By DAVID IZRAELEVITZ
Los Alamos
How is one to honor an event that marked one generation in the midst of another that will equally be sealed in the memory of the next? Maybe it is to remember that while time does not heal all wounds, but that painful memories gain, in time, the blessing of distance and perspective. As the Cerro Grande Fire was a defining moment in my life in Los Alamos, and now, twenty years later, we look back and remember and learn, so let us hope that the same will be for our children who see, in these times, their own defining crisis.
Unlike many friends, our loss in the fire was trivial; a ruined floor from a melting icebox, some smoke damage from a window cracked open. The pain came by proximity, standing by friends as they surveyed the loss of possessions too valuable to measure. I can only imagine that even after all these years, the place these items held in their lives reinsert themselves not only on anniversaries and birthdays, but at random and unexpected times. Even without the loss of possessions, strange memories seemed to elbow in for me for a long time; when I hear the dull drone of propellers above town, those slurry-carrying planes are back again, and I stiffen.
But the losses and the stresses of the Cerro Grande fire are not what come to mind mostly when I seek for memories of those days. I remember more clearly an elevated time when neighbors helped neighbors, the sense of relief that no firefighters or other emergency workers were injured in the chaos. I remember stories of midlife love found between two lonely people in FEMAville, those empathetic glances and handshakes and offers of assistance from around the world, the amazed and grateful look in my children’s eyes when they were offered unlimited tokens at a Santa Fe bowling alley. This latter instance is one I come back to when I want to think about the good in the world. I wonder whether the attendant had any idea what a significant and affirming gesture that simple act of kindness meant to us parents, whose stress and burdens were so meaningfully relieved by watching our children overdose on pinball machines.
After the fire, the schoolchildren of Los Alamos made seedballs, and I was one of the chaperones of a group as we planted trees all along the Quemazon trail. I thought at the time that I would take my boys back some day to this trail, to see the young trees that they planted mature enough to bear fruit. We would talk then about time, and memory, of loss and of gain. Now I realize that the longer I wait, the grander the trees will become, and the more majestic the view.
Of course, twenty years is a very long time. 9/11, war, loss of family members and of friends, even another fire and evacuation are now milestones that adds distance to this, my first communal emergency. But good things too have happened; that boy excited by unlimited pinball machine play is now married and the father of a one-year-old.
And so, I look around me, at the trees that have grown to maturity, but I also look at the saplings whose majesty is to come. I look at my adult children and their role as parents that emerged in a two decades that came too quickly, and at children walking in my neighborhood and know that their parents will be amazed at the passage of time as well. What will they remember of these days? Like the kind attendant at that bowling alley, long ago shuttered and then restored as Meow Wolf, what can we do so that those children we see now, their high school graduation, their kindergarten friendships, their seventh-grade puppy love disrupted , what can we do so that their remembrance of these months, that as scary as they will be, will also be sprinkled with memory of love, and kindness, and neighborly self-sacrifice.
That is what the Cerro Grande fire taught me, a lesson that is just as valuable today as it was 20 years ago, and one that will be just as valuable 20 years hence.
