The Phone Call

Thinking back on all significant phone calls I've received, the most impactful one rang the old rotary dialer while I was asleep a couple of days after seeing the ruins of the homestead. That obsolete telephone was the clue, and the glue binding present to past, past to present.

The embers still glowed, six months after. Six months of a landscape scorched, of ashes that once were home. The Hermit's Peak/Calf Canyon Fire. A beast, they called it, but a beast born of carelessness, of an unvanquishable monstrosity, the very government sworn to protect us. And then, the sleep. A troubled, dream-haunted sleep, but different that night. The old rotary phone, impossibly whole amidst the ruin, ringing. I picked it up, that heavy handset, my heart a confused thrum in my chest, somehow sensing who was calling me now.

A voice, familiar as my own breath, yet impossibly distant, spoke calmly but insistently to me.

"Dad?" My response a whisper, lost in the smoke. "Where are you?" I could almost feel his presence, not ghostly, but solid, reassuring, as if he stood right there, just out of sight. And then, his voice, calm and steady, cutting through the chaos of my mind: "Don't worry, son. Everything will work out fine. I've made sure of it." Too burnt to believe it possible, I scoffed.

It was then the fog in my dreaming mind began to lift. Made sure of it? How could he have known this desolation? This wasn't by any grand inheritance or hidden treasure. No, it was in the way he taught me to use tools to build with, to read the sky before a storm, to stand firm when the world shook hard. Every lesson, every quiet example, every time he let me stumble and learn, every laugh we shared—it wasn't about the land, the house, the physical things that now lay in ruin. It was about knowledge and energy he cast my way, which I absorbed.

He had prepared me well without me sensing it much at all. He had poured his strength, his resilience, his unwavering belief in hard work and integrity into my very being. And in that moment, standing in the ashes of that dream, holding that impossible phone, I understood. He had made sure of it by informing me. By showing me how to survive, no matter the fire, no matter the beast. I had the skills within and knew the tools. I just had to confidently put them all to use in concerted fashion after extended thought and planning on best approach.

They say I moaned long and loud while ensconced in that dream. I remember waking to it, the mournful wail trapped in throat the way dream vocalizations sometime are, heart aching. Then my mind stopped racing and began intently seeking solutions, organizing, planning. And he was right. Even though the beast that is my government continues balking at compensating victims, leaving us not whole again almost four years now after they ignited the damned fire they knew they weren't prepared to tame or contain, my life is back on track.