Well, the residents at the Grumpy Old Dyke’s house out here in Lakeside dodged another bullet. As with the Cedar Fire four years ago, we were where the Witch Creek Fire was not.

We got missed.

Lot’s of people did not get “missed.” They took it straight between the eyes, and now they have to start their lives over. Those of us who felt the air stir as the bullets whizzed past us, and still walked away, now have to deal with the PTSA – Post Traumatic Stress Almost.

Unlike PTSD, where the affected person suffered some awful ordeal and now has to deal with the memory of it. PTSA is caused by almost suffering some awful ordeal and having to deal with the stress of what might have happened.

Fires can cause that.

The October fires forced you to make the kind of decisions you didn’t want to face. What to take? Where to go? How much time do we have? What will fit in the car? All these variables made for a crazy-story problem in the hardest Algebra test you’ve ever taken. Meanwhile, the evacuation zones moved closer by the minute, like a timer ticking away on your math teacher’s desk. Any minute now it’s going to go – Riiinnnggg – and then it’s “Time’s up! Please hand in your answers.” And you haven’t even started.

To make matters worse, superimposed over the Witch Fire was the scalding memory of the Cedar Fire.

The Witch Fire didn’t have the element of surprise that the Cedar Fire had – the War-of-the-Worlds quality of people running for their lives, the Demolition Derby driving, the Mt. Vesuvius ash covering everything. All of that was missing in the Witch Fire. But flash-backing Cedar Fire veterans got to experience it all over again. The air was full of tension. All of Lakeside was collectively holding its breath.

Under such pressure, a person’s decisions can be less than brilliant. For instance, when gathering up my evacuation necessities, I packed a week’s worth of pants and no shirts. Maybe there is something Freudian in that, I don’t know. And because TV newscasters kept wagging their fingers at us and saying “Don’t forget to pack those photo albums. You don’t want to lose those precious memories,” we loaded up a suitcase with old photo albums that we never look at, and left all our favorite photos hanging on the walls in their frames.

(Mrs. G.O.D. says “Maybe next time we will do better.”)

Then there were the animals. The cats were not a problem: We lined up all their carriers on the front porch like bus station lockers. We put the dogs’ food and beds in the car, packed some water in case the H2O got shut off, and grabbed the crazy cat’s seizure medicine and the old poodle’s arthritis pills. The kid’s snake was okay in his terrarium. But what about the horses?

Well of course you evacuate the horses, right? Take them down to the rodeo grounds, right? Tie them to a fence with a lot of other terrified animals. Well maybe, and maybe not. Everyone who went to last year’s Gay Rodeo, knows that the Lakeside Rodeo Grounds are all dirt and pipe corrals, (except for the bucking chutes and the press box). Well, my horse pasture is the same, minus the press box. The rodeo grounds were also closer to the fire than my house, and down in the river valley where the smoke collects, while my place is on a hill. I wasn’t sure the horses would actually be safer there – especially because of the Fear Factor.

Horses are ruled by fear. They will jump in front of a freight train to avoid a blowing burrito wrapper. And every horse has its own individual phobias. One of my horses was abused by a previous owner and, consequently, is terrified of men, cowboy hats, and ropes. If we tried to take her to a rodeo arena, she would most likely kill herself, and take a lot of people with her. We decided the horses would be better off left in their own pasture.

All questions answered, we put down our pencils and waited for the buzzer.

In the end, however, none of our stress over options mattered. The wind changed direction; the fire went the other way. Safe again, life returned to normal. So we thought.

Last night, a week after the Witch Fire ended, Mrs. G.O.D. burst through the door.

“There’s a fire!” Her voice was tight.

We careened from window to window checking the skyline for flames. But it was only the smoke from a neighbor’s chimney.

The fires are gone, but the PTSA remains.