The fine line between life and death
I am beginning to wonder whether our family is being chased by fire. After losing everything in the 1993 Malibu fires, fire struck again early on the morning of Jan. 15 in my home in Washington D.C.
But this fire was much different than a Malibu fire. Fires in Malibu are forces of nature, foreshadowed by days of dry weather and howling Santa Ana winds. They usually begin in the hills, and burn a path through the canyons, heading toward homes if the winds turn wrong.
This fire was small, swift, violent and deadly.
Jan. 15 was supposed to be the beginning of the end of my old life. It was my last day at a job I had held for four years. Two days later, I would leave my job and my home behind, heading west on a train bound for Seattle to start a new life with my girlfriend.
It didn’t work out that way. I woke up before six that morning to the smell of acrid smoke that reeked of burning plastic. I opened up my bedroom door on the third floor of the house and saw flames shooting from down below. The only other way out was through the window.
On the ledge of the window was a bottle of champagne that I had been icing, scheduled to be emptied that evening in celebration of my last day of work. I sat myself on the ledge, and without any hesitation, plunged from the windowsill.
When my mind circles back to that morning, it is not the smell of the smoke, the sight of the flames, or the sensation of plunging out my third story window that I remember. It is the sound of the crash. In my mind, there was a loud clanging of glass, like an early morning pickup from the recycling truck. But these might well be sound effects that I have added myself. The dull thud from the cement on which I landed seems too anticlimactic, an inappropriate soundtrack to my narrow escape from death.
But the leap from my window was not a leap to safety. I had jumped into the bottom of an airshaft, surrounded on all sides by walls of wood or brick. I paused for a moment, letting out a couple of wails of pain, bracing myself against the wall. I had landed on my feet, and my left foot was bleeding badly. The yelling seemed to help a bit. From above, I heard other occasional screams I recognized as coming from my housemates, and the ever louder roar of the fire.
Any sense of security I felt by simply escaping the house vanished when embers started falling from the roof. A couple of them singed my shoulder, and I quickly brushed them off. I realized that somehow, I’d have to get out of there. To my right, I noticed a small door. I had no idea where the door led, but knew that it was my only chance to get out of that space. I gave the handle a twist, and amazingly it gave way. The door was unlocked.
I got it open a crack, enough to see that it led back into the basement of the house. There was a set of suitcases blocking the door, and I pushed desperately to get them to give way. Through the basement was a way out. If I could just get those suitcases out of the way, I could make it out alive.
As I was trying to wedge myself through the small opening, into the basement, I saw one of my housemates approaching. I yelled at him as he ran past, and he moved the suitcases out of the way. Walking on what I would later learn was a broken foot and a broken back, we went out through the backyard, hopped over a fence, into the alley, both barefoot and mostly naked in the sub-freezing Washington morning.
Not everyone in my house was so lucky. One of my housemates, only 24 years old, emerged with third-degree burns over 90 percent of his body. He died two days later.
As I sit in my parents’ house recovering, I feel lucky to have escaped with relatively minor injuries, a newfound confidence in my own instinct and determination to survive, and an appreciation for the fine line between life and death.