Altar helps keep vehicle lost in arson in owner's life

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GORDON DANIELS

Julie Robbins stands on her back steps which shows fire damage on the step's railing. Her car was parked closeby and probably would have set the house on fire if the Northampton police hadn't awakened her.

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GORDON DANIELS

Julie Robbins, of 16 Pomeroy Terrace in Northampton, sits beside an altar she created for her Subaru Impreza, which was destroyed by fire Dec. 27, the night an arsonist allegedly roamed the neighborhood.

NORTHAMPTON - Nothing is taken for granted more than that car in the driveway. Well, until recently, the idea of going to bed and not have someone burn down your house was pretty much taken for granted. Things change. But that bucket of bolts out front? A given.

Julie Robbins and her husband, Joel Nisson, of Pomeroy Terrace, never heard their car blow up in the dead of night of Dec. 27, but their neighbors did.

"I was awakened from a lovely sleep with a pounding on the door," said Robbins. "Police, fire, what?"

For a second, judging from the urgency of the pounding, she thought there was a warrant for somebody's arrest. "Yeah, what kind of a creature was I with?" she said with a laugh.

As they opened the door they saw the blazing husk of their car, with flames impinging on their porch, heat to make you shield your eyes. But no one was putting the fire out, and sirens were everywhere.

"Where are the trucks?" asked Robbins. "We knew immediately it was something big. I heard the word arson, the talk in the street was arson, we had arson in our heads. 'Why you?' somebody asked. 'I don't want to go there,' I said."

It was her first car.

By now, some of the shock has worn off from a Sunday morning that screamed horror at every turn.

In the fire's ugly aftermath, we learned a lot about those who died, the salt-of-the-earth Yeskies. We learned about the family who made it out of their Union Street home by the skin of their teeth. And we learned a bit about ourselves and the baby-faced kid who lived down the street and allegedly struck.

The toll of destruction that night included six structures, two lives and, oh yeah, a large number of torched cars. In comparison, it doesn't have the same punch. The cars were not occupied, though in a few instances their flames licked dangerously close to dwellings. In the end, they're only cars, right, not any different from those devoid-of-character clunkers that clog our highways and suck our spirits dry.

But "Honey, have you seen my keys?" is a phrase most of us are familiar with, nonetheless.

"The car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad and incomplete," said the late sage Marshall McLuhan.

What may have been lost in all of this is what it's like to lose your car by arson. It's a bit different from your crackup on King Street, where you watch as they tow it away and make arrangements with the authorities to salvage what's in the backseat, trunk and glove compartment. These automobiles were blown up like something out of Fallujah. Not a single item with your name or picture on it is coming back.

Robbins and Nisson never owned a car in New York. More of a burden there, really. As author Daniel S. Greenberg puts it: "Storing your car in New York is safer than entering it in a demolition derby, but not by much."

After Sept. 11, the couple moved to Northampton, a move, many will attest, requiring the purchase of a motorized vehicle. "Hey, where can I grab the subway for Whately?" is not a question asked.

The car was a 2002 Subaru Impreza. The couple had put 49,000 miles on it before it got torched. The cell phones were in the car, along with a down jacket, lots of CDs cut by musician friends like Meg Carey, lots of Springsteen, and, of course, the snorkeling gear. The couple met in the Cayman Islands some 15 years ago.

"What are the odds?" said Robbins. "Two New Yorkers who never knew each other meet in the Caymans."

Robbins still used the gear to snorkel in local swimming pools. That's the handiest thing about cars - what you need the next day is usually in the backseat.

Their neighbors said it was a cacophony of two explosions, yet the couple slept right through it. Needless to say, their slumbers since have not been as blissful.

"As a New Yorker I felt incredibly safe in this town," said Robbins. "You could take the dog out at 3 a.m. without a care. Now there's been a shift in trust, with a lot more vulnerability."

The next day she saw sap oozing from the porch bannister.

Arson takes things to an emotional level most of us have never had to tap. There will always be fires, floods, so-called acts of God and there will always be grief over what was lost. But even the unholy image last week of the fire that consumed the West Cummington Congregational Church does not take us to the civil rights murders in Alabama. Only arson does that.

Though Robbins and her husband were already pretty friendly with their neighbors, they got to know a lot more of them in the hours and days following Dec. 27. Though haunted with a week of sleepless nights, a community responded, got to know each other a lot better, vowed to keep an eye out and raised dollar after dollar.

One of those Julie Robbins has had the privilege of getting to know is Elaine Yeskie, whose son and ex-husband perished on Fair Street while she and a friend escaped.

"I've been in touch with her every day," said Robbins. "She had a major loss; this seems like nothing. Here we are trying to recoup our losses and she's lost everything."

Cars are funny things, though. Unpredictability turns on a dime. Robbins finds it "very ironic and amusing that I got the car repaired and had just re-registered it, then it gets burnt and I get my registration in the mail."

It was her first car. Not to be confused with first love, but enough of an attachment to inspire a limerick:

In 2002 a New York car virgin bought an Impreza
The Subaru boasts 4-wheel drive, just to impress her.
'My first car," she explained, "is now ravaged by flames
She was safety inCARnate - now let us bless her.'"

"It's a sickness, actually," said Robbins. "My life is a limerick."

To keep up with the rhythm of her life, Robbins has been using a loaned hybrid from a dear friend whose daughter is out of the country. She also claims to be getting the run-around from her insurance company, not being adequately compensated, doubtful of coming up with a comparable car, and the more she gets upset, the more upset she gets with herself for being upset. The inconvenience and personal horror of her own loss, she says, pales with that of the Yeskie family or the Seftel/Siegel family driven from their Union Street home.

"I felt grief and numbness for the Yeskies," she said. "It made me incensed and inflamed, a fluctuation between grief and anger."

All she salvaged from the burned-out hulk was the car's license plate and its Impreza nameplate, and has used those and other artifacts to create "my gratitude monument - gratitude that we were spared," she said.

It's in memory of a car that once ran, dependable as the lungs in your chest. It's in memory of the space out front it occupied, and the innocence that was snatched from the city it once stood in.

Bob Flaherty can be reached at bflaherty@gazettenet.com.