October 24, 2008
I woke with a start. Baby, our 2 1/2 year old Boxer, was laying on my legs making a "chuffing" sound. She was supposed to be on the floor, but, as usual, she had waited until we had fallen to sleep and had silently sneaked into the bed. It was crowded in our double bed: me, Scotty, Roxie the 5 month old Rat Terrier, Little Boy the 7 year old Chihuahua, and now Baby.
I wasn't sure what time it was; I didn't sleep in contact lenses. I knew it was the middle of the night and wasn't sure at first what had caused me to wake up. Baby made another "chuff" noise, and I did what you always do when your dog wakes you in the middle of the night. I said, "Hush, Baby, go back to sleep."
I don't know how long I dozed there with Baby making that weird "chuff" noise. She wasn't panicked or agitated, but as I slowly became more cognizant I realized that she was curious about something. At some point I realized that I was hearing noises on the deck outside.
We were living in a single wide manufactured home. The master bedroom was at one end of the house, with a hall (laundry included) leading to the kitchen / dining area. Scotty had built a very nice 16 x 30 attached covered deck where we spent lots of time. Right now, in the middle of the night, I could hear something on the deck outside.
Baby was notorious for having encounters with local wildlife. She had recently recovered from a snakebite that had seriously affected her health, and there were regular skunk encounters that left her smelling less than attractive. I figured that there was a skunk, a possum, or some such creature on the deck.
I decided to wake Scotty and have him deal with whatever was on the deck. I shook him and forced him awake. I said, "There's something on the deck. Go see what it is but don't open the door all the way; I don't want Baby to have a run-in with whatever's out there".
Scotty got up and stumbled to the door. He turned the knob, cracked the door, and then it was immediately snatched out of his hand.
Flames of fire began licking inside the house at the ceiling as soon as the door opened. He turned his head toward me and yelled, "Rachel!" I stood up and gathered Roxie & Little Boy, each on one hip. Scotty ambled to the kitchen to get the fire extinguisher. By the time he got back to the door with the fire extinguisher I was in the kitchen with Roxie & Little Boy each under an arm and Baby heeled beside me.
I ran to the front door, which we never used, and began unhooking the chains and unlocking the door. Scotty was still at the back door trying to pull the pin on the fire extinguisher. I turned to him and yelled, "Leave it -- go get a cell phone and just leave it!" I did have an advantage on him: I had been awake for some time while he was still in sleep mode.
Scotty looked at the fire extinguisher for a moment then threw it out the door onto the deck. It was engulfed in flames by now. He ran into the bedroom and scooped up both cell phones and his wallet. As he was coming out of the bedroom, one of the windows in the bedroom exploded. He was just at the door in the hall and dove onto the floor, never losing hold of the cell phones or wallet.
I swear that this was not funny when it happened -- laughter was the furthest thing from my mind. After all, we, or at least I, was in panic mode with "GET OUT" the only thing on my mind. In hindsight, it has been particularly funny. Scotty slid like a bowling ball down the hall into the dining table and chairs. The table and chairs slid across the floor into the pantry wall. And amidst all of this, Scotty never let go of the cell phones or his wallet; he was holding them almost like an offering. If we had had a video set up, we would have won $10,000 on America's Funniest Home Videos, but...
When Scotty dove onto the floor I turned from unlatching the front door and ran back across the living room to the kitchen. I was screaming at the top of my lungs, "Get up! Get up! Come on!" At times of crisis I've found that we are not the most coherent of beings and that most of what we say is pared down to basic necessities. Communication becomes a staccato event of phrases and sometimes meaningless patter.
At that moment I meant every single thing I was saying -- I wanted him to get up, and I wanted him to get up NOW! As I had run back across the living room towards Scotty I still had Roxie & Little Boy in each arm. Baby was still heeled with me, but I was panicking and she was following my lead. When I reached Scotty on the dining room floor, Baby was stride for stride with me. When I stopped to yell into his face, she kept going and ran down the hall into the bedroom.
She had to practically run through flames to get there. Her safe place during storms or when she was in trouble was under our bed. I guess she was so panicked by our behavior that she needed her safe place. I started yelling for her, "Baby, come! Baby, come!" She had been to obedience school and surely knew what my words meant.
In the mean time, I helped Scotty to his feet. Don't ask me how -- I still had Roxie & Little Boy each under one arm; I didn't even have an extra hand to extend to him. But I remember actually helping him to his feet and moving us toward the front door. We ran down the steps into the unused front yard and then ran around the end of the house, across the driveway rock to the vehicles.
Scotty had already gotten the keys to my car from his console in his truck and had started it and backed it up. I threw the dogs into the truck and turned toward Scotty in the car. By this time, the pistol had already fired a couple of times. It had been on the night stand on Scotty's side of the bed. He had rolled down the passenger side of the window and yelled at me that he didn't have keys to the truck.
I opened the door and gathered Roxie & Little Boy under each arm again and ran across the rock to the car. I haven't mentioned this yet, but we both sleep nude. We were running around in 40 degree weather with no clothes on and certainly no shoes. We are both tenderfoots and had no recollection of running across rock until the next day when the bottoms of our feet were black and blue.
I made it to the car; Scotty had leaned across and opened the passenger door for me. I somehow managed to close the door with a dog under each arm. I still don't know how I did the things I did with arms and hands that were basically rendered useless by holding dogs.
We were still screaming at this point. I yelled, "Call 911 -- Now!" Scotty dialed at 2:15 am. We drove to the end of the driveway to escape the possibility of the propane tank exploding and to help the firefighters find the address. You can't see our house from the road, and the numbering leaves a bit to be desired. Our address is an odd number, and our neighbor across the street has an odd-numbered address, too, one of the pitfalls of living on a circle.
The volunteer firefighters arrived at 2:35. Twenty minutes seems like a lifetime when you are sitting naked in a car at the end of your driveway with two scared dogs with no glasses or contacts to see what is going on around you. Twenty minutes for volunteer firefighters to respond to a 911 call, get up out of bed, get dressed, make it to the station, get in the truck, make sure it is loaded with water, and arrive at the scene is miraculous.
We discovered a pair of shorts and a long-sleeved T-shirt, along with tennis shoes in Scotty's truck. The fruits of working out at the gym. We discovered a pair of thongs, a pair of sandals, and a towel in the backseat of my car. The fruits of tanning at the salon and boarding the dogs just six days before when we went to Vegas for me to speak at a conference and for us to get married.
In my zeal to protect the dogs I could carry, I had squeezed them so hard that I had actually squeezed the poop out of one of them. I asked Scotty for something to wipe myself with; he laughed and said that we were short on cloth at the moment! I had wrapped the towel around me like a skirt, put on the long-sleeved T-shirt and the sandals. Scotty had utilized the gym shorts and tennis shoes. The only problem I had now was that I couldn't see, and I had dog poop on my leg! I found some wet leaves and played like I was camping or was in colonial times -- I wiped the dog poop off with the dew-encrusted leaves.
We sat in the car at the end of the driveway for a couple of hours. The firefighters came to tell us that they had saved the truck. If we hadn't had keys to the car it would have been damaged. As it was, the Chevy emblem and the front grill on the truck were warped from the heat.
We finally drove back down the driveway to the house, and the fire was mostly out. The firefighters were stomping embers and doing last checks. If you've never experienced a fire, it's unlike anything you've ever imagined. The couch had been thrown out of the living room, the ironing board and office chair had been thrown to the ground as well. The washing machine & dryer were on the ground where the deck had once been, and objects all around the house were on the ground outside the windows now instead of inside where they once had been.
These objects are removed from the structure to remove the possibility of re ignition. As we walked around the house, items were still smoldering on the ground.
Not being able to see is a huge disability. Scotty sleeps in his contacts; he wears extended lenses and can see upon waking. I wear gas permeable lenses and take them out each night. I couldn't see a thing! We were walking around the front yard, it was cold, and we had limited coverage for warmth. Scotty said, "Let me take you back to the car." I was so unfocused that I said, "You can't just put me in the car and leave me out of this!" The whole time Scotty was trying to protect me and make sure that I was safe and warm. It had nothing to do with excluding me from what was going on. I was disoriented for a number of reasons, most of which because I couldn't see, secondly the circumstances in which we found ourselves.
During all this time, I knew that we had lost Baby. Scotty still believed, as he did at the time, that she had run out of the house. As I had been screaming "Baby, come!" he had been constantly telling me that she had run outside. It was the only way he could cope at the time. It broke my heart the whole time I was yelling for her to come and knowing that she was gone.
We were standing in the yard with a blanket that miraculously appeared in the car, and we asked the firefighters to look for Baby underneath the bed. They graciously walked across dangerous joists and placed themselves in danger to find Baby. Six of them took a bed comforter from the guest bedroom and wrapped Baby in it and carried her out as if in a funeral procession. They comforted us by telling us that the heat in the bedroom would have been so high that she would have passed out as soon as she went under the bed, there would have been no oxygen left for her.
It was the most touching thing: these firefighters who didn't know us who respected dogs enough to offer their respect to her, or to us. We never looked at Baby again. Our friends carried her to her grave at Daddy's later that same night.
The investigator who arrived that next day, Friday afternoon, told us that if we had been in the house only five minutes more, we wouldn't have made it out. We've modified our new manufactured home plan to include five exit doors (that's another story -- we're still not living in it yet!)
Baby saved our lives, and we have learned new things since getting married and starting our life together. I'd like to think that she has taught us things that we wouldn't have learned otherwise, and I believe that to be the case. Baby was always laughing... she would be proud of us now.
