February 2025

January 2025

Hurricanes and Fires are Different Monsters

By Richard Myers
Posted: 02/02/2025

Fires and floods are both forces of ruin, but their natures could not be more different. A flood announces itself in the distance, swelling on the horizon like a slow-moving tide of inevitability. You watch its approach with a mix of dread and preparation, knowing the contours of its coming destruction. It is a breast that hits you with its brute force. When it arrives, it crashes through, relentless but measurable. It drowns and drowns again, swallowing streets, homes, lives—until at last, it recedes. And in its wake, though the world is soaked and broken, there is something left. The skeletons of houses, waterlogged but standing. Belongings coated in silt, but salvageable. Fragments of a life, waiting to be cleaned and dried. 

Fire is different. It is not a distant specter but a phantom in the dark, waiting in silence. It is sneaky and tricky. It lurks around looking for an opportunity to hurt you. Fire gives no warning, no days-long anticipation. It ignites in an instant, a flicker turning to an inferno before you have time to understand. It does not stop at drowning or breaking—it devours. It feeds on breath, on memory, on history. It does not recede. When fire has come, what once was is no more. No debris, no scattered remains to sift through. Only ash, only absence.

I remember Hurricane Harvey, how it battered and bruised but left behind the pieces of what had been. How, even in destruction, there was something to hold on to. But fire—fire does not leave you pieces. It leaves you with emptiness. And you must start again, not from wreckage, but from nothing.