Trial by Fire

The Jumpstart of my Service Year

Image from Unsplash.

I started my service term with AmeriCorps in a flurry of activity that can only be described as chaotic. Not a month before my term was set to start, I woke at night to the biggest thunderstorm I had ever heard. I stood on my balcony at 3am, mesmerized by the beautiful lightning and breathing the fresh eucalyptus-scented air of Santa Cruz. All was well.

Two days later, most of the area was on fire. What I didn’t know while I watched the storm was that I was witnessing the shocks that would start the CZU Lightning Complex fires that would devastate the surrounding region. Hundreds of people lost homes, and thousands had to be evacuated as the acrid smoke filled the sky. In a year where we have already experienced such loss, it seemed like we were losing once again. I guess sometimes the most auspicious of beginnings are heralded by the tides of misfortune rising so high that there is nothing left to do but start over.

The thing about fire — however damaging it may be — is that it often means rebirth. From the ashes of a charred forest, an entire burgeoning ecosystem waits to begin life anew. It is precisely with that sentiment that I watched people rise up to support each other during one of the biggest natural disasters in decades.

I’ll be honest. My primary reason for starting to volunteer was based in self-interest. The office I would be working in soon was the one coordinating the relief effort, and I thought that volunteering during a time of high need would be the best way to get my foot in the door and ease some of my anxieties surrounding starting a completely new job in an unfamiliar place. Yes, I could use a volunteer opportunity as a way to assuage my own fears and hopefully buy some peace of mind. Another reason to step in was that sitting at home with no job since March had truly rotted my brain. There are only so many hours of trashy reality television one can watch before going into a fully vegetative state. I think I actually began losing grey matter. So maybe my reasoning wasn’t entirely altruistic — despite what my Nana believes, I’m not a saint. But as many of my self-centered exploits turn out, this one was life-changing.

The first day of volunteering was uneventful. I worked the front table of an evacuee shelter, signing…