In general, I'm not an easy sleeper. I lay in bed a while, and it takes a while for me to get to sleep. Recently, however, I've been trying to see if I can find a way to get to sleep better. I've taken to reading just before I go to bed. A book as stressful and suspenseful as The Hunger Games may not seem to be a good way to get to sleep, but it is actually working.
So, after reading for about an hour before bed last night, I went to bed and fell asleep. In theory, that was that, I'd sleep 'till morning.
BRACK!
I had no idea what had made that sound, but I was awake now. It was a little before 1 in the morning, though I didn't know that at the time. All I knew was that it was still dark.
Clearly the sound had woken me up, but at the time, I just figured it was a one-off. I decided (rather easily) that I'd just try to go back to sleep.
But after a moment or two lying in there, I hear the same loud sound again. It had the volume of a "boom" and the sharpness and suddenness of a crack of lightning. And another couple moments later, I heard the sound a third time. About then I was certain they were gunshots. A forth bang came quicker after the third than the two before it, and was similarly followed by a fifth. There were more bangs after, but I lost count of how many.
I started getting worried when one of the bangs seemed to cause one of the cars on our street's alarm to go off. I was up. I was awake. That in itself is a defeat. It was one night when I was actually sleeping, and sleeping well. I could hear my parents talking downstairs, and I assumed they were talking about whatever was going on.
I got out of bed, and started walking downstairs to see what was going on, as I did, I heard the word "fire" said in the conversation between my parents. I was downstairs in a heartbeat, looking out the window by the door to see what could be seen. From that angle, next-to-nothing. There were people in the streets, and it was clear that they were looking at something, but what I couldn't see.
From there, I went back up stairs to my dad's office, which has ever so slightly better a view of the street, particularly of the part where people were gathered around. Sure enough, when I looked through his window, one of the neighbor's trees was alight.
Now it wasn't a giant fire, with giant glowing flames licking the sky and smoke billowing up into the great beyond. The far side of the tree seemed to be glowing, sparks flew up to about the level of my eyes, and I was bent over to look through a second-story window. The tree looked, for all I could tell, to be just embers glowing, except for that they kept going and going. After watching a couple of minutes, someone must have grabbed a garden hose and started spraying the fire, because it disappeared.
It was only a moment more until a fire truck appeared. Although the fire was now under control, my folks, and perhaps others as well, had seen fit, before the fire was out, to call 911: the american equivalent of 999 in the U.K. So there came, after a surprising long wait, given the fire station was only 5 minutes away, a giant, glowing, flashing truck down a small dead end street. There was a badge on the front of the truck that read SQT61. Squirt 61. This wasn't the first time I'd seen this truck. When I was young (and I mean really young, the kind of young where 14 is old) there'd had been some sort of safety fair at the fire station, and all the little kids had seen a bunch of firefighters and they had a firetruck. Squirt 61. SQT61.
Of course, this was a very business-oriented visit. The firefighters came and seemed to be taking care of something. The fire was out already, but they must have done something, because the truck was there, idling away, for quite a while. At this point, as exited as I was, everything to see had been seen. Time to go to bed. Ugh. 'Cause I'm totally going to sleep now that I'm awake, energized, and exited and all that jazz.
Before I went back to bed I took one more look out my own window, from which the fire truck and part of the crowd were visible. I could see my father out there, standing in front of the truck, watching on with worried eyes. I know my dad worries. He worries nonstop. We all, as a family, try to make the right choices. But hey, right now, someone else has probably done something stupid, and that has risked a lot more than just a tree. If this had been a little over a week ago, the air would have been hotter, drier, and the same would go for the ground. That blaze would have been a lot more dangerous.
With that, a sad, unsettling thought crossed my mind. You can do everything right, you can take all the steps to protect yourself and your friends and your family. But someone else can do something stupid and all your care goes up in smoke.
There's only one more thing. About nine hours later, I was awoken again by a noise coming from the street. Laughter. Now I have no idea about the context for the laughter. Something silly someone's toddler said? Something about the fire and the events of this past night? I honestly don't know, but somehow, it miffed me that things could be so light out in the street when only hours before there had been a fire covering the hight of two stories on a tree.
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