That's how I felt as I watched the fire as it developed, and then destroyed, Cunha's Country Grocery.
That's when you realize how strong a fiber those everyday things are in your very roots, when you watch it slowly taken away in a cataclysm of smoke and fire on a cold night, as I did Wednesday, outside Cunha's.
 Stacy Trevenon |
Professionalism asserted itself: Deb reached for a camera and I pelted back inside the office for pad and pen.
Outside, chaos was growing. People were streaming to street corners to stand transfixed by the sight. From the swelling crowd came a horrified awareness the smoke was just the start, that worse might be coming.
Many stood with cell phones in hand. "Half of Half Moon Bay is standing in the street right now," said one teen, looking around himself incredulously.
I recognized familiar figures sitting on a bench outside City Hall on the corner of Main and Kelly: Cunha's owner Bev Ashcraft, and huddled around her, Cameron Palmer with an arm tightly around her, Naomi Patridge and one or two employees.
"I'm just thinking, this is her whole life," said Patridge, glancing darkly at the fire. "All that history. Part of Half Moon Bay."
Nearby, Viviana, a young employee, was slowly shaking her head. Usually she's smiling impishly, but she wasn't now.
"No work. No work," she kept repeating dully.
Across the street, I saw Cameron's mother, Adora Palmer, with her grandson Kenneth. With a sob, she hugged me.
"I could cry," she said. "This was the first place we bought groceries when we moved here with three kids, in 1976. This town's going to be in mourning."
"We were packing up vegetables and a guy said we had to leave the store. We got out, and then a whole bunch of smoke everywhere," said Kenneth.
Indeed, if there's any blessing in this, it is that no one was hurt or killed. Viviana brokenly recounted how the store had been full of after-work shoppers when Bev smelled something burning, and told everyone to leave. The adjacent parking lot also, miraculously, cleared quickly.
Before long, the crowd lined the streets four deep. Police officers paced back and forth, pushing them further and further back as the huge billows of smoke grew blacker, denser and more acrid-smelling.
I saw firefighters and Review reporters vanish frighteningly in the smoke, and emerge unhurt moments later as the breeze puffed a clearing.
Two things jumped out at me, tributes to small-town life in general and to Half Moon Bay in particular: All those familiar faces in the crowd were trying to do their best to help.
Review cartoonist Bob Lacey stepped up to help the policeman, waving his arms to move the crowd back. "You don't want to be breathing this. This smoke is toxic," he roared.
Half Moon Bay Police Chief Ike Ortiz stood like a sentinel on Main Street, shaking his head.
"I just feel so bad for Bev," he said. "I can't believe that that place is on fire."
Neither could those in the crowd. As I ranged up and down Main Street, my jacket-sleeved arm pressed protectively over my nose and mouth but still tasting the grainy air, I passed faces bleak with shock, tears in many eyes.
And I lost count of the number of times I heard the word "heart."
"This is like the heart of the city. City Hall is City Hall, but this is the heart," said Rosemarie Willamann, who stood with her husband Urs half a block away.
Tears brimmed in both their eyes as they recalled what they liked best about Cunha's. "You'd have more fun standing in line than you did shopping," Rosemarie continued.
"It's like the town's heart is broken," said Lacey. "You know Dorothy Parker's line, 'There's no there, there'? Now, there's no here, here.
"I've never seen so many people crying for a building, up and down the street, because they know it's true: There's no here, here."
As dusk and cold deepened, the fire went to six alarms, and the smoke did not stop. Outside, firefighters crouched holding hoses spurting jets of water on the walls.
But one of the most heart-rending sights I saw was later that evening. Inside City Hall, in fresh air out of the smoke, Bev, Naomi, Bev's nephew and niece and some close friends, and Cunha's employees flocked, silently watching their building burn. When the walls collapsed with a boom, they flinched collectively and a couple cried out, and then they resumed watching as flames shot up through the roof.
Bev exuded a calm borne, it seemed to me, of shock. Every so often, she would make a detached remark, almost like a commentator.
"Look at the flames. They still won't stop," she said, and then, when a fresh plume of fire shot up, "See, that's the alcohol. All that liquor on the top shelf."
But there were other things, too. "This is not the way I wanted to retire," she murmured.
"My husband has been dead three years this weekend - Memorial Day - and he kept telling me to retire. Something's trying to tell me something.
"But this is a hard way to retire."
A team of two fire department chaplains came up to her to inquire if she needed anything, and she thanked them but graciously declined. Television news media members rapped on the window, but she turned away. Outside, my fianc/ - a new Coastsider who said he "felt he had to be there" - passed, nodded to Bev and pressed one hand to his heart and the other against the window in front of her. She smiled wanly.
Finally she went into a meeting with insurance agents and town officials, and, thoroughly drained, I headed home.
That feeling haunted me next morning as I arrived at work to see Cunha's smoking shell, yellow police ribbons up and down the street, and a crowd keeping silent vigil around the building.
"I don't know why I'm here. I just felt like I had to be here," said Laurie Becker disconsolately.
Over 20 years on a changing Coastside, I too cherished Cunha's. You could find anything there, in its wonderful palette of foods. Going upstairs was like entering a time warp to an old-fashioned wonderland of housewares and clothing.
Yesteryear's music wafted through the building, adding just the right ambience. You knew the employees like old friends; they'd chide me when I'd fill a bag with my favorite treat, the chocolate-covered malt balls.
It was all a link to more genteel times, and I was by far not the only one who felt that way, judging by the people who stood on Main Street Wednesday night with shock and tears on their faces, as we watched a core of ourselves consumed by fire.
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