“This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays.”1
Scenes from a West Texan Thursday:
10:40 pm: My fiancée calls to tell me to go outside. “Is the whole place burning down?” I ask. It isn’t, not yet, but outside, even in the city, you can still smell the smoke. My eyes still burn, and my throat is as sore as it has been since I quite smoking over ten years ago. My clothes—and even my car—smell as day-after smoky as a post-bar-hop hangover.
1:15 pm: Shortly after a kid asks, for the bazillionth time, what foreshadowing means, all of the electricity at the high school cuts out and remains off for half an hour.
3:15 pm: My cell phone starts playing Depeche Mode’s “Somebody”. That’s odd, because it means my fiancée is calling and she knows I’m in class at this hour.
3:20 pm: The math department chair knocks on my door. She tells me that Highway 285 is closed, all the way to Amarillo. Another math teacher who resides in our yellow city is on MapQuest.Com, she says, finding alternate routes. I send cute e-mails to everyone I know alluding to that damnable Tony Christie song. “Show me the way to Amarillo,” I type over and over, chuckling at my own cleverness.
3:35 pm: I close and lock my door and race the kids out of the building. I get in my car and head toward Channing.
3:37 pm: I realize that my front driver’s-side tire is flat and turn around to air it up at Allsup’s.
3:50 pm: On the road to Channing, fires rage in all directions. I’ve rarely been so scared and rarely wished so strongly that I had my camera. I can see billows of hellish red raging smoke and sparks of actual fire at all four compass points. I can actually feel an irregular heat in the car, and I certainly smell the smoke.
3:51 pm: The phone rings. It is another teacher, who tells me that they were advised to go the other way out of town, through Borger, and that the highway through Channing will soon be closed.
3:52 pm: I swear, and turn around. My dad calls and tells me that the fires in Hartley County – which I can see raging all around me – are contained, according to the scroll at the bottom of his screen.
4:00 – 5:00 pm: I stop in each town I pass through to put air in my tire. I watch the massive cottony smoke fumes rise over Dumas in my rearview mirror. On the phone, my father (age 66) scolds me (thirtysomething), saying I should have stayed in Dumas, but it looks from here as if Dumas is burning. Also the whole northern Panhandle. And the river basin.
Through Stinnett and Borger, the air clears, but I look west as I cross the Canadian River. An ginormous black mushroom cloud rises into an eerily blue sky.
5:25 pm: My son calls, wondering how he will get to his guitar lesson if I am not back in town. I am glad that he is so obsessive compul— responsible, but—I can’t work miracles, here . . .
5:40 pm: Driving on rims and unwilling to spend the time to put on the spare, I desperately search Panhandle for an air pump. I learn two things:
- Panhandlians don’t appeciate hearing “Where the @#$%^ in your @#$%^ing godforsaken piece of @#$%^ little @#$%^ing town is a working @#$%^ing air pump?,” and
- The only working @#$%^ing air pump in Panhandle is at a quaint little hobby shop called, swear-to-God, Buttons-n-Bows.
6:10 pm: For the first time in my entire life, I am glad to see Amarillo.
spacedark
1 Douglas Adams, the true prophet.
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