A Car Ablaze

Thursday, January 9, 2025

A couple of nights ago we had not long turned out the lights and were dozing off when both my wife and I heard a thump sound outside. We had no idea what it was or where exactly it came from. My first thought was someone snooping around the house, something that thankfully has never happened and so my mind let go of the idea straight away, …but that reason also did not allow me dismiss that there might be someone outside!

As I stepped out of the bedroom, through the blinds in the hallway I could see something ablaze across the valley from where our house is. I knew immediately what it was. A car had been abandoned a few days earlier after crashing into a barrier beside the highway - the car now sat on the opposite side of the road to the barrier. I have no idea how the accident happened, but wondered if it was the result of a theft? Since then no one appeared to be making an attempt to remove the car, and after each night a little less of the car was there as people scavenged for parts.

Someone, in the dead of the night, had set that car alight.

We called 911.

While waiting for the emergency services to arrive we watched from our vantage point as the car burnt. Occasionally there was a pop as something in the car reacted to the heat.

First the police arrived, they closed the road off, and then the fire department. The valley echoed with the roar of fire retardant being sprayed over the car. Back in bed we heard the fire trucks use our road to turn around and head back to base.

I found the visuals and sounds very disconcerting. Fire destroying an object. An object that once belonged to someone. I thought of our house, grateful for its safety and aware of its vulnerability. Even writing this unnerves me.

I thought of the Maui wildfires from a year and a half ago, destroying the town of Lahaina and homes in Upcountry Maui. People’s homes and sometimes livelihoods gone…and in the case of at least 102 people, lives lost. Maui is currently very dry, though I am blessed to live in one of the wetter and greener parts of the island. I found myself wondering what the car blaze might have started if the vegetation had been drier?

I think of the fires engulfing parts of Los Angeles as I write this. Of the homes lost there, livelihoods destroyed, lives lost.

That vulnerability frightens me.

…

By the next day the vehicle had gone, its remains towed away.