Canby Herald Online

Fire: a child's perspective

• By: Peggy Savage  
• Published: 10/13/2009 4:21:28 PM

A couple of weeks ago, I covered a sales event at a local restaurant, the type where dinner is free to anyone willing to listen to high pressure salesmen try to convince you that you can’t live without their product. In this case, a smoke alarm system.

In the course of the evening, these two young men hammered the point that people don’t know what it’s like to be stuck inside a burning house, until it’s too late.

But I do know what it’s like, and as I listened to those words and watched towering flames consume one house after another on their video screen, it all came back to me.

It was a hot morning in July. I was 8 years old, a scrawny, tow-headed know-it-all kid, one of a family of seven. We lived in a typical two-story Victorian farmhouse on the farm my parents had purchased only three weeks earlier, across the Santiam River from Stayton.

I remember hearing the house wake up that morning, noisier than usual because we had company visiting a few days. I shared a bedroom upstairs with my 12-year-old sister Johanna.

 Breakfast over, my folks drove their guests into town on an errand, taking my two youngest siblings with them. My oldest brother and sister had gone at first light to pick strawberries on the neighboring farm. Johanna was put in charge of me, my 7-year-old brother Johnny and our visiting friend. Johanna was washing the breakfast dishes while we younger kids headed out to the sandbox. Not long afterwards, she came out the back door and announced, “The house is on fire.”

I didn’t believe her. I never believed anything she said. If the house was on fire, where was the smoke?  She told me to come see for myself, and led me into the house. I only went along so I could say “I told you so,” when no flames presented themselves. The boys stayed out and played.

She pointed to a small hole in the bathroom wall, a hole that had been there when we’d moved in, and told me to take a peek. I pressed my eyeball to the opening, and sure enough, flames were licking away at the lathe and plaster inside the wall. The sight intrigued more than frightened me.  I asked if she’d called the fire department and she said no.

“You call,” I told her. “I’ll put out the fire.” I filled a glass with water and tried to slosh the water through the hole in the wall. I kept doing it over and over and over, and then realized it wasn’t doing any good.
I ran to the kitchen to get a saucepan. Johanna was in the front hall, talking into the telephone, trying to give the operator directions to our farm.

Back in the bathroom, I filled the saucepan with water, splashing pan-full after pan-full at the wall. But the hole was too tiny. Not much water got through. I wanted to rip at the hole with my fingers, to make the opening bigger. But I was afraid I’d get in trouble for it, once my dad found out.

The flames climbed higher, silently spreading like an orange sheet inside the wall. I pressed my eye to the hole again, watching, mesmerized, until the flames jumped at my eyeball. It stung. I jumped back, my hand clamped to my eye. 

 All I could think to do was to plug the drains in the bathtub and the sink, and turn on the faucets full force. Maybe the water would overflow and drown the fire, I reasoned.
By that time, the blaze was crawling through the ceiling space. It sounded like a thousand tiny mice scratching over my head and I knew I could do nothing to stop it.

The room felt like an oven. The fire was all around me, scratching and hissing. I thought it was coming to get me.

      I ran into the kitchen, looking frantically for something to save. Breakfast dishes were still piled high in the sink. I didn’t want to waste time rescuing dirty dishes. I opened drawers and slammed them shut. I whirled around in circles, frantically picking things up and setting them down again. I had to save something. I remember looking at the refrigerator and thinking that was the one thing worth rescuing. But I was a little kid. It was too big.

Then the fire came to get me in the kitchen. It felt like the blaze was alive­­—a monster coming to get me. I could feel it pulsating, feel the heat radiating through the walls. The old brown-flowered wallpaper bubbled and blistered, and I watched, fascinated. Thick, gray smoke oozed down the stairwell and crept across the ceiling. The house groaned as the fire devoured it.

My glasses!  I suddenly realized they weren’t on my face. Every day of my life since I’d been five years old, I’d had to wear ugly pink-framed glasses. I was never supposed to go without them. But in all the excitement that morning, I’d forgotten to put them on.

I ran to the foot of the stairwell, staring up into the smoke, and thinking of my glasses waiting on the night table. I had to save my glasses.

I took two or three steps up the stairs and stopped. I was scared. I couldn’t move. The smoke stung my throat, nose and eyes. I stood on the third step, indecisive, holding my arm over my face. Johanna rushed in from the front hall.

“What are you doing!” she shrieked. “Come on, let’s get out of here.” She grabbed my arm and dragged me through the kitchen and out the back door, while I hollered indignantly that we hadn’t saved a single thing.

We ran to join the boys, who were still playing in the sandbox, blissfully unaware. The boys looked up at the two of us, and then beyond us at the house, their eyes growing round. Johnny didn’t say a word. He scrambled to his feet and leaned against me. The four of us stood there in a straight row, gaping at the sight, open-mouthed.

Flames exploded out my bedroom window. The shattered glass fell tinkling to the ground in slow motion, almost like a fireworks display. I stood there shaking, knowing what would have happened to me if I had actually gone up to my room.

I took off running down our long, graveled lane toward the main road, screaming, “Fire, Fire!” like I’d seen them do in the movies. Johanna yelled at me to come back. Down at the main road, a gray pickup truck, dust flying, drove toward me. Kids stood in the back of the truck, holding onto the wood rails—strawberry pickers from the next farm next door. The truck skidded to a stop and my brother Jim, white-faced, pulled me up on the running board beside him. He held me tight as the truck raced up our lane, bouncing over rocks and mud holes. It lurched to a stop in front of our house.

Flames shot out all the upstairs windows, but the fire hadn’t broken through to the downstairs yet. The farmer lined up the oldest of the kids, those12 and older, and he led them into the house.
About a dozen kids between the ages of 12 and 15 ran in and out of the front door, rescuing anything they could carry—the television set, boxes of books stacked in the front hall, chairs, the china cabinet, the refrigerator. The younger children formed a line on the lawn, passing the smaller stuff back, from kid to kid, stacking it all in a pile a safe distance from the fire. The kids only had a few minutes, and couldn’t save much, but their efforts were heroic.

By the time the fire truck came charging up the lane, sirens screaming, with my folks following close behind in our old blue Pontiac station wagon, the house was engulfed in flames. The farmer and strawberry pickers gathered on the front lawn.

The firemen pulled out hoses and asked Dad for a water source. Dad dashed around, trying to get the pumps working, and the firefighters yelled there was no water pressure. I thought of the faucets I’d left running in the bathtub and sink, and kept silent. I was afraid it was my fault the water was gone.

Then the roof bulged and collapsed with a horrific roar, sending sparks and burning chunks of wood over the firefighters. The house burned to the ground. Later, the fire marshal said faulty wiring was to blame.
 My mother stood watching her home burn that morning, holding my little sister in her arms, and saying over and over again, like a mantra, “At least the kids are safe.” I looked up at her, and thought again what would have happened to me if I’d gone upstairs to get my glasses.

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