Wednesday, January 25, 2006

Fire? Getting back to my opaque post from a week ago Things that go bump in the night. Being back in my place now, I have retrieved my camera's USB cable, and gotten the pictures I took out of it and into my ibook. There was fire in my apartment. It didn't really cause any damage, what damage there was the fire department occasioned as they hunted for it, and soaked the place down. I'm far more comfortable with fire as metaphor than as un-contained actuality. I can think of three or four basics types of fire. Categories not specifically corresponding to the types I learned about many years ago in aircraft team firefighting school at NAS Jacksonville (paper/wood, electrical, accelerant-liquid fueled I think). There is fire in a fireplace. Nothing symbolizes civilization so much as fire on the hearth stone, yet it is fire and in revery it stands for all the rest. Against this domestic fire are wild fires. Fires often assuming the form of a quick moving line of power and destruction, renewal passing through or over the forest or grassland. There is conflagration: fire assaulting the built environment. Attacking the home, the urban core, potentially culminating in ekpyrosis. What I had was another type: hidden fire. At 3:30 lightning appeared to strike the building, and started an electrical fire in the wall. I never saw this fire never heard it. By 4:00 am; though, I could smell it. By 5:00 I could see smoke. So I called the fire department. Fire departments on a rainy nights are not inclined to find things that do not wish to be found. They told me nothing was wrong and left. At 6:00 am when my kitchen filled with smoke again and the smell of fire pervaded the apartment, I began to look for fire. That's when I pulled my refrigerator out from the wall and saw the melted floor tiles. I called them back. they arrived trooped back in and looked sympathetically at what I showed them. They got out their infrared viewer and looked through it a bit, before deciding my refrigerator's compressor had burnt out and this was the source of the heat. They told me to leave it unplugged; then they left again. The smell of smoke came back and the floor continued to get hotter. Around 11:00 am  my apartment complex people came by with a new refrigerator (I had been to see them earlier). I was bowled over by the speed they got around to that on a Saturday morning, but I told them: "remember that part right after the dead frig part when I said I thought the building might be on fire? Feel the floor here in the kitchen, see how water boils off the floor." That's when the fire department got called out again. This time they found the fire, in the crawl space under the building. There is something unsettling, insidious about a hidden fire, especially when you know it's there, but is offering no proof of itself. Those last few hours it was like a quiet malignant companion, an actual and draining presence. In the days following the only odd thing that kept coming up is how many other people recalled hearing a loud bang in their neighborhoods that same night. People who live near me, but not that close. I had attributed the crash that woke me to lightning hitting my building. It was that loud and I awoke with the impression it shook the room. I was so startled I went outside in the rain to look around before trying to get back to sleep. Looking over last week's post I can see that I was always unsure at what caused the bang. Talking to other people reminded me that for a few seconds after the crash I thought it had been a sonic boom. It was only when I heard rain and far off rumbles of thunder I switched to the idea of lightning. 11:19:41 PM    comment [];trackback [];

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. 2006 Paul Bushmiller. Last update: 2/1/06; 8:57:47 PM.