By Kate Wheeling, Photo: Senior Airman Crystal Housman/Flickr, Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), February 2, 2022
On November 8, 2018, Sally awoke to the smell of smoke and a phone call from her daughter, imploring her to flee her home. It was 8:30 a.m., but the sky was dark with smoke. The Camp Fire was bearing down on Paradise, California, and the entire town was under an evacuation order. The air was so warm from the encroaching fire that Sally left her coat behind, mistaking the fall morning for a summer night.
As Sally, 69, drove away, she heard her neighbors’ propane tanks explode. She led a line of cars on a winding narrow road, banked, at times, by steep ravines. Through the haze of smoke, Sally could see little but the pavement in front of her and flames to the east that made it seem like she was driving into the fire, rather than away from it.
“To survive this, I intentionally shrunk my awareness to absolute essentials—I was like an automaton responding to the police order to evacuate out this road, just trusting that this would get me out,” Sally, who asked that her last name be withheld, said. “That kind of hyperfocus—put one foot in front of the other and repeat—persisted long after I was safe from the fire.”
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