Showing up to work as a wildfire fire burns six miles away

I’m a doggy daycare attendant living in downtown Leadville, where the Willow fire blazes in the background six miles away.

Tourists were still buying “Mt. Massive: mugs on July 3 as ash fell and smoke billowed. I’m part lifeguard, part cashier. It feels insane to be working and cleaning the dog bath while trapped in a bubble of smoke. I should be organizing my Jeep-turned-getaway-pod.

We’re not under evacuation quite yet, but the number of emergency personnel fighting the fire multiplies each day — we’re now at over 500 — and the damage is more than 4,000 acres deep, at 10% containment.

Stay, or go?

I’ve lived here for 10 years. You’d hate to linger too long, but you’d hate to dip out too early.

When the fire started on the hillside by Turquoise Lake on June 28, I was dog-sitting for my yoga teacher, who burst through the front door and said, “We’re on fire!” So we rushed outside and stood in the road with our neighbors.

Leadville sits at 10,200 feet above sea level, home to some of the highest fourteeners in the Rockies. But that day the mountains were a vague silhouette as smoke shot into the sky, revealing a red sun.

I think all of Leadville is pretty invested in how this story ends. Parts of the town have already been evacuated. Now there’s parking everywhere on my block, and the population is thinning out. My partner, Blue, and I laughed about a Facebook comment on the emergency updates page by a man in a tall cowboy hat describing Leadville’s historic grit, adding that he would settle the fire through “hand to hand combat.”

It takes a natural disaster to bring us together, to shake us from the trance of individuality. And we’ll need it, because it’s not the first time many have thought Leadville was done. When the Gold Rush died, when the Silver Rush cracked, when the mines closed, when the railroads quit. At a population of just over 2,000, we’re still out here. We battle the forces of wind, heat, water and time.

I’ve been sitting tight in case my side of town undergoes an evacuation order. Several days into the fire, the smoke was so thick that there was nothing to see. I could no longer make out the shape of the mountains or see how close the fire was.

It’s a waiting game now, and I’ll go when they say go.

You know that dilemma about what to grab if your house is burning down? We’re there, but we have the luxury of time to plan our next move, at least. I need to work, because I’m not sure how long this will go on.

The first day of deciding what to pack, I was a goddamn monk. Take nothing, let my art burn…but that didn’t last long. A few days later, I examined every one of my possessions and cleaned out the Jeep, realizing I only have so much room.

At the dog daycare, I have a front row seat to humanity, but I do see some main character syndrome. One lady went on about how bad the fire was for her cat’s stress levels. “She won’t snuggle me,” she said. “Y’all got bigger problems than I can solve,” is what I thought as I went back to pricing freeze-dried duck heads.

An older woman leaned in to tell me, “I’ve had a lot of blessings in my life,” before buying a $99 bag of dog food for the teenager in front of her who couldn’t afford it. Then she stepped back into the thick wall of smoke settling over the town.

One woman came in and said: “We should do public hangings of people who start forest fires and destroy my favorite place to park my RV.” One guy asked me whether I thought they would hold the Leadville 100 in August, or if all his training would be “down the drain.”

My response to all of this has been to hug a basset hound and regulate my nervous system. We all need to have a little bit of grace with each other.

I can complain about continuing to go into work as the West burns, but imagine showing up to hike up steep terrain for three and a half hours in heavy gear, to race towards geysers of heat and shooting sparks to hold the weight of a town in your hands. Thank you, firefighters, you brave motherfuckers.

As a writer, saving my stacks of journals seems somewhat pretentious next to preserving family photos. How do we assign value to the things we own? What’s worth keeping? How many sequin vests do I need? By day six, Blue and I had gotten out the snowmobile trailer and loaded up his dirt bike, our raft, the cross country skis and my splitboard. Now we’re thinking about what it’d be like to start over.

I’m struggling against a high horse, that my own personal crisis is the most important crisis. Because we each have a story about the fire: Whether you’re stressed over a business, the dip in tourism or your grandma’s property that’s been in the family since the 1800s, we are all up against the devil of uncertainty.

Whatever your role is in the big story we’re telling, make it count. After packing the Jeep for an approaching wildfire, I can tell you that relationships matter, not the stuff collecting dust.

I’m grateful for all the forces at work to save Leadville. Thank you to firefighters, search and rescue volunteers and courageous crews. Thank you to friends who checked in when columns of smoke were rising and did not stop.

And thank you to those opening their homes as we flee. May we find soft places to land and the courage to begin again.