My brother has been known to play a practical joke or two. As a testament to both his devotion to practical jokes and his poor execution of them, he has a permanent scar on his arm from a time when we were camping and he quietly snuck off into the woods, circled around behind the camp, ran up behind us growling like a bear, tripped and fell into the fire.
So you can understand my skepticism when he sat up from the backseat of the car and started hitting me on the shoulder yelling "Fire! Fire!"
Sensing the impending practical joke, I puttered around with a few things before giving him my full attention: wrapped up the article I was reading on my phone, set the radio clock, and organized the glove box (my wife was driving at the time). Finally, I was ready to participate in his little joke. And as I looked to the left in the most "this one better at least be funny" face I could produce, I saw that the Barnes & Noble sign a mere 30 feet from our car was ablaze.
It wasn't a big fire, more like the slow burning flame you'd see in a living room fireplace, but it was definitely on fire. After I recovered from the shock that my brother was actually being serious, we all snapped into action like a well trained rescue team.
Our first action was to hover there in the middle of oncoming traffic for a moment in order to endanger as many people via this small fire as possible. Then we really got going and decided we needed to call 911 and drive back to tell the people in the store.
We circled around and as we did saw the lights of the other signs on the building flicker and go eerily dark. When we arrived back at the entrance the events inside the store and outside of it reached a nexus. As my brother, who was on the phone with the 911 dispatcher and I went into the store, we passed the manager on her way out, on the phone with a 911 dispatcher. Knowing that 911 and a Barnes & Noble manager were on the case calmed us, and we were able to head back to the car, drive to a better vantage point and watch the denouement of the episode.
The fire department arrived about 4 minutes later, and took a surprisingly long time to actually put out the fire. I imagine they were verifying that electrical breakers were turned off or something of that nature, but after they arrived there was about 10 minutes of standing around, 30 seconds of water, and the fire was out.
In the end, the "B" in Barnes & Noble was the only major casualty. It was too dark for cell phone pictures the night of the fire, but we returned to the scene a couple of days later and snapped the pictures you see here. Thankfully everyone was safe and it was just a minor fire, but I did learn a valuable lesson that night: bookstores can be exciting places when they're on fire.
