What We Learned During the Fire

I returned yesterday from four days in San Diego County. While I wasn't directly endangered by the fires throughout the county, I was close to several of them at various points during the week. The hotel (a resort, they called it, complete with golf course) was about 7 miles from one fire, and the college I was visiting as part of an accreditation team was about 5-6 miles from another one. Each day the members of the team I was on would awaken to a sky filled with smoke and ash, and each night we would return to the resort and see the mountains backlit by the flames of infernos. To describe it as surreal would perhaps not do it justice.

I drove down to San Diego on Monday. The news was already reporting that fires had broken out near Malibu and in Orange County. I hadn't heard yet about the ones in San Diego County, but when the Accrediting Commission asks you to visit a college, you show up and do your job. I drove on even when confronted by a thick wave of smoke in the northern part of San Diego. When we held our first team meeting that afternoon, we found out that the college had actually be closed at 1 p.m. due to the poor air quality from the heavy smoke in the area. We went about preparing ourselves for a visit, not knowing if we would actually be able to go onto the campus the next day.

On Tuesday we got up and drove toward one of the fires because that was the direction of the campus. Imagine choosing to head in the direction of a blaze. When we got to campus, we were met by about twenty-five employees: faculty, staff, and administrators. The college was still closed due to the air quality although the wind had shifted and was blowing the smoke in the opposite direction, away from the campus. We met with and interviewed as many people as we could, and we toured a campus that has two new buildings open and one more soon to open (with a gorgeous theater and an entire half of a large, beautiful building devoted to the English Department--sigh). Yet we visited a campus without students. It was eerily deserted. We could only imagine what the cafeteria looks like when it's filled with people. The new lab space must be packed with students at all hours of the day, but we will never know because they were told to stay home. Even the bookstore looks great, but we couldn't go inside because those employees were probably either evacuated from or worried about their own homes. At about 3 p.m., one of the campus police officers arrived with the college president to tell us that we had to evacuate. The college had gotten what is known as a Reverse 911 call (where the system calls you to warn you of an emergency rather than the other way around). The wind had changed again, and the smoke was once again threatening the air quality. Within 10 minutes, we had packed everything up and were on our way back to the hotel. We spent the rest of the day talking with each other, eating dinner with each other, and writing some notes for what promised to be a most unusual team report to the commission.

Wednesday promised to be another strange day. By this point, college officials decided that the campus would remain closed the rest of the week. We, however, needed to review documents that the college had gathered if we were going to attempt to finish our evaluation. Some of us, myself included, got to take a trip to the other college in the district to meet with the chancellor and his staff and to attend a special meeting of the Board of Trustees. By this point in the week, you could feel the heat from the fires no matter where you went. The sun was shining, of course, but the heat was not the kind you feel from sunshine. And ash was everywhere. I was wearing a black shirt that day, and it looked like I was having the worst ever case of dandruff, a case so bad that it had spread to everyone else's clothes too. We finished at the district offices, returned to the campus, and proceeded to review documents and write drafts of our individual sections of the report that we would submit to the Accrediting Commission. Again, we spent much of the rest of the day in each other's company. We certainly bonded as a team during those four days of the fires.

I should mention that all of the San Diego television stations were broadcasting the news of the fires around the clock. We never went into the restaurant or bar or hotel office, anywhere with a television set, without the latest news reports. Each day we would wake up not knowing if we might even be able to return home. One morning the I-5 was closed because of a fire near Camp Pendleton. The next day it was open again, but the I-15 (the only other major route north) was closed. The news would be contradictory at times too, just as you might expect when so much is happening at the same time all over a county as large as San Diego. Some stations would say a freeway was closed while others were saying that it was open. Not knowing the region well myself, I could only watch and wonder if any of the blazes they were discussing were anywhere near me. I only knew the one way home to Los Angeles, and that's the I-5. I had to know what was going on for my own safety, of course, but at some point, you become so immersed in the stories of the lives of the many, many people who were evacuated to the stadium or whose homes were lost, in the stories about the attempts to evacuate the animals, ranging from house pets to horses and livestock to even the ones at the Wild Animal Park north of San Diego, and in the stories of the little ways we care for each other. One of the more memorable images for me was the stack of water bottles that had been donated for the people who had been relocated to Qualcomm Stadium. You wouldn't think such a little thing as that would be moving to someone as cynical as I am, but at the bottom of the screen, the news read that so many people had donated fresh water that no more was needed at the stadium. That's a generosity of spirit we don't see too often.

There are other images that I won't soon forget. On our way to campus one morning we were stopped at an intersection so that the next shift of law enforcement agencies could leave. After about twenty police vehicles passed in front of us, we were able to continue on. One night, about the time we decided to go to the drive-thru for Taco Bell, we had to stop for about half a dozen fire engines racing at full speed. On our final day, before we could leave the campus for the last time, we had to stop for about twenty evacuees who had been relocated to one of the parking lots at the school and were crossing the street to get some of the food that had been donated for them. Sometimes it's just the sheer number that overwhelms you.

Of course, not everyone was focused on the fires during that time. My stepfather is a golfer, so I know a bit about how much golfers love the game. I was not prepared, however, to wake up one morning and see several dozen people waiting for the official course start time of 7 a.m. It's as if nothing could stop them from playing a round of golf, not even the threat of a wildfire or the possibility of inhaling too much smoke. When they were asked to leave the course in the middle of the afternoon one day because of the poor air quality, they actually grumbled. We learned later that the resort was hosting some sort of college tournament with players from all over the United States, but it did seem strange to me that they were apparently more interested in getting in a game rather than trying to get home from a region engulfed in a series of deadly fires.

Our final day was Thursday. We had done much of the writing the night before and just had some final revisions to make. It's kind of like writing a 10-page research paper in two days, using mostly written evidence and interviews. At least, the section I took responsibility for was about 10 pages. We knew we were leaving, but we were still unsure how. At around noon, we presented our brief "exit report" to a dozen brave people who had come to campus to hear what we had learned about their beloved school. We said our goodbyes (hugs all around from this team who had shared so much) and got into our vehicles and headed north (most of us, anyway) on the I-5. We passed the charred roadsides near Camp Pendleton. We drove through thick smoke still billowing across the freeway in Orange County. I actually stopped in Mission Viejo for gas and couldn't believe how many people were out and about, mostly young people whose schools had been shut down. They seemed to be completely oblivious to the layer of smoke that surrounded them. I did stop on my own campus for about an hour, but even there the smoke still hung too thickly. When I finally got home last night, I dumped the luggage in the living room and fell asleep on the bed.

I know it's a cliche to think about how good it feels to return home. But I was exhausted and very grateful to be able to sleep in my own bed and use my own shower. We don't realize how much energy we expend when our stress levels are elevated. I guess spending four days with that heightened sense of awareness, always wondering if we would need to be evacuated from the college again or perhaps even from our hotel, takes a great deal of energy. At this point, I have no idea how I'd feel if asked to serve on another accreditation visiting team. This one was so unlike the others I've been on. All I can say for certain is that last night was the first time I've had a good night's sleep since Sunday.