Oh my god, Herman's house burned down!
Photos from last springOkay, so I have been helping my friend Herman out with his garden for 2 (only 2?) years now, but I have a longer history with his apartment- one time Pookie and I were helping to unload sound equipment in the rain after a demonstration in Richmond, and Pookie slipped and fell on the stairs and injured his hand...and there were the days when several of us worked on the beautiful MayDay posters there...so smoky, so dusty, so dirty...but it was Herman's home for about 8 years. He works as a translator, so he would literally spend days at a time there, typing away, ordering in Chinese food.
He got seriously into gardening after that MayDay, and Chris and Shelley and I started helping him out once or more per week that winter. We installed raised beds made of fancy redwood and these giant bolts. We carried in tons of finished compost, rocks, and more compost. Herman stopped importing compost this year because he subscribes to the BioIntensive gardening method, in which you try to import as few materials as possible.
Last night his landlord left some ashes on or under Herman's deck. At some point, they caught the deck and then the whole house on fire- Chris later said there were 30 foot high, 1500 degree flames. Chris and Shelley were at home on the hill in Albany. this morning, they noticed that it seemed to be extra hazy out, in a smoky kind of way. Chris walked up to the top of Solano to see if he could find out where the smoke was coming from. Of course his first thought was to look towards Herman's house- he can always recognize it because he can spot the neighbor's house. He said the smoke was coming from there in H's neighborhood. They way he told me, I was like, "so was her house on fire?" and he said, then I checked for the other neighbors' houses...and then his... So then he and Shelley jumped in the car. It was Herman's house. Fortunately, Herman had gotten out, and his landlord, too, though the latter was a bit worse for the wear because he had gone back in multiple times to retrieve things (he is a writer).
Herman didn't get to save anything- not seeds, not sound systems, not his computer, not his dictionaries, or gardening books, or a jacket or his wallet or his cellphone. He has to start all over.
Shelley and Chris took Herman home with them. They came by in the afternoon and we were able to lend him a cellphone and give him some clothes. He smiled when I gave him back the plaid jacket he had lent me last year. Later in the day, he found that he does still have one bike trailer, one hitch for it (it was all that remained in the area where his bikes had been). As Chris predicted, his digging fork is still intact; however, the digging rod was bent nearly in half! They dug around in the 3 feet of ashes in the apartment and found his passport, and they also retrieved his computer. They weren't able to open it. Near where the car batteries that he used to power the sound systems were, there was a pile of potatoes that had fused together with lead. Yuck!
The topmost garden beds are destroyed- the firefighters had thrown items such as the door to the oven and a mixing board out the window. They found one intact bottle of wine and brought it home to drink tonight. Chris said that you can see straight into the shower (there should have been a wall, toilet, and shower door there). They were able to pick some food and take it home to make soup. I wonder what will become of Herman's garden. Will the house be demolished right away (likely), will the landlord keep the property, will he rebuild...? Will Herman try to continue to work on that land?
I wonder, will he get a new place that has a big yard for gardening? I suppose he will keep translating, since it is what he does. Will he get in trouble for not finishing the document that he was working on this weekend? Will he buy more sound systems and keep supplying them for demonstrations? Will he have a garage at his next place? He didn't seem too upset today, given how I would have been acting were I in his borrowed shoes, but I hope that he will let himself grieve.
posted by mahtin @ 7:54 PM
