One street, one blaze, many ways to experience loss
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EDITOR'S NOTE: Gazette staff editor Deborah Oakley wrote this account of the fire that struck her next-door neighbor's home on Union Street in Northampton Sunday.
NORTHAMPTON - Henry Siegel was drifting off to sleep around 2 a.m. when something jolted him awake. "I heard glass breaking - things being pushed over," he said Sunday. Henry, 15, fearing a robbery attempt, woke his father, Glenn Siegel, and the two rushed downstairs.
The porch off the kitchen was on fire.
The flames forced them to scramble into clothes and flee, Henry barefoot, out another door and into the rain. Glenn called 911 and told his son to run next door and alert the neighbors.
Someone hammering on our front door awakened my husband, Hobie Iselin, and me. We could smell smoke, and see it out our upstairs bedroom window. We ran downstairs and opened the door. A police officer stood there, fuzzy in a smoky haze, fire engine lights flashing behind him. "The house next door is fully engulfed," he said. "You need to evacuate now."
We later would learn that the 26 Union St. house was the first of a rash of home and vehicle fires - one fatal - that raged across Northampton early Sunday morning, compelling fire and rescue assistance from throughout the Pioneer Valley, raising the specter of arson and setting a city on edge.
Glenn Siegel, who is the director of radio station WMUA 91 FM at the University of Massachusetts, and who hosts a Friday morning jazz show, stood quietly across the street, holding an umbrella and watching with stoic calm as a grim symphony played out: fire engines, at least three, thrummed ominously as water gushed down the street; firefighters shouted, their boots clattering on a ladder; a chain saw - a heart-stopping sound - was fired up; window glass shattered.
"There goes another replacement window," Siegel said to me with a little smile. Siegel and Laura Seftel, and their children, Henry and Arlo, 12, have been our neighbors for 18 years. Neither Laura nor Arlo was home when the fire broke out.
Henry Siegel sat in our car, parked in a neighbor's driveway across the street, phoning his mother, who was staying with a friend. His younger brother, unaware, was sleeping at a friend's house. In the back of the car, our cats, hastily stuffed into crates along with our tortoises, howled.
"I've read in the Gazette about things like this happening and thought, 'Wow, that's too bad,'" Glenn Siegel said. "You hear about things like this," he said later, "and you say, 'I'd do this, and this' - and then it happens (to you) and you just act on instinct."
Siegel and I stood together as firefighters fought to bring the blaze under control. At first, only smoke from windows broken by firefighters to ventilate the house was evident, and we hoped damage might be less than we feared.
Soon, though, the house, its main structure some 180 years old, began to show the strain of its battle against the fire snaking up the walls of the old framework. Smoke and steam rose in clouds from the upper part of the house, and suddenly scattered flames lit the night. The rich cranberry color of the house's trim glowed strangely as the blue clapboards began to blacken.
It was raining, and I hoped that would help prevent sparks from leaping across to our house, just 22 feet away. I was shivering, under-dressed and hating myself for worrying about my home when our neighbors' was burning with all their possessions inside, including precious family pictures and what Glenn Siegel later would describe as a "lifetime collection of music - four or five thousand CDs and vinyl."
Neighbors shuffled up and down the street, formed groups, whispered. Police officers questioned bystanders, in some cases requesting identification.
At around 4 a.m., police cleared us to return home. Glenn, Laura and Henry came over, too.
None of us knew what to say, so we all sat in the living room and went over what happened and what we knew, praising Henry for his quick thinking. Laura, who is an art therapist, recounted with a smile the phone call from her son that alerted her. His message was direct, but characteristically spare.
"He said, 'Everything's fine. The kitchen's on fire. Dad and I got out OK.' He didn't mention that his brother wasn't home."
Henry, later sharing his feelings about the tragic turn of events, would say, "I'll never say, 'it won't happen to me' again."
We all walked upstairs to our first-floor landing and looked out the window. A firefighter was working on the roof of the charred home. "Look," Laura said quietly. "They're drilling a hole in our roof." We stood watching. No one spoke. Later, Laura would say that the burned house was not the worst thing that had befallen her recently. Her car was hit in the summer, leaving her stranded as she sought to reach her dying father in New York.
We returned to the living room. No one wanted anything to drink, or eat. The silence in the house was jarring, paired with the fire engines idling outside, and I asked if anyone wanted to hear some music.
"Play something peaceful," Glenn Siegel said. "Haydn or Mozart."
