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Thursday, April 24, 2008

NEIGHBORS: Fire Time Brings Out the Best

By Vanessa Vaile /
Mountain View Telegraph
      Monday, keyboard to the grindstone, I submitted my first Neighbors column. I had intended to start with “Hello readers, Vanessa and Mountainair here.” Context counts. Anything titled “Neighbors” should be about real neighbors and our neighborhood. Introductions and a (sprightly) “about Mountainair and me” statement were to be my version of the local welcoming committee covered dish.
       Suffice it to say I live in Mountainair. Although not “from” these parts, I have lived here since the end of 1999. No stranger to small towns, I was born in one, grew up, went to school and lived in others, albeit not always the same ones. I graduated from high school in a class of 25, not rural New Mexico but Cajun country in south Louisiana. No mountain views but otherwise more like Mountainair High School than even the nearest city or suburban high school. Neither region started Anglo, and both owe unique character (and cuisine) to this difference and cultural diversity. I now defer musings about and comparing small town to another column along with lighthearted “Southern Exposure” type commentary.
       Fire time with evacuations, loss and destruction is not the time for lightheartedness. Fire concerns take over. The lightheartedly rustic quaintness is out of place when primeval forces threaten, if not you personally, then friends, neighbors and the land about. The Trigo Fire, aggravated by dry, windy weather and threatening the East Mountain village of Manzano, has been the lead story on local news across the state. By now, firefighting — as Incident Management press releases remind us — costs are closing in on the $2 million mark. Follow-up weather reports, dry and windy, predict a tinderbox summer with more of the same. It’s not just news to us.
       Evacuations were in progress (despite many declining displacement and staying put). Mountainair’s Dr. Saul Community Center and the high school round dome gym stand at the ready for evacuees. Red Cross, Incident Management and TV news vans parked at the high school mark it as a staging area. Any town residents not on the road helping out, evacuating kin and/or moving livestock are glued to TVs and telephones.
       Turner Inn, Shaffer Hotel and Rock Motel have all offered free lodging space to evacuees. The Hamiltons at Jackass Junction opened their stable, paddocks, arena and round pen areas to evacuated horses whose owners don’t have ranching kinfolk to take them in. As during the Ojo Peak Fire, Shannon DeRemer is taking in pets, filling up yards, pens, sheds and spare rooms with dogs and stacking crates in every spare corner, somewhat less frantically this time for having more warning. Representative examples — not the comprehensive list. All over town, pots of green chile stew, beans and hams are cooking, cakes and pies baking at the ready to feed the hungry, firefighters and displaced alike.
       How does everyone know what to do or what needs to be done? Osmosis, grapevine, asking around, calling, getting called, checking in at Town Hall. Internet communication supplements but does not displace the local grapevine or uncounted telephone trees, characterized by varying levels of organization. I know of two for sure, but there are surely more, probably at least one for each demographic group or social network, all overlapping.
       Rancher and real estate maven Edwina (George) Hewett has added telephone and e-mail to her existing verbal “buddy system,” explaining, “My phone ‘buddy system’ has been working out really well, and that makes me very happy. The ‘buddy system’ so far has been a verbal thing, but I am looking to get that to a more permanent status with a live list that will include redundancy. Our fire season is just starting, and we are going to have more fires throughout the rest of the year — or as long as we stay dry and in drought conditions.”
       This activity is neither centrally organized nor adhering to a hierarchical flow chart. It flows spontaneously through Mountainair’s usual information and rumor disseminating nodes: post office, Town Hall, local volunteer fire department and emergency services, church, exchanges in public spaces and the usual small-town gathering places.
       These times bring out the best in Mountainair, spotlighting traditional communitarian strengths in rural small towns. Bingo fundraisers and bank accounts opened to take donations will follow. Disaster manages what good intentions alone can’t. Blaming comes later. Grumbling, rumblings and rumors are already afoot. Right now, though, getting through this and looking after one another takes priority.
       This “best side” says as much about small-town dynamic as both the quirkily entertaining and frankly frustrating less than best side — and explains, at least partially, why I remain. Incidentally, it mirrors community response to disasters, more likely hurricanes than fires, in rural Cajun communities. I have not felt so at home somewhere since leaving that part of the country, less different than you might imagine.
       Neighbors is a weekly lighthearted column written by people in the community. If you are interested in writing for Neighbors, contact Rory McClannahan at 823-7102 or online at editor@mvtelegraph.com.>      

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