{"id":469,"date":"2005-07-15T14:33:00","date_gmt":"2005-07-15T14:33:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=469"},"modified":"2005-07-15T14:33:00","modified_gmt":"2005-07-15T14:33:00","slug":"469","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=469","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Back on track<\/strong><\/p>\n

M. and I have been home for three days, and life is beginning to settle down. It will be a long time before we forget the 3 a.m. evacuation and the drive into the dark mountains, not knowing if we would see our little house in the woods again.<\/p>\n

You can read all about it at Nature Blog<\/a>, probably more than you want to know. <\/p>\n

I was on deadline with The Pomegranate<\/em><\/a> when all this started. Most people, it seems, grab photo albums and such when they are forced to evacuate; I’ve seen that time and again. M. took her parents’ wedding picture, I know that. But I had the little box of 3×5 cards for tracking article submissions to The Pom<\/em> and a flash memory stick with all the files on it.<\/p>\n

We arrived at a friend’s house at what would become “Burro Camp” about 4 a.m. and spent the next three hours trying to sleep on sofas. When we had left home, our gravel county road was the new fire line, so in the state between waking and sleeping I tried to visualize a shimmering blue curtain running along it between the national forest and the home sites. All the fire had to do was move into a stand of dry, beetle-killed ponderosa pines, burn hot, and then toss embers down the hill to the road. <\/p>\n

That never happened. When I returned, I could see that it stopped about 30 yards short of the dead trees. The wind shifted, I suppose. And the firefighters never had to make a desperate fight along the road to save the houses. <\/p>\n

The fire did cross the road at a higher point, but quickly stopped, whether due to a wind shift or to daytime aerial slurry drops I don’t know, since I don’t know whether that part burned before dawn or not.<\/p>\n

Of course, it is hard to keep from running a mental movie of yourself sifting through the ashes. I was kicking myself a little for not grabbing items from the outdoor shrine, located in a little grove uphill from the house. (Would a brass statue of Hekate from Sacred Source<\/a> survive a fire?) What sort of Pagan leaves behind the household gods? On the other land, leaving those “graven images” there provides a focus point of magical work.<\/p>\n

Anyway, it’s nice to be back, on several levels.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Back on track M. and I have been home for three days, and life is beginning to settle down. It will be a long time before we forget the 3 a.m. evacuation and the drive into the dark mountains, not knowing if we would see our little house in the woods again. You can read […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s6xQTg-469","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":762,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=762","url_meta":{"origin":469,"position":0},"title":"A ritual no more","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"November 7, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"I like living where I do. I like going down to the old schoolhouse to vote in a building where time seems to have stopped about 1950 (except in two classrooms that are now a library).I like seeing the election judges whom I otherwise might meet only at the post\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":13953,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=13953","url_meta":{"origin":469,"position":1},"title":"We Love Trees, and We Live with Their Bodies","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"March 5, 2025","format":false,"excerpt":"A forestry \"masticator,\" which mulches small trees and large branches, is here used to pull a ponderosa pine trunk off a hillside. On Thursday, February 27th, M and I went on a city shopping trip, returning mid-afternoon. I heard a chainsaw running and thought it was a neighbor cutting road.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"animism\"","block_context":{"text":"animism","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=animism"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/masticator-pulling-trunk.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/masticator-pulling-trunk.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/masticator-pulling-trunk.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/masticator-pulling-trunk.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/masticator-pulling-trunk.jpg?resize=1050%2C600&ssl=1 3x"},"classes":[]},{"id":13374,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=13374","url_meta":{"origin":469,"position":2},"title":"My Interview about Time Slips, Synchronicity, and a ‘Fairy Portal’","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"May 18, 2023","format":false,"excerpt":"As promised, my interview with host Timothy Renner of the Strange Familiars podcast has now dropped: \"Episode 395, Time Slips and Portals.\" You can play it on the site or download it. ((I always download podcasts and shuffle them onto and off of my iPhone, because I do not always\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Colorado\"","block_context":{"text":"Colorado","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=colorado"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/395-1400-1024x1024.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/395-1400-1024x1024.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/395-1400-1024x1024.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":3811,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=3811","url_meta":{"origin":469,"position":3},"title":"Thought Crime in the Writing Classroom","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"February 11, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"I taught writing for twenty years. I heard some shocking stuff\u2014especially in the \"Creative Nonfiction\" class, which occasionally produced some, shall we say, highly confessional material. And there was one outright psycho student who, lucky for me, fixated on a different professor as the cause of all her problems\u2014not to\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"academia\"","block_context":{"text":"academia","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=academia"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8287,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=8287","url_meta":{"origin":469,"position":4},"title":"Not Dead and the House Is Still Standing","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"October 26, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"Sorry about the lack of content. Everything went topsy-turvy on the 17th and is just now returning to normal, or to a \"new normal.\" I left home on the 11th for a trip to eastern North Dakota to go grouse hunting with an old friend who himself was facing heart\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Colorado\"","block_context":{"text":"Colorado","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=colorado"},"img":{"alt_text":"william-f-schmalsle","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/william-f.-schmalsle.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1247,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1247","url_meta":{"origin":469,"position":5},"title":"‘True Samhain’ is Friday","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"November 2, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Now that the costumes are put away, note that Samhain calculated astrologically (Sun at 15 degrees of Scorpio) falls on Saturday, Nov. 6, at 6:42 a.m. Greenwich time, which would be roughly midnight on Friday here in the Mountain Time Zone.Last year Peg and I had a little blog-discussion of\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"movies\"","block_context":{"text":"movies","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=movies"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=469"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}