Addendum to how I felt about surviving the Dixie Fire

Staying during Dixie was simply life altering. I could never see her flames, nor hear her crackly roar, as 100 plus foot trees exploded into flames and they, or their limbs limbs, fell to the forest floor. But seeing the fire on the news, witnessing the denseness of her smoke, seeing her embers blown onto my property, smelling the pungent, acrid perfume, sometimes old yet often new that wafted from Dixie, and the head-to-toe sooty firefighters I saw and spoke with regularly, offered enough vicarious proof for me that Dixie was indeed real and her insatiable appetite was bringing her relentlessly closer!  

On the worst evening Peninsula Firemen visited me. They warned me the wind would shift and was forecast to grow to 30 miles per hour later that evening, and it would come from the direction of the fire itself which was raging only a couple of miles from where we all stood. Embers were forecast to rain down upon the Peninsula, and the firefighters who visited me told me there would be nothing they could do to stop it. It was a very somber conversation and I reiterated to them not to come looking for me as I had my spot on the lake that I was going to. We all shook hands and we parted.
Proof of how close Dixie was were the nearly incessant alerts to my phone!  Imminent Danger Evacuate Now they read. Further proof were the sirens blaring here in the dead of night, and the sheriffs car stopped at the end of my driveway, its loudspeaker 📢 warning me of imminent danger and telling me to evacuate immediately!  I flashed my truck’s headlights and the sheriffs car left.

I didn’t leave, because I was certain I would be okay. Around six pm the wind did indeed shift as was forecast so it came from the north where Dixie raged, but the forecasted high winds simply never materialized. Eight hours later the threat that Dixie had posed had passed by me, and I and the Peninsula were safe. That was the miracle that altered my life. 

This place here, this Peninsula, is special. It’s sacred in ways I am not sure of, and I don’t need to know how or why it’s sacred for it to be true. I felt cradled and safe despite being surrounded by a massive, half million acre forest fire.
Those weeks, and the weeks since then, have been a time for me to commune with the universe, with my god, and to be a part of a life-altering miracle. 🙏