A Birthday to Forget - Part 2

I have the most fortunate disasters. As catastrophes go... mine are simply the best. Let me explain...

 

My life is complicated... and this isn't unusual. Most everyone I know is dealing with trauma and drama on a semi-regular basis, and if you think yours is the worst... well as my old friend, Qui-Gon Jinn was fond of saying, "There is always a bigger fish." So with this in mind, whenever I am outlining my own myriad of issues to myself or others, I try my very best to highlight the positives. It gives me a much needed sense of perspective.

And when I am given mandatory evacuation orders due to an unprecedented fire threatening the very continued existence of my beloved community, I try to refocus that perspective, and count my blessings and my good fortunes... and I find that actually I've had quite a few...

I'm a lucky ducky #1
My wife's medications are filled at the pharmacy in the small mountain community of Boulder Creek. Why do I drive a half hour into the woods to pick up her medications on an almost weekly basis? One could argue that it is because I get to drive for an hour round trip through the woods on an almost weekly basis. One could also argue that my wife and I are incredibly lazy and we often neglect small life details like "there is a pharmacy within walking distance of my work". So... when I drove up to Boulder Creek on August 18th to pick up the bulk of her meds for the month, it was my first indication of the seriousness of this new fire that was scorching the nearby forest. The smoke in the air made breathing outside almost impossible. Without my N95 mask, my asthma might have floored me on the spot. I lived several years in Boulder Creek, and I'd never seen the smoke so thick even at the peak of fire season. I grabbed her prescriptions and I fled the town, back down to the lowlands of Santa Cruz...

The very next day on August 19th... Boulder Creek was closed for business, except for the fire station. Mandatory Evacuation. If I had waited even one more day to get her prescriptions... it would have been... for lack of a better word... an absolute clusterfuck. We wondered if the pharmacy would still be there when the fires subsided.

I'm a lucky ducky #2
The day before our own evacuation order... an old friend from elementary school (!!) offered to take me and Staci and my cat, Cricket, into his home, should we need to evacuate. "Preposterous!" I thought at the time, "We won't be evacuated! The fire is nowhere near us!" I had only reconnected with this friend perhaps six or eight months prior, after decades of near silence, but we quickly realized that we were being foolish when we lived so close. During the early days of the pandemic, we had interacted just enough to know that we both shared similar paranoia and took extreme precautions with the virus... resulting in mutual comfort levels about us merging our respective safety bubbles. So when the evacuation order came on the 20th, we already had somewhere to go... somewhere safe not only for my disabled wife, but for our pampered kitty cat... neither of which would have fared well in the crowded shelters as 64 thousand evacuees hit the streets at the same time.

I'm a lucky ducky #3
As CalFire's twice daily news briefings hit the twitterverse, and we watched the streams in growing horror, it quickly became clear that we weren't going back to our home in any speedy fashion. Our welcome at my friend's house was clearly not a long-term arrangement, and so we needed to find a stable place for Staci and Cricket to exist... her parent's house in Southern California seemed the best possible landing pad. All I had to do, was figure out how to transport my disabled and mostly bed-bound wife five hours south without killing her... and also the
same for a cat that hates to travel and gets badly car sick. Elevating himself from "old friend" to "frikkin SAINT"... my buddy offered to take us down south in his "Space Van™", and then drive me back... all in the same day. On August 22, we pulled out his seats, and tossed in an inflatable camping mattress for Staci to lie on for the journey, and Cricket's carrier fit perfectly into a cubby so that Staci could keep the kitty calm the whole way down. The trip was still hard... but I can't even begin to imagine how much harder it COULD have been.

I'm a lucky ducky #4
As we plotted course in the Space Van™ and engaged the warp drive, I was already tackling my next logistical boondoggle... the bed. Our bed was of a rare breed... after years, nay decades of searching for a bed that could accommodate Staci's back... we had finally achieved success. This sleep number bed was therapeutic, adjustable, long-lasting and it actually made her pain more manageable. But since it is the only thing my wife can sleep on without getting incrementally worse each day, it meant that if she was going to be in Southern California for more than a few days, then the bed had to come too. The Space Van™ was capable of great feats involving time and space, but a queen size bed set was just slightly out of reach. So I had to rent a cargo van and make the same drive again the very next day. A cargo van rental in Santa Cruz... during an evacuation of over 75,000 residents... on a Sunday... with no reservation. After frantically hunting around online for ANY cargo van rental place open on a Sunday, I finally found one... with the cheapest rates in town... open on a Sunday... with one van available for renting that day... just for that day. And it was one block from my workplace. I felt like I won the lottery in hell... but hey I'm still a winner, baby!

 

I'm a lucky ducky #5

I returned to Santa Cruz after a weekend of driving. Thirteen hours round trip on Saturday and sixteen hours round trip on Sunday. I crawled into my temporary living quarters (also known as my office) and collapsed. My plan was to drive back down the following weekend for a proper visit with the in-laws and to be with my own displaced family for a couple days that didn't involve panicked madness. So when my  car's starter failed to do its job on Wednesday... well I had some choice words at the time which now mysteriously escape me. The good news, though, was that this didn't happen on my weekend trip. My car gave me a scary two minutes of simpering whines... but still actually started, which then gave me the ability to complete a couple critical errands (without turning the engine off, of course) and then drop the thing off at an auto repair place. They had me up and running again by Friday. Just in time for my trip. Whew.

So to wrap up the details of my fortunate disaster... I spent a total of two weeks living out of my office. Thanks to COVID-19, brand new filters on the HVAC system kept most of the smoke outside... the couch in the office foyer folded down into a bed, which paired nicely with my sleeping bag... and the office has a kitchen and a full bathroom (including shower)... so my workplace was basically as good as any apartment or hotel room. And while my bad news just kept rolling in, one punch after another, all I could say was... "damn it could've been worse. So much worse." Even though every day was miserable, stressful, panic inducing, terrorizing, and varying degrees of asthmatic... I found myself feeling quite positive about our luck and good fortunes, and our friends and support network... and how it all worked in tandem to save our bacon.

Also it was my birthday in there somewhere. Phew... who cares!

To be concluded....