Langdon aptly expressed in his poem, “Winter Apples”), we promise never again to worry about “things,” but to
savor friends, family and community each and every day.
That way, if lightning should strike a fourth time, there’s nothing tangible for it to destroy. We’ll keep our memories.
– Katherine Freiberger