yesterday, april 22nd, dawned just like any other southeastern new mexico spring day: dry, cold, windy, clear. the news said that the winds would be worse than ever so for some reason my wife wanted to pack emergency supplies in the back of the old suv - tent, sleeping bags, documents, emergency supplies. wise people said prepare for an emergency.

heck of it was, a neighbor came by to tell us we'd been evacuated. this was at about two. by then we'd moved on to other projects but nonetheless we packed what was left into two cars now, four dogs, a cat, three teens, whatever they chose to bring with them, and off we went. a woman told us to go the back way so we did. this would put us in mayhill, an even smaller town than cloudcroft, but it would take remote backroads to get us there, maybe about twelve miles. we rolled into mayhill about three. it was a slightly festive atmosphere - more people than usual - but not necessarily evacuees. we bought some water and ordered some hamburgers to go from the restaurant.

in there the word was that they'd already contained the fire. the fire was down by where our road meets the highway, halfway between mayhill and cloudcroft, and they'd blocked the highway for a bit with all the fire vehicles, but they'd pounced on that thing like russians on mariupol. it started on private land but then hit the national forest but all that did was allow lots of different fire crews to jump on it, surround it, hose it, and keep it from going anywhere. it never got over a square acre. the evacuation was apparently out of an "abundance of caution."

i was proud of our boys for being so efficient, since up in ruidoso they had a fire come right up against a school in session, and then burn a hundred buildings or so before they got it contained. nobody's died yet, and i think that's true throughout the state, but it's been a wild fire season and things like this get everyone on edge.

we got home and unloaded the pets and the hamburgers, left the tents & emergency supplies in the car. wind was still at about twenty, pretty stiff. my sister called and i was telling her about it, but just then we had a power failure that was to last until about midnight. some tree fell on some power line somewhere, throwing the whole system into chaos. for us, it throws us into chaos too, although the generator worked just fine. it makes a lot of noise, and we get the smell of gas everywhere, but at least we have internet and light when we need it. i didn't really sleep well though, knowing there was no power and knowing it would come on at some random time. when it came on, around midnight, it woke me up.

certain things are not right when you have no power. I couldn't charge my hearing aids. i couldn't take my usual shower, because hot water heater and even pump weren't working. my wife gets paranoid about the refrigerator being open because it will lose what little cold air it has.

now, well into morning, all is back to semi-normal. the open window lets in some of the cool breeze. the wind is still a little stiff, actually i would call it noisy. but they consider that normal around here, in fact, the whole blessed experience was pretty common in the big picture. most people, i sense, don't leave for these evacuations. it's either because they have a lot of faith in the fire crews, or maybe they are very attached to their homes and their guns. but in any case we didn't see too many of them on the roads, though a lot of people were running back and forth getting supplies. evacuees? not that many. Us, we were there, in our cars, our pets looking expectant, sitting in prominent parking places, eating our burgers. it was one to remember.