What UPS has left me, Part 3: Belonging

Sometimes you don’t realize how deeply a place has become part of you until something happens to it.

It’s not unusual for UPS drivers to be transparent with each other about their earnings. It’s also not unusual for UPS drivers to know exactly where their coworkers live.

This isn’t just because they socialize with each other outside of work, although that’s part of it. Physical addresses are UPS drivers’ stock-in-trade. It’s our business to know exactly where places are.

Some people are secretive about where they live, but I’m not one of them. I came of age when home addresses were public information. Back then you had to pay the phone company extra money each month to keep yours private.

I share my address freely and tell people to stop by anytime if they’re ever in the neighborhood. Over the years, more than a few coworkers have delivered to my house, and I’ve hosted a number of gatherings there as well. Many of my coworkers have actually been inside my home. I love the fact that so many of the people I know and care about know where I live.

Still, I was startled and confused when my phone dinged on a Saturday afternoon in early August. It was from a former coworker, asking if my house was okay. If my family was okay.

I had no idea what was going on. My coworker was delivering that day and had seen a plume of smoke not far from my neighborhood.

This was the first I’d heard anything about a fire. When I walked out my front door, the sky was perfectly clear. But when I turned around, I saw what my coworker was seeing, except from the other side of it.

What we saw didn’t immediately alarm me. There’d been fires before. Some had even come within fifteen or twenty miles, close enough for the smoke to be prominently visible. That’s how it looked this time too.

Before getting back to work, my coworker urged me to look into it. And so I did.

I learned about an app called Watch Duty, which provides real-time updates on active wildfires and maps their boundaries and surrounding alert areas.

I’m not sure how it works elsewhere, but in Washington state there are three levels of wildfire evacuation alert:

• Level 1: Get ready. There’s a threat in your area. Stay informed.
• Level 2: Get set. Be prepared to leave at a moment’s notice.
• Level 3: Go now. You are in immediate danger.

At 2 pm I had no idea there was a fire anywhere near me. By 4 pm I was evacuating with my family – including our four animals. We weren’t sure yet where we were headed; we just knew we had to leave.

There was only one way out. The entire area was being routed along a two-lane road leading away from one fire and toward another. It took us three hours in more-stop-than-go traffic to reach safety, less than 20 miles away.

That night we slept in our cars in a friend’s driveway. We weren’t sure whether the fires would force us to evacuate again. We had no plan and no idea when we’d be allowed to return home – or if we’d even have a home to return to.

We were evacuated for eight days, but the house had survived. As it turned out, it had never been in any real danger.

Others hadn’t been so lucky. At last count, more than 700 residences were lost in the Spokane area fires. Some entire neighborhoods were leveled.

All of the affected neighborhoods were near mine. Near enough for me to reach on foot. I’d run to and through them plenty of times.

But more than that, I’d delivered to them as a UPS driver.

One of the neighborhoods was my Peak route one holiday season, before I’d won my own bid route. I was on those steep streets through all kinds of wintry weather.

Another neighborhood, at the very top of the hill, was my usual Saturday route at the time I left UPS earlier this year.

The neighborhood most affected, at the bottom of the hill by the river, was not just my favorite; it was everybody’s favorite. The stops always came off so quickly and easily.

And it’s not just the houses that I’m intimately familiar with. It’s the people who lived in them. So far I count four people I know directly whose homes burned down.

And one person whose house came really really close.

Doug is another UPS driver who took the recent buyout. Though his house had been directly in the fire’s path, he chose to stay behind to try to save it. He sent me harrowing photos all weekend. The next block of his street was leveled – that’s how close it got.

Before the fires, I’d routinely passed through these affected neighborhoods on training runs of varying distances. Now I wasn’t sure if my very presence, let alone snapping a few photos, would feel disrespectful. I reached out to Doug for his thoughts.

So about three weeks after the fires, and two weeks after the evacuation orders were lifted, I resumed my running.

On my long run I went along the river for about six miles, then headed into that first neighborhood. Though there were very few structures standing, it wasn’t devoid of activity.

It was a Sunday morning, but recovery crews were there working in their white hazmat suits. Nearby, a Salvation Army vehicle was serving up cups of hot coffee to anyone who wanted them.

Despite Doug’s assurances, I did not feel at all comfortable passing through this scene. I took in as much as I could with my eyes without slowing down or stopping.

One thing I remember is a sign in someone’s front yard. It read, ‘Please do not remove this tree.’ I don’t know who put the sign there or when. But it nearly broke me. I imagined it coming from the occupant – a parent, perhaps. The fire took our home, it seemed to say, at least let us keep our tree.

It took several blocks before I started to feel comfortable enough to shoot some photos. But there was literally nothing to center a shot on. Just places where houses used to stand, husks of burned-up cars, and charred trees.

I left this first neighborhood and continued up the hill, near where Doug lives. The destruction here was a little more intermittent, the pattern more random.

It was farther up Doug’s street that I came upon this sight:

I’ve been thinking about that word – COMMUNITY – ever since.

For the second time on my journey, I was moved nearly to tears. The colossal devastation was heartbreaking. But what choked me up were these messages of care, support, and hope.

At this point I was less than three miles from home. From here I passed more fire-affected areas and other makeshift memorials, snapping photos that look a lot like the ones I’ve shown above.

From the sky, the fire followed more or less a straight line up the hill from the river. But on the ground, the path seemed so erratic.

Along the main artery through the neighborhood – the evacuation route – there were six duplexes on one side of the street. Of these, five were destroyed and one was untouched. Not one on either end, though; the fourth one up the row.

Firefighting airplanes had dropped retardant, coating the hillside with a bright pink stripe. It was a literal dividing line between devastation and preservation. Though it had faded somewhat in the intervening weeks, it remained on the pavement, signs, homes, and yards as a lingering reminder. Rain has washed some of it away, but it persists even now.

That line sits less than a mile and a half from my house. I have to believe that it saved the entire neighborhood.

Nearly five years ago, I wrote this:

Driving for UPS has helped me learn about – and love – specific places, and place in general, in a way and to an extent that nothing else has.

Nowhere is this truer than in my own neighborhood.

It took a devastating wildfire for me to see that UPS has left me with a sense of belonging to a place so intimate that its wounds can reach me – even when they aren’t mine.