I stood for two hours alone in a boat in the rain today, watching my sailors going upwind and downwind. The rain was a downpour, heavy and incessant. I was bedraggled and wet and it was raining so hard that I didn't bother to change out of my foul weather gear after practice but wore it in the car. When I turned the keys in the ignition the dashboard told me the temperature was 47 degrees. My hands tingled and glowed as they warmed up.
As I drove home I saw a lot of smoke billowing in the air and turned left off of Pleasant Street to go look at it. It was a house on fire, and I stood on some train tracks and watched it burn. I was upwind, so I never smelled the smoke. But the crackling was so loud! It was way louder than I expected, and somehow the noise, more than the visual of a house burning, conveyed danger to me. The flames went way way up, to twice the height of the house. There were firemen, but they were turning their hoses on the house next door, to make sure it didn't go up too. This house was doomed. I stood on the railroad tracks in the rain and watched across the backyard until the roof collapsed. It was mesmerizing. Terrible, in the old-fashioned and serious sense of the word. The black smoke billowed up in patterns I didn't understand -- sometimes like a mushroom cloud and sometimes like the stream of steam from a kettle. When I first got there only half the house was on fire, but as I stood and watched the whole thing was consumed. I watched the roof almost start to dissolve -- tiny cracks of orange visible where it had been solid, and then a sort of buckling and peeling, like old paint on a porch railing. When the first half of the roof collapsed it was as though the fire had been set free and it surged up so high and so dramatically that I thought oh god, this could get bad. I realized I was standing next to a parking lot full of oil delivery trucks. Maybe that's a bad idea, I thought, but I was rooted in place, listening to the crackle and watching burning fragments of the house fall down.
A woman in a raincoat came and stood beside me, telling me that she lived on the road and that she had company coming tomorrow and that her daughter called and told her to look out the window and that she hoped everybody had gotten out. A couple of guys came by and one told the other "It's a railroad car." I said, "It's a house." They came over and stood beside me and said, "A house? Wow. Look at that. It's a house." One of them lit up a cigarette.
I left and went home. The rain was still coming down, hard. I listened to Fresh Air. A mile or two north of Yarmouth I had to slow down for flashing blue lights and an ambulance and a red car, crumpled, way off the road at the lip of the woods.
Spellbinding.
Posted by: Carol Anne | May 04, 2006 at 02:01 AM