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It sometimes takes a disaster to put the value of things in your life into perspective. On October 21st, San Diego was hit with a string of devastating wildfires. And over the course of the next few days the fires grew and seemed to put the whole county under the threat of fire. Even at the close of the month, full containment of all the fires in the county isn't expected until well into the first week of November. In total approximately 338,000 acres of land had been consumed by the fires and over half a million people were told to evacuate their homes and businesses due to the threat of fire. More people were subject to evacuation during these fires than all of the areas affected by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

As the fires were building up overnight on the night of the 21st, I was at work in the middle of the night dealing cards at one of the local Indian casinos and one of the communities neighboring the new community I had recently moved to was heavily under attack by the wildfires with the Santa Ana winds blowing hot air from the desert west towards the Pacific ocean. By the time my shift came to an end the fires had spread west and had already caused the closure of roads and highways I usually take to get home.

It was a long and tedious process attempting to get home unsure of whether or not my carpool buddy and I would be able to make it home. Our trek home included a huge detour directly west towards the ocean to catch the highway nearest the beach to head south. As most people were given the recommendations to head west and north to get out of San Diego county, the highways we had to take to get home were jammed packed with people trying to head west and north as recommended. Fortunately once we were far enough west our path opened up as we were heading south and then ultimately heading back to the east several miles south of our starting point. A commute that normally takes about 15 minutes once on the highways took nearly two hours to complete.

Once home, it wasn't long before the evacuation order was given for my community and I had very little time to commit to thinking about packing some items in preparation for the worst. At best I only really had time to pack a suitcase of essentials, such as a kit of toiletries and a week's worth of clothes. I also packed up my laptop computer and grabbed the external hard drive to my desktop computer. In the few minutes I had after packing those essentials, I looked at all my possessions to see what was important enough to take. Naturally, I wanted to take it all out of harms way but that wasn't going to be possible.

Ultimately, I looked at my ABBA and Roxette collections, my DVDs, my CDs, and pretty much everything I owned and decided all of it was ultimately replaceable. Sure many of the things would not be replaceable in the form I currently have them like autographed items or some rare limited edition items that are numbered, but ultimately, they are just things. So without any remorse or regret about my various collections, I left it all. I took my suitcase of clothes and toiletries, and my laptop bag with chargers for the portable electronics I took with me, and left my home with the goal of safe and orderly evacuation in mind. The only regret I had once I reached where I evacuated to was that I forgot to grab my box of important documents like my passport and a few financial records. I had those hidden and in the haste of prepping my suitcase, it slipped my mind.

My carpool buddy, his wife, and I evacuated to a fellow co-worker's home in another part of San Diego. She fortunately had a guest house in her back yard where we were able to stay. Her home had a view of one of the other fires in San Diego County that was raging out of control. We were far enough away from the fires to not be danger and also far enough away to not be inundated with smoke and ash. Probably, in what could only be described as just wrong, we settled in to patio chairs next to the pool, with beer in hand (as my carpool buddy and I had been up 20 hours straight by this time from work and evacuating) while our hosts threw some chicken on the barbeque while we watched the smoke and fire in the distance consume the hills. I was supposed to work that night, but in light of having been evacuated and most of the major highways now closed between where I was evacuated to and work, I called in as the emergency hotline still indicated the casino was still open.

Fortunately, the next day the south section of my community was re-opened to residents to return home and sure enough, I did have a home to return to. The fires only managed to get within a mile of where I live at its closest point before it was stopped. The north end of the community in which I live wasn't quite as lucky as those of us in the south end. Several homes were lost, more in the community even further north. Many of those homes were featured on national news segments with even the nightly news anchors for most of the networks temporarily relocating their live broadcasts to San Diego to share the battle against the flames to the nation from the heart of the battle ground.

Despite how close the flames did manage to get, the re-opening of the section of my community was the first part of San Diego to allow residents to return. Grabbing a couple of pizzas on the way back into the community, we spent much of the next couple of days glued to the television to see the progress of the firefighters as they worked around the clock to contain the fires threatening San Diego. The fires eventually spread to the vicinity of the casino at which I work. The flames surrounded the property and even burned down one of the temporary tent structures at the edge of one of our parking lots. The casino served also as an evacuation center and as such was closed to gambling for a week from the date they ultimately closed during the fires.

While this experience has certainly given me new appreciation for the amazing work our firefighters do and the community at large that pulls together in time of crisis, it also makes me wonder how much a collection of memorabilia is really worth. Do they really serve as items of value or just physical representations of the memories associated with obtaining them? While I have been a big collector of many items over the years, is it really worth keeping all of them when all of it cannot be saved if a disaster strikes? Also having just recently moved, it takes a lot of time and energy to move these items that never seem to see the light of day between moves. Perhaps, ultimately, it's time to start selling some of it off because I'll always have the memories, and they are certainly much easier to pack up and move than the physical items in the event of moving or a disaster such as fire.

Ryan