You Always Hurt The Ones You Love

House Fire
There’s an ineluctable,
and at the same time
fugitive intimacy
in watching your own house
burn down on videotape.

Strangers in helmets
smashing windows with
axes: the most obvious
analogy (so let’s skip that)
would be with rape.

No. This is even more
impersonal; let it seem odd.
Here’s a monitor-full
of what the actuaries mean
by an act of God.

That's a poem I wrote in January of last year after a house fire at a property my wife and I owned in Spokane, Washington. It was a distinctly spooky experience, going out to the website of KHQ Channel 6 TV and seeing a piece of videotape showing my own house ablaze, with fire crews breaking windows and such.

The fire itself was confined to the kitchen, and the kitchen was really the only part of the house that was completely and utterly destroyed. (Along with my collection of baseball memorabilia, with which I had decorated the kitchen. And that included a mounted, autographed color picture of Nolan Ryan.)

But a worse surprise awaited me upstairs. The house was unoccupied; it was a property we were hoping to rent out as office space. Still, I had installed my library in one of the upstairs rooms. A contractor had come in and built floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. I had put in a stereo sound system. I had moved in a desk, my computer, a rocking chair and an armchair. All of my books and CDs were in that room.

I had come in two days before the fire, and upon leaving, had left the door to that room open. Thick, black, greasy smoke from the kitchen fire had permeated the entire house, and smoke goes UP, as we all know.

My entire library, with very few exceptions, was completely "smoked." Nearly all of my 1,000-some books were coated in thick, black soot.

Our insurance didn't cover it. We carried about $10,000 insurance coverage on the entire contents of the house. That didn't come close to what it would have cost to replace my collection of books and music. The insurance adjuster advised me to just trash the whole collection. Take them to the dump, start over.

No way.

You see, I had parted with my library once before, and that time it was a collection I'd spent about 30 years amassing. When I left Maryland in 2003 to return to California, it was under somewhat desperate circumstances. I'd been unemployed for nearly six months and was forced to head back out to the west coast where my family was. I had to travel light, and I simply did not have the resources to store 1,400 books, 600 LP records, 500 CDs and assorted household effects.

I gave the whole lot away, donating them to the Wheaton Public Library's thrift shop.

For a guy who agrees with Montaigne that "My home is where my library is," that was an extremely painful decision. Once I was settled in California and found a new job, I began slowly, laboriously rebuilding. Modern conveniences like the Internet made it somewhat easier than it had been in the 1970s and '80s, when buying books meant visiting bookstores and writing snail-mail letters to book dealers.

Gradually my collection grew again. Naturally I sought out and re-acquired many of the titles I had given away, in addition to new ones. Within three years I had amassed, once again, several hundred books.

Then came that fire in Spokane.

Well, the insurance adjuster be damned. I wasn't about to part with my library a second time. I went out and bought a couple of gallons of Simple Green and about 10,000 paper towels and began the long, laborious process of cleaning my books, one by one.

Let me tell you, there are few jobs so nasty in all the world. Greasy, black soot is all-pervading and yields no quarter. Some books simply had to be tossed. Others, despite my labors, will always be tattle-tale gray around the edges. But I was determined not to part with my library a second time. After cleaning each stack of books, I packed them into cardboard boxes, sprinkled in stink-remover, (for soot stinks as bad as it stains)and put them into storage.

Then my wife and I sold the bed-and-breakfast we were running in Spokane and returned to her home town of Washington, D.C. The boxes of books, along with nearly everything else I own, wound up stacked in the basement of our new house, for which we have plans to turn it into yet another library just as soon as I can come up with $5,000 to pay yet another contractor to build some shelves down there.

Then, about a week ago, it started to rain. It rained all day Thursday, and Friday. It stopped for a while on Saturday, long enough for me to barbeque steaks on the grill in the backyard, but then on Sunday it started again. It continued on Monday, as I went downtown in the morning to take care of some business at Voice of America.

When I returned home around 12:30 that afternoon, my wife had left a note on my desk. "BASEMENT FLOODED."

Huh boy. I went down to take a look. Apparently the heavy rains had seeped in through the basement windows on the east side of the house.

That just happens to be the wall against which my boxes of books were stacked. Naturally it was the boxes on the bottom of each stack that had gotten wet. I started lifting and moving to get at those boxes, afraid of what I might find when I tore them open.

Actually, the damage could have been worse. The basement floor apparently has a slight south-to-north tilt to it, so the boxes at the far end of the room were untouched. Also, numerous boxes of books were stacked on top of two footlockers, which kept them protected.

But a number of books were indeed water-damaged, some so bad that I had to just toss them out, write down their titles and figure on re-acquiring them once again. Some, including a few "Library of America" volumes, went into the oven at 175 degrees for a quick dry-out. They'll always show slight water-damage, but I can live with that as long as they're not unreadable. At least i got down there fast enough to prevent mildew from forming. I had a similar experience more than 20 years ago in an apartment where I was living, only that time I was unaware of the water damage until it was too late. Some books, including my cherished copy of Joyce's "Ulysses," had actually gotten mildewed, and there's no cleaning that up. This time I was a bit luckier than that, anyway.

But there you have it. I can now officially state that my library has been through fire and flood. If we ever get boll weevils around here, I can add pestilence. Fortunately I have yet to hear of an outbreak of boll weevils in the nation's capital. Oh, we do have pestilence here, but the last time I checked, members of Congress weren't eating books. And probably won't, as long as there are loopholes in the lobbying regulations that allow them thousand-dollar lunches.

But maybe I'd better think about having those new shelves built on stilts, like one of those bamboo houses you see in pictures from the Amazon. I don't know if climate change has anything to do with this, but when being a bibliophile becomes a risky proposition, we are living in dangerous times.