A Burning Desire To Save Stuff Over Lives
CONTENT WARNING: Mention of injury and possible death.
I’m relaxing at home. There’s a parade going on in my small town, and vehicle traffic naturally is delayed as a result. Immediately outside my picture window, I see a large SUV – the kind you can fit six kids and their different hobbies in – drive up to the road immediately outside my house and approach an intersection at roughly the same time as the parade goes past.
The window gets rolled down, the driver leans her head out the window to yell, and there is much honking and revving of the engine that suggests she is literally expecting the parade to halt and split up so that she can continue on her way.
And then I see flames.
Parts of her car are catching on fire. I immediately sprint outside in my bathrobe and start yelling to get the driver’s attention. The driver panics, all the doors open, and four teenagers leap out of the car. They all sprint away towards the nearest house (mine), and I open my garage to get them inside in case the car explodes (I don’t even know for sure if that can happen, but I’m not gonna risk it) while I call 911.
I realize the driver isn’t with them.
She throws a large purse and a tote bag on my lawn and RUNS BACK TOWARD THE BURNING CAR. There is smoke at this point. The parade has stopped as people realize what’s happening. Several others and I yell at her to get away from the car as she opens the hatch and pulls out two giant bags of sports equipment. She’s coughing as she comes back to my lawn, throws the bags down, and runs back to the car again to grab two more.
I have to stop one of the kids from joining her because he sees his mom working and wants to help. Someone else comes up while she’s dropping off those two and physically holds her back from going back to the car a third time. She is hacking and coughing like a mess, and the car is starting to be visibly consumed by the flames, but she’s still trying to go back for her stuff.
By the time emergency responders arrive, the driver has passed out. She gets loaded up onto a stretcher. The kids’ parents are called, including the driver’s husband, and they arrive on an adjacent street to get the kids safely home. I soon realize that they didn’t even bother to take the kids’ bags with them; from their size and quality, I estimate about $75 worth of sporting goods in each. Assuming the owners will want their things back, I keep the bags in my garage and send word to the parents asking if they want to pick them up.
Three of them ask if they smell like smoke. When I answer in the affirmative, they refuse, insisting that it’s never going to come out.
The fourth – that being the driver’s husband – says no outright. His wife is in the hospital, suffering from smoke inhalation and not expected to recover, and the kid doesn’t even want to play the sport anymore.
I dispose of the bags and sit down to realize that I might have seen someone die trying to save things that aren’t even usable anymore.
