I thought it was just me spreading gloom over the holidays. I came by it honestly. As I wrote, it was my first holiday without husband Paul. Then I begin to hear gloomy moods from others who did not know me or, if they did, had not been near me.

I gathered this from comments like “it seems so much darker this year” or “I just can’t get excited about this year.”

No one I heard blamed it on the political environment or Trump becoming president in a matter of days which surprised me because that is on my worry list. However, his election has not made my list of daily worries, so it was not that for me either.

I think that the fact I and many others have a list is the reason for the season.

Is there a sense of our security being rocked by too much change and/or too much unpredictability whether natural-occurring or human-generated events?

One that is occupying the news as I write this is the destructive fires occurring in California. Some of the areas are residential, much like the one I live in here in Sequim.

We all feel sympathy if not despair over the enormous losses of lives and property resulting from the fires spreading across southern California. We know how we would feel, a feeling usually followed by “it would not happen here.”

Could it happen here?

In my view, things like that should never happen anywhere or if they do, we have the systems in place to contain and extinguish the fires.

I, perhaps naively, believe most communities have the systems in place to put out fires, especially in urban and suburban areas. I am not the only one who thinks that; I heard comments from experts puzzling over the spread of the California fire.

I am sure there are reasons which I could not know. One I heard had to do with the number of hills.

There will be an analysis which should interest us all.

Failure to contain a fire shakes our confidence in our public safety measures. This is not the kind of wake-up call that should happen.

Those responsible for fighting fires are reluctant to speculate on both the cause and progress of today’s’ fires. at least not as of this writing.

They wisely say in response to many questions that the focus now is on fighting the fires. Causes and responses to the fires will be examined when the fire is contained. Let us hope so.

And I want to know their conclusions.

Fires are to be respected; they can happen anywhere.

Respecting fire

I have lived in the Pacific side of the mountains for decades and cannot imagine it getting dry enough to support the spreading of fires of the kind California experiences.

Insert here, we are on notice that summer seasons are getting hotter and dryer.

But I can imagine the horror and helplessness a person feels seeing their home with the possessions of a lifetime in flames that resist any attempt to extinguish them.

Fires like those in California are more likely to occur in the eastern part of our state which experiences droughts. Although, we cannot be complacent. Urban areas or areas like Sequim have no immunity against uncontrolled fires.

The good but terrible news is that most fires are human caused, by an unattended campfire or dropped cigarette. Good because that fire is preventable; not good because humans are careless animals.

We have had forest fires near enough to our community to turn our skies orange, but it does not happen yearly and never lasts long. My guess is that is true of some of the established towns in California that are caught in today’s fires.

We can never lose sight of the possibility of a destructive fire whether to our own home alone or to an entire community.

We, the people, are being warned such catastrophes are going to increase as a result of climate change and warmer, drier environments in which fires thrive. We have seen it in our forests.

Several years ago, I had the opportunity to be on a ride-along with the Sequim Fire Department. I was told the call for fighting fires is a small, albeit important, part of their work. Most calls are for medical emergencies.

Our community is enormously grateful for that service, just as we are enormously grateful for the protection of firefighters on call 24/7.

We can take that worry off our gloom list if it was ever on it. We likely already have because we tend to take fire departments for granted.

They are just always there waiting.

Bertha Cooper, an award-winning featured columnist with the Sequim Gazette spent her career years in health care and is the author of the award-winning “Women, We’re Only Old Once.” Cooper and her husband lived in Sequim for 26 years. Now widowed, Cooper continues to live in the area she has grown to love. Reach her at columnists@sequimgazette.com.