On Monday I came home from a meeting at the Rescue Squad to learn that a forest fire was closing in on my mother's home, the house where I grew up in rural Virginia. I called her just as she was throwing a few mementos into the back of the truck and preparing to flee down the back road. She wanted to know if there was anything in particular that I wanted her to save. From her windows she could see the fire coming over two ridge lines and working its way down into the shallow valley where the house sits.

I couldn't really think of any souvenirs that would be quite as meaningful as my mom surviving, and suggested that she continue her plan to evacuate. As she grabbed some clothes she described the scene: the fire had been burning since early that afternoon, and had consumed a couple hundred acres. It was almost certainly sparked by some fucking moron tossing a cigarette out a car window, casting a spark into leaves that hadn't seen a drop of rain in over a month. At this point, the fire was only burning on the other side of the narrow dirt road that runs past my mother's house. Helicopters had been dumping water on the flames, but as night fell the fire crews retreated to a defensive posture, trying to protect the houses that were in imminent danger. At this point that meant my mother's house and the closest neighbors, about a quarter-mile away. Their house was directly in the path of the flames, and crews had dug a fire line around it.

Then she was walking out the door, heading for a friend's house. She promised to call when she got there. I phoned the local volunteer fire department to get more information. They reiterated that the crews up on the mountain were there to protect the two endangered houses, and that full efforts to knock down the fire would resume in the morning. (I had already identified myself as a fellow volunteer firefighter in hopes that this might squeeze out a bit more technical information than I'd otherwise receive. We immediately shifted into lingo.) They had a tanker and a couple engines up there; they could draft water from my the pond in front of my mom's place if needed. "So no houses are in immediate danger tonight?" I asked. "Negative," he replied.

I talked to my sister on the phone while we waited for my mom to reach her haven for the evening. We both felt that there was some cause for optimism despite the very real possibility that the house could be destroyed. For one thing, the road was a natural firebreak, which could be enhanced by cutting down more trees and setting backfires. I also felt very confident that the crews on the mountain would protect the houses at all costs. They probably didn't mind if a few more acres went up in smoke, but I was certain they wouldn't be happy watching homes burn up in front of them. On the other hand, if the fire jumped the road, fire crews might quickly find themselves surrounded and be forced to retreat. As the fire expanded, it would become progressively more difficult to monitor the whole road and prevent flames from jumping the gap.

It was difficult to get my mind around what the loss of the house would mean. I spent my entire childhood there, in the foothills of the Appalachian mountains, and maintain a strong identification with it. All our family photos and history was there. But oddly enough, I was relatively untroubled by the potential destruction of these irreplaceable items. More troubling was the idea that the house itself might be lost. The original structure was a one-room log cabin inhabited over 200 years ago; our living room ceiling was a little over six feet high, built in the modest proportions of the day. Generations of people lived and died there. My mom had renovated a few years ago and added some space and a more modern kitchen than the spare one I knew from childhood. I hated the idea that a fire could devour that old home after it had endured so long on the land.

I talked to my mom later that night and tried to cheer her with my cautiously positive assessment of the situation. She was not in much of a mood to be mollified. She later said that when she left the house she'd said her good-byes to it, assuming she'd never see it intact again. "I had a lot of fun working on you," she'd told the structure, "and I guess I'll have fun rebuilding you."