In Flames

The little shell of our house shuddered in the wind on a mountain ridge over the sea. Spray ripped off the whitecaps fleeing across the horizon, and the sky groaned through leaves shredded in the tree tops. Winds off the desert vaporized the oils of sage, manzanita, sumac, and mountain sides of chaparrals. All melted into our bedroom air, mixed with the pungent scents of pine and eucalyptus flailing over our roof. In the wild sway of the Santa Anas that had ushered in the birth of our first son a year before, and would usher in our second a few years later, we waited for the inevitable. The fire had already begun without flame.

We felt proud having made the choice to live on country roads in the Santa Monica Mountains, under canopies of oaks, in small communities with farms and horses, breathing clean air and listening to the drone of insects in brown grass. Only 20 minutes away, Los Angeles strained against its rebar embedded in concrete. Most of us had moved here never imagining our vulnerability in these soft mountain landscapes. Unwittingly we had enrolled in an incontestable relationship between the parched slopes of woody chaparral and howling desert winds, a regenerating system of wildfires older than the mountains themselves. A system of explosive exothermic oxidation that began on earth about 440 MYA with the very first oxygen and plants to provide fuel.

None of us could have understood fully, that when our electricity, water, and emergency services had failed, our roads had closed or been obstructed, and smoke had blackened our day into night, that we would be exposed and alone as a country rat or rabbit under sky high flames. Even more in danger, for unlike the coyotes, mountain lion, rattle snakes, road runners, red tailed hawks, and an entire ecosystem of fire-evolved and fire-benefiting flora and fauna, we had dismissed the nature of our coexistence with flames.

As the summer of 93 approached, groups of flatlanders backed by some governmental agencies came out against flatlander taxes being allocated to protect people residing in wild fire areas, including government subsidized fire insurance like the California Fair Plan. They argued that the hills were not a place we were supposed to live. Some argued to defund Federal Emergency Management Services for us, including the Santa Monica Airport for staging emergency operations. These were the same Californians living on the San Andreas fault where the US Geological Survey estimated a 6.7 earthquake occurs every 6.7 years, and where the long overdue “Big One” will most probably devastate Southern California at any time.

The calling I felt to live in these hills included wildfires every 15-45 years, but I did not know what it meant to have enrolled myself in this ecology like all other creatures. Including the Chumash Indians and others before them who had never been disconnected from nature by an urbanized life. It had been 50 years since the last big fire, but that summer of 93 I saw the fire in the eyes of the old Malibu residents as they began to prepare. The brush was thick and dry, probably about as flammable as gunpowder. In spite of fire department warnings to clear everything flammable from around our homes, limb up our trees, and generally prepare, some neighbors did nothing more than hose leaves down their driveways. Others not so secretly gloated over their home’s proximity to a fire hydrant or a fire station.

I already knew from talking to old timers up on our hill that the best chance of saving our home was to stay with it. I had begun doing some research, and was struck by one horrifying account of a woman who had run from her kitchen with a flaming casserole to put it outside her door. That was where they found her, completely cremated on her door step. The article explained that her thick blouse had become a wick for her flesh, which had quickly melted into the fire like candle wax. With this landscape ablaze, a fire hose would probably not be more effective than pissing in an erupting volcano. That is for as long as water supplies lasted. And when the fire department and their machinery were overwhelmed, I would somehow have to discover the resourcefulness to protect my home and very flammable body.

That summer of 1993 I watched old timers preparing for the fire as if I were standing low on a beach, watching animals fleeing up the hillsides from a tsunami they somehow felt approaching. My neighbors, Phil and Olaf above me, and the oldest old timer Tim up the street brush cleared their hillsides and hauled away trash. Some neighbors maintained large rusting water tanks somewhere on their properties. Many had 50-gallon barrels full of water under their rain gutters.

In his old age Tim had become curiously obsessed with purchasing huge logs which he had delivered to his driveway. He relished bucking the logs up into rounds with his chainsaw, and then splitting the rounds into firewood with a splitting axe. I had never seen anyone split firewood growing up in sunny Los Angeles. He seemed designed for it, physically big framed and able to get a leg up to run a chainsaw through large sections. He then rolled them over to stacks along the edge of his driveway at the top of the hillside. It was an odd hobby or compulsion, as if he were honoring something in the wood.  

He was usually out of breath whenever I stopped to say hello. Bucking and splitting logs was hard work. He tilted up his straw hat and wiped sweat away from his broad brow with a handkerchief. It never bothered me that he always seemed on the verge of saying something, but never said it, and rarely responded. He was a keen listener which made speaking easy, as if he was pleased to know me.

One day I spotted a lovely round of pine on Tim’s driveway. It had very tight growth rings which would have made a fine coffee table for our house. I asked Tim for it, but he shook his head. A bit surprised, I offered to replace the round with firewood, but that didn’t make any difference. “I am saving that one to burn.” He said, “I can give you another if you like.” 

That was a weird. Why wouldn’t he let me have it?  He was just going to burn it anyway. Such a lovely piece. That’s what I thought at the time, that burning had no value. Maybe a real wood burner like Tim had his heart set on something, like more BTU’s from that piece of old growth, some quality of fire in that piece that he needed to experience. Maybe it was a burning aroma he craved, or a crackling sound that spoke to him, or colors he knew that piece would emit, or some chemistry important to him.

I wanted to prune and remove some trees, but had never used a chainsaw in my life. Tim had several. He knew about bar sizes, sharpening chains, different types of cutting chains. He advised me to buy a steel bodied Stihl with a 22” bar. He came later to help me with a pine stump, and straddled the root ball like a large praying mantis, rocking the howling carbide chain straight through stones embedded in the roots. I was impressed by that.

The smoke so often pouring from his chimney on warm days seemed too odd to mention. No one else in the neighborhood did either, but this was southern California, not Canada. Maybe he was living on a small pension and cooking with wood to save electricity, I reasoned. Then there were his front curtains always drawn and leaves pilled up at the front door, but this too could be seen as normal for an old man living alone after his wife had passed away a few years back. Aside from his beaver-like activities and closed up house, he seemed an intelligent man who was at ease with himself, a few tools, and his logs.

Tim became more mysterious to me the first time I went into his garage and noticed a well-used door into the house. I was standing beside him at his workbench while he showed me how to sharpen a saw chain with a file. The door just caught my attention, the way conspicuous things do. It was a planked door, probably built by him, and strong enough to keep a bear out. The moment Tim excused himself to get something inside the house, a FED EX truck pulled up. The driver had a letter that needed Tim’s signature. I knocked at the planked door, and opened it slightly. Before I could call out, the sight of a soot blackened room stole my voice. Slits of sunlight shone through venetian blinds upon smudged ceiling beams and smoke-stained walls. A wooden Adirondack chair with a floor lamp and a few books on a side table sat in front of a brick fireplace as black as a locomotive furnace with stacks of wood either side. The acrid stench of smoke was overwhelming. I quietly closed the door and knocked again.

 

A few days later at the end of October, the Santa Ana winds started blowing. The temperature rocketed up around 90 degrees Fahrenheit. I worried about being prepared for a fire as I drove home from a client meeting in town. I wound up our canyon road, and slowed to enter the single lane of black asphalt into our neighborhood. It was cut into the steeply sloping bluff over the sea. The mountainsides were dense with shrubby chaparral, all so dry and sun baked that the leaves were ashen in color. As I passed my neighbor Ray’s house on the upslope, I jammed on my brakes at the sight of a large coil of canvass covered firehose on top of his trash cans.

You’ve got to be kidding! I thought. I jumped out, expecting the filthy hose to be useless, full of holes, rotted, rat chewed, but instead it seemed in very good condition. It was the same type used by fire departments with a canvass covering that weeps water to prevent the hose from burning, and with a coupling sized to fit the neighborhood fire hydrants.

I walked up in the soft shade of tall eucalyptus trees over Ray’s driveway and poked my head inside his front door. “Hey Ray, what are you doing with that hose on your trash cans? You throwing it out?”

Ray was from the east coast. He built an elegant Craftsman design house when he moved a few years back. It had beautiful details inside and out, including horizontal wood siding, and exposed wooden eaves that were stained and finished like furniture.

“You should keep that hose you know.”

“No,” he said, closing the door behind me, “it was left here by the last owner. It’s been cluttering up my garage for years. Take it. It’s yours.”

I stopped at Tim’s house just down the street, to show him the hose, almost 200 feet of it crammed into the trunk of my station wagon. He was directing some tree trimmers to limb up his pine trees to prevent ground fires from leaping up into them.

He came over and nodded, exaggerating approval with his eyebrows up.

That was it. I had respected his kind mannered unresponsiveness, but in my doggedness to prepare, I asked directly for his advice about staying with my home during a wildfire.

He chuckled as if I had embarrassed him.

I might have reacted like him once, when a novice sailor innocently asked me for advice on surviving an ocean storm. I had already crossed several oceans by then, and found I couldn’t answer. As a novice, I had pored over books including “Heavy Weather Sailing” by Adlard Coles, looking for technique and guidelines. It was not until those nights a thousand miles out at sea that would I discover the wherewithal to save myself. Clinging to a violently jerking shroud under shrieking winds aloft, or crawling the deck to tie down a flailing block, or complete any small task that had become a monumental undertaking with the cold weight of seas rushing over me, I never knew where my steadiness of spirit came from, or how I always figured out what to do. I felt like I was holding nature to an agreement that we are intended to survive the world we are born into.

My annoyance for feeling sidelined must have shown, because Tim paused with his head down. “Get yourself a smoke mask, and a 1,500-gallon water tank with a gas pump,” he said in a lowered voice.  

I nodded.

“Hide inside till the firestorm passes over. Then come out and see what you can do.” 

Growing up in Southern California was a Ring of Fire upbringing, and a child never forgets where he comes from. When I was seven years old, I awoke one night and saw my cat launch off my dresser, legs outstretched through the yellow glow of my night light. My dresser rocked wildly back and forth, shoving its drawers in and out in a supernatural racket of nails squealing and beams groaning in the walls. It was a magnitude 7.2 quake in 1952, the largest of the century in Southern California. Other than fallen over things, our house showed no sign of damage the next day, and my parent’s silence at breakfast the next morning reinforced a kind of resilience for living in this ecology. Even when the LA times came out with large black and white photos of broken bridges and crushed cars, nothing I remember was ever discussed at home. We grew up feeling the earth trembling in our bare legs so often, it was usually nothing worth mentioning, and the scent of smoke in hazy summer skies had always been the smell of home.

 

I was at Sammy’s Graphics in Santa Monica, when Annica called my cell.

“Did you hear?  There’s a fire. Can you see the smoke?”  

I bundled up the roll of ammonia reeking blueprints I had printed for my lighting clients, and hurried out the back door with the phone pinned under my ear on my shoulder.

“It started up on Mulholland. It’s already heading for the coast. It’s all over the news.”

I peered up over the rooftops in the alley, and saw the huge blot, spilled like ink in the sky. I looked at my watch. It was just after 3 pm on November 2, 1993. “I see it,” I said. “Oh my God, it’s happening.”

“I’m packing up some stuff,” Annica said. “I’m getting ready to leave with Matthew.”

“Ok, I’m on my way home.”

“What are we going to do about Tareana?” Annica asked.

Before I could answer, she hung up the phone, or was cut off.

I jumped in my car and sped off with Annica’s words reverberating in my head. Yes, what about Tareana? We never got the horse trailer we talked about.

Then my new office I had just built in half of our garage jumped to mind. A dream come true after all these years with beautiful glass drafting table on gorgeous legs of rusty iron that I had dragged up from the beach, new furniture, wood floors, and meticulously designed lighting. And there was our completely remodeled kitchen in the house.

Suddenly all our belongings began shouting for my attention like refugees desperate to get on the boat. My orchid collection, and my beloved 100-year-old Gibson Guitar from my mother’s family… Certainly the photo albums of our son being born, and my mother’s photo albums painstakingly assembled over her lifetime had to be taken. Also, my ex-wife’s oil paintings that she left for our son after she passed away from cancer last year. The signed Edward Weston photo of my father as a proud, but gloomy young man had always been difficult to look at, but was probably valuable, and my grandmother’s antique silver in a box in our garage that had migrated to me from her cloistered and shuttered existence had to be remembered. Not to forget my grandfather’s gold Movado dress watch with his name, same as mine, engraved on the back….

The tiny space of Annica’s car was already overflowing. Her gorgeous wedding dress boxed up on the top shelf in her closet would have to be taken. A big box. The mahogany dining table I ate breakfast around growing up, making faces at my brother so he’d choke on his food laughing and get in trouble with Dad would be a piece of my life forever missing. And the oak desk my dad made for me when I was a teenager. In it was a conversation I had always yearned for with him Oh my God, our horse… What else could I do, but release her to run from the flames?

I sped up the Pacific Coast Highway past the opposite lanes clogged with bumper to bumper traffic with a brown belly of smoke swelling up behind them. Cars full of dogs, goats, cats, chickens, personal stuff all squashed inside as if a bomb blast had collapsed the floors above… a tangle of frenzied decisions up to the headliners, hanging out of windows, tied into the gaping mouths of trunks. A graphic parade of attachments and choices were laid bare, but people kept their eyes to ashamedly to themselves as if they were nudists sharing a beach.

I just passed an ironing board wedged in a car trunk. For God’s sake! Are people insane? It was not just the expensive stuff or keepsakes people took. Evacuees threw in surf boards, bicycles, and saddles in what seemed an effort to preserve a lifestyle. I’ll bet some people threw in their yoga mats. I knew I might.

Some possessions are of more of a mnemonic importance and not physically necessary to save. I could let go of the folding leather campaign chair that my Dad passed away in with me at his side. My mother had given it to me without comment. That was also true for the huge driftwood front gate I created for a new marriage and life with Annica. And also, the sweet little sculpted gate on the back deck came to mind, holding a sea-shaped brick heart with the date of our anniversary engraved on it. Some things are just a pause, or breath along the way.

Other things clung to a physical existence for no apparent reason, such as an ugly gold mirror lashed to the roof of someone’s car like a mummy, or a child’s small hand painted dresser that just seemed sad, or a Japanese bonsai maple unable to ever grow any bigger, or a chandelier that a sister might have inherited instead of a brother. Things trapped in this world. Or useful things that could have been easily replaced were allowed space in vehicles, like a good pair of pruning loppers. My neighbor had grabbed a box of buttons on her way out, leaving behind a houseful of valuables to burn.

In the strained composure of every driver’s face, there was the building aggravation over being unable to escape. Bewildered kids craned their necks and nervous pets dripped saliva out the windows. An elder in the back seat with a resigned seen-it-all expression glanced at me going the wrong way. Knotted in the viscera of every driver was the urge to save oneself at any cost. It burned like a neural fuse down into the driver’s accelerator foot. Hawkish glances, just one or two cars pulling out of line, and suddenly family SUV’s might hurtle like personnel carriers through the Highway Patrol barricades. People have trampled each other to death for much less, for oatmeal on sale or seats at a concert.

Behind the miles of bumper to bumper traffic was a convulsion of oxygen and conflagrating matter, black smoke ascending 5 miles up into the earth’s troposphere. It was a magnificent monster of exothermic oxidation with blistering, incinerating, and vaporizing walls of flame 150 ft high. A firestorm that would create its own weather systems, 70 to 100 mph winds raging up the mountain slopes like solar blowtorches blasting embers and flaming brands 2 miles ahead. A total eclipse of our world view was taking place, an indomitable force indifferent to religious belief, privilege, social status, credit ratings, big or small bank accounts. A perfect design to force capitulation and morbidity, growing without mercy, respect, fear, or ambition. A force incapable of being compromised or reasoned with. A brilliantly unprejudiced force that fairly incinerated clothing, furniture, roofs, and trees in the same light, and melted car bumpers into the same silver puddles reflecting the sky on blackened foundations. It would BBQ people the same as rabbits for the hungry coyotes in the days after.

I raced home past a Highway patrolman trying to wave me back. There were no roadblocks up this far yet. The ocean pounded the shore along the highway. Large Pacific white-sided dolphin slid through the swells as they do so often in Malibu, with their porcelain indifference to the chaotic lives of us humans, manically connected to our cell phones in rush hour traffic jams, shuttling our kids back and forth to schools or the dentist in Santa Monica, or summers sweating it out or refrigerated in our cars trying to reach beaches, and now on the verge of trampling each other to flee smoke blackened skies.

I turned off the highway at Big Rock Canyon, and raced up the winding road in falling ash from a tarnished pewter ceiling of smoke. The gravely sound of my tires ground around corners as my windshield wipers noisily dry-plowed ashes to the side. In my gut was the irrepressible knowing that I had stay and save my home. If a person loves a place they live, that place will call for trust and courage in the relationship. Now was the time. I felt that strongly, but also the guilt of not bowing to good sense, to admit that to Annica. But Annica was not afraid. She knew staying behind was my best choice to be a father. The decisive moment had been our marriage, and that moment just repeated itself. She would have stayed with me. She said so. She never interfered or belittled me in the past for sliding around in mud during nights of torrential rains, shivering with cold, sandbagging our hillside because I loved the storm in my hair. She was same.

I accelerated up our driveway. Annica’s gray Volvo sedan was parked facing out with the trunk and all doors open. Smoke billowed over the hills behind our house. A steep canyon below our property was all that separated us from the approaching fire. Annica hurried from the front door with her arms full of clothes. The car was already full to the headliner. Our youngest son was strapped in his car seat ready to go. My 16-year-old boy from my first marriage had gone to friend’s home after school.

Annica told me a helicopter had flown over broadcasting through a loudspeaker for everyone to evacuate. The fire department had already warned that our private roads were too narrow for their trucks. Soon there would be no water, no power or phone, no helicopters or doctors, no visibility, not even breathable air without a mask, and most likely no contact with anyone, not even other neighbors like me who might have stayed up there. I wondered about Tim at his age, what he would do. There are times like these when no positive outcome can be anticipated.

Annica went in the house for a last load. Tareana whinnied down in the corral in such a high pitch it sounded disturbingly like screaming. Small burning embers floated down stinging my bare arms. I stared down the driveway at the fan shaped roof of her stable. I had built it with my own hands from heavy timbers I got from the old Hollywood Reporter newspaper building after they tore it down. My brother was the contractor on the job, and I built the corral as a present for Annica. I stood there listening to Tareana’s hooves thundering back and forth. I could release her into the bush, or try and bring her into our house. I wasn’t certain I could control her. Annica reappeared from the house with a last bundle in her arms, and pushed her car door shut on it, when a small man on foot suddenly turned up our driveway and hiked forcefully up the steep incline.

In a heavy Texas sort of drawl, the small man said, “I’m a house guest at your neighbor’s. I know horses. Want me to ride her out of here?”

The three of us hurried down to the corral, reeling back as Tareana charged the gate. She veered off at a full gallop around the corral slamming her chest into the railings at either end. The little man hopped the gate and was able to calm her enough to bridle her. He declined the saddle I rushed over to him, and charged out bareback, grabbing Annica’s cell number scribbled on a scrap of paper. It was a mile or two down the canyon road through falling embers to the highway, and then another 10 miles through the madness of evacuation, blaring sirens, flashing lights, and roaring fire truck engines to Santa Monica. We found out later that Tareana’s guardian angel had once been a professional jockey.

That was it. Annica got in her car, and turned to me stooped in the window. Our 3-year-old sat wedged in his car seat in a hollow of our belongings. Our newfoundland panted in the front seat, and our cat yowled in her cage. Our diseased hairless and ill-tempered hamster named Scubie was hiding in his pile of sawdust in his cage. Annica did not know where she was going to stay. There would be no way for either of us to reach other.

“I know you that you’re determined to do this, Frank. I know you will be OK. Please be careful.”

At the bottom of our driveway, she gave me one of those lingering stares that we both dreaded to think might be the last. She put her hand over her heart, and I did too. Then she sped off.

In spite of my good fortune to find the firehose stacked on Ray’s trash cans, it was completely useless without a nozzle. I had stored the hose in our neighbor Olaf’s garden shed next to the city fire hydrant on the hill above. He was an old timer in the neighborhood, and we had agreed to coordinate efforts to save both our homes. A fire station was my only hope of finding a nozzle. The closest was a couple miles up the highway at the junction of Carbon Canyon and the Pacific Coast Highway where the fire was already in the process of destroying 85% of the residences, and was already raging up the mountains toward my neighborhood.

I drove back down to the now empty highway with my headlamps shinning in the syrupy orange dark of a lost afternoon. Litter from the exodus of the residents lay cast along the roadside, boxes of things no one had stopped to pick through, items fallen off of vehicles like chairs, and a rolled-up carpet in the gutter.

When I reached the fire station, long lines of fire trucks were parked along the street with their diesel engines roaring. Every door and garage bay stood wide open and empty with hoses and pieces of equipment strewn everywhere. Firemen ran in all directions as if the firehouse had been kicked like an ant nest. No one would stop to listen to my pleas for a nozzle, until a wild-eyed guy whirled around in his slicker and yellow toed fire boots. He looked at me as if I might help him remember something.

 “I am trying to save my house. I need a nozzle,” I said.

“Everything is out. We can’t spare any equipment.”

 “It’s a 2 ½ inch hose,” I insisted. “We are on a private road. Fending for ourselves.”

“Oh that’s a deuce-and-a-half. A heavy hose; we don’t use’em much anymore. We might have a nozzle for that.”

He grabbed my arm, and hurried me over to banks of lockers with all doors hanging open. He thrust his arm down into a big one and pulled out a heavy bronze nozzle with a flow lever across the top. “Here, put this under your coat,” he said with a sideways glance.

I was not wearing a coat, but no one would have been able to take that nozzle from me. I hurried back to my car with it at my side.

When I pulled back up our driveway, sunlight had vanished as if Malibu had gone out of orbit. An eerie orange aura rose back up in the darkness from the west like a sinking sun gone wrong. I ran about in a choreography of tasks, closing windows, stretching out my garden hoses, making tools ready like, pipe wrenches, shovels, an axe, buckets, or anything I imagined I might need.

The plan with Olaf, my neighbor above, was to stop the fire at my house before it burned up both of our houses. When Olaf shouted, I scrambled up through the pine trees into the glare of his flood lights in falling ash. He and his burly construction worker son had already stretched out the 200-foot length of hose from the hydrant, to a position on the hillside over my house. There was one house below ours on the canyon edge, my neighbors Hal and Marlene, but no one was there to defend it. Olaf turned the hydrant on to test the hose, and it recoiled with the weight and force of a concrete python, almost flinging me and Olaf’s son over the hill. Olaf’s son set about nailing together a cross-braced wooden framework and lashed the hose to it so he could aim the nozzle himself over my house.

My very dear friend Arnaud suddenly appeared at my side from his house further up the street. Instead of evacuating with his wife and daughter or staying with his own house, he had come to check on me. By then flames had visibly crested the top of the mountain. Olaf produced a camera and took a photo of Arnaud and I and his son leaning together with our arms around each other’s shoulders, me smiling for no explainable reason in a water-soaked shirt and bandana with a sky full of red coals spilling overhead, and Arnaud grimacing like a gargoyle on the side of an old French church. Olaf’s son was grinning with his big belly as if he had just arrived at a neighborhood BBQ.

 “Ok this is it!” Olaf’s son yelled. He straddled the hose and eased the lever forward on the nozzle. The plume of water arced over my house in the firelight like a neon orange rainbow. The fire still had to cross the canyon in front of us from the opposite ridge. I tobogganed down the hill on my butt, and dashed to my ladder leaning up against the garage. I dragged my heaviest duty garden hose up to the roof. It was connected to a valve I had installed on mainline pressure at 150 psi.

My rock roof was already a flaming bed of molten embers falling from the sky. It was as if I were looking up from inside a volcano. With a wet rag tied around my head and breathing through my smoke mask, I waved my hose from side to side. It blackened wedges across the roof like a giant magic marker, but only an instant later the coals flamed back. The wind rumbled with the approaching fire and consumed the distant calls from Olaf’s son.

The trees in front of our house burst spontaneously into a wall of flame, flames well above their 60-foot height. The fire must have leapt right over the canyon, burned through air. In the blast of heat my legs had already begun moving on their own, running with my hose in both hands toward the dark side of our garage. Unable to see the roof edge, I heard my voice repeating instructions inside my head. Don’t break your leg. Look for the edge. Don’t break your leg. Don’t break your leg. I leapt into the dark, and collided heavily with the slope, rolled and scrambled down behind the garage. I clutched the hose spewing water under the deafening hiss that sounded like millions of insects masticating above.

A few moments or minutes later I emerged from behind my garage in my gasmask. With an insect strength of my own, beyond my own weight and fears, I dragged my hose to fires floating in the red phosphorus night. Following breathable oxygen, I swam through the liquid dark of flaming effervescence. There was no depth perception in this chemistry of conflagration. Only the water pressure in my hose tugged my arm back toward a physical world. Embers hurled up over the hillsides and stuck onto the sides of our house like flaming tomahawks, jubilant little dancing dervishes that I quickly dismissed with my water stream. Then the din carried a fragment of Olaf’s son’s voice, “Fire at the back of the house.”

I loped down the arbor path, dragging my hose over our concrete pavers toward bursts of light. The Juniper bushes at the corner of our bedroom exploded in grey smoke at the end of my stream. Then an explosive crackling spun me around as our Podocarpus trees blazed around our garden deck. Below them in darkness were our avocado and citrus trees, which were finally giving fruit after years of care. I blasted the deck and burning Podocarpus trees as the tall smoky skeletons of our hillside pines sputtered in sparks overhead and dropped flaming limbs.

Olaf’s son’s voice descended again from dark above, “Front of the house!” I lunged with my hose back out to the driveway, recoiling from the heat as our Italian Cypress trees turned into Roman candles ejecting geysers of sparks the length of our driveway. They were all gone in a flash. My blast of water sickened the last flames into smoky wads of blackened sticks. Then my hose went abruptly slack. I looked down at the retreating stream, curving downward and dribbling at my feet. With the municipal water tanks up the mountain empty, I had no more connection to the outside world.

I dropped the hose and turned to the sound of a whine, and a chorus of whines that came up from Hal and Marlene’s house below us. I stared down over the edge of our hill at the black skeleton of their house in the flame. The frames of rooms leaned and twisted like optical illusions. A bone-snapping crack rang out as the king beam in their open 2^nd story ceiling collapsed, followed by a swooshing avalanche of embers. Two staggering blasts followed, one after another from Al’s detached garage/workshop where he kept his acetylene tanks for his work constructing stunts for Hollywood movies. Then more explosions rocked the mountain, maybe the gas tanks of Hal’s boat melting on its trailer, or his wife’s new Mercedes in the garage. An otherworldly chorus of calls and wails rang out from around the neighborhood, like wailing coyotes over things leaving the physical world.

Suddenly, down at the last house at the end of our street, a large eucalyptus tree burst into white flame. Somehow the house and tree had out survived all the others on our street. In the ghostly pyrotechnics reflecting from the surface of the swimming pool, I spotted puffs of smoke coming from the corner of the wooden pool deck. It was attached to the house like a fuse. So many houses burned in this way. Houses that had miraculously escaped the leading edge of the firestorm, burned down from a few pathetic splinters that had ignited later. I would have gone to put them out, but unpredictable gusts of fire were still torching sections of the road on the way there.

As the smoke thinned and visibility increased over the blackened landscape, I realized my house might not burn down. I felt no relief or victory. It had been about 5 or 6 hours throwing shovels of dirt upon flames that refused to die. Olaf’s son had fallen silent long ago in the depths of their own battles. Errant flames still raced over the hills, twisting toward areas that had escaped, flaring up into crackling volleys in the distance.  Flames bent like soldiers mercilessly finishing off their last victims, sputtering their last breath in the charred night.

A strange glow caught my eye over our hillside. I tried to adjust my eyes in the shapeless void of the landscape I had known. A very long snaking scarlet glow like the leading edge of molten lava under a cracked crust crept up toward our house. The purple ice plant, or sea fig, so many of us in these mountains believed was a fire-retarding ground cover had betrayed us. Layers of dead, crisp material under its succulent green mantle were burning toward the homes they were planted to protect.

In the still flickering golden night, my ash encrusted shape hacked and tore away ice plant from the top edge of our hill. I slipped and slid on the slope of crushed succulents for more than an hour until I dropped to my knees exhausted. I stumbled into the house mummified in mud and ash, my hair tangled and stiff as wire. I almost forgot there was no electricity; the house was festive with warm light flickering on ceilings and walls from every window. I lugged a 5-gallon jug of drinking water from the kitchen to our bathroom and used a glass to pour it over myself. My clothing had been kiln baked in mud and ash for about ten hours and lay on the bathroom floor eerily holding my shape. I smelled like a fire pit even after I scrubbed the filth off with a scouring pad from the kitchen. I soaped several times finally pouring the last of the jug over my head. My body still smoked like a fire that wouldn’t go out.

I walked out of the shower into our bedroom and stood in front of the mirror flickering in flames. Being clean felt like oxygen expanding in my lungs as I ascended to the surface of my life again. I looked in my closet for something nice to wear, and pulled out a good pair of jeans and one of my favorite long sleeve T-shirts with a zipper neck. Back in the kitchen I poured myself a glass of Malbec, and took a cigarette from a pack I kept when I couldn’t resist having one. That was a picture, me walking out of the house in the middle of wildfire, all clean and dressed with a glass of wine and cigarette, standing at the bottom of my driveway gazing over this strange kingdom I had become an upstanding citizen of.

Just up the road my neighbor Dick the dentist’s house was on fire. To my right down the road, another neighbor’s house had been untouched, and was sitting in the shadow of thick foliage and overhanging trees. The place always felt spooky after a child had drowned in the pool ten years back. At the turn in the road the skeletal remains of Hal and Marlene’s house were smoking furiously. Down in the cull de sac, what was left of Peter’s house was still blasting embers into the sky.

I turned up to the left to watch Dick’s house burn. It was a big brand new cliffside house creating an extravaganza of flame. As I took a seat on the asphalt road, some observer inside me noticed that I did not even flinch when a flurry of sparks hissed over the road a few yards off. Something had changed in me. My favorite wine did not agree with me either. I leaned the glass up against a melted pear cactus behind me, and lit my cigarette. The smoke went fine with the smoke. It all seemed to make sense somehow, being part of the vanishing existence of things.

Dick’s house roared defiantly on the cliff edge in the black vacancy of smoke obscured sky and sea. Below was an almost vertical slope 600 feet to the highway. Flames shattered the windows and bellowed out in a weirdly high-pitched scream or screech. I stared into the flaming belly of the house certain I must be about to experience something paranormal. There was another ungodly groan from the smoke, and the entire house tilted, as if opening its jaw from the bluff, squealing at an unearthly frequency. The steel rebar of its foundations stretched like molten saliva from its black throat, snapping and recoiling back in slow motion. The house then hurdled into the darkness in a giant fireball. It plunged down the mountainside, plunged like an animal on fire until it dropped in its tracks on the last plateau above the highway. Flames leapt up consuming the last of it, and slowly sank back into the glimmering black landscape.

 

The worst of the fire had passed; at least that was my impression at the time. I had no idea what had happened to my friend, Arnaud, and turned my attention to getting up the road to his house. The road looked passable. Flurries of sparks crackled explosively over sections, but lengths of it remained in darkness. I pulled the elastic strap of my smoke mask back over my head and started walking, ready to spring from crackling bursts anywhere near me. I passed the snaky glow of Dick’s ice plant. It had missed its chance, smoldering toward the empty space where his house had just disappeared. When I had rounded the bend in the road, I was amazed to see that Arnaud’s house was still standing, safe in a pocket of darkness.

Something was not right. Arnaud was nowhere about and a racket of pyrotechnics sounded over the hill, with a glow much bigger than a single burning house in the sky. Unbeknownst to me and my courageous neighbors, the fire department had set a backfire. That was what people said later. While we were battling for our lives to save our homes, our neighborhood had apparently been sacrificed to buffer residential areas the next canyon over.

In white smoke at the top of the road, I spotted the shape of Olaf’s son, wearing his face mask with a red bandana around his head. He defiantly raised a shovel in his fist, and gestured toward Tim’s house. The new fire coming up the hill had ignited Tim’s collection of log rounds under his pine trees. We had just begun rolling Tim’s flaming rounds to the middle of his parking area when we turned to what sounded like a deflated rubber ball thumping back and forth against a wall. We thought we were alone on our street, but a pair of large oval eyes and a green rubber snout appeared through the smoke. My lawyer neighbor, wearing an army surplus gas mask raised his hand into an A-Ok sign.

The three of us finished rolling the last of the flaming rounds away from Tim’s trees, and then hurried over to bucket water up into his roof eaves which had caught fire. There was no time to figure out how to start Tim’s old gas engine pump which he had left ready and hooked up to his water tank. Instead we bucketed water from the steel barrels he had positioned under his rain gutter downspouts. Then we stood with our backs to the fire, guarding Tim’s house as his hillside burned itself out.

The new fire was then circling and threatening homes the first fire had missed. I headed back down the road to check on my house as sparks hurled again through the darkness. I stopped at my neighbor Bill’s to rip away an arbor smoldering over his front door. The wooden structure twisted easily off the nails loosened in the charcoaled beam ends. That was when I noticed smoke coming from Arnaud and Isabelle’s house, across the street.

I rushed over tromping through their garden planters to peer through their windows. Smoke hovered over the large oak plank table where our families had so often had dinner together. I ran into the backyard and saw smoke rising like steam from their cedar shingled roof. I found a ladder and climbed up. Olaf’s son rushed around the corner to help, and handed up pitiful amounts of water from a yellow plastic child’s bucket he found lying next to their jacuzzi. When my eyes adjusted to the dark on the roof, I realized the smoky shingles under my feet were full of charred black holes venting smoke. The house was gone. I climbed down, and Olaf’s son went back home to help his dad.

From what I could see through Arnaud’s and Isabelle’s glass patio door, the house had already been gone through and evacuated, except for a painting that Arnaud had been working on. It sat oddly alone on his favorite antique easel in the open floor plan between the dining and living rooms. It was if someone had put it there not to forget it. My impulse to save it, especially the antique easel, was strangely overshadowed by feeling I would be interfering in some way. The house was locked which was unusual in our tiny neighborhood, where we rarely ever locked our doors, and where vandals were highly unlikely to ever show up. I would have to physically break into my friend’s house. Transgressions are so often a pitfall on the path you would normally take. Already concealed in the hillside brush was Arnaud’s wedding ring which he once tossed up in front of me like a yarrow stick. It bounced off the deck railing and was never found.

I was more on a bucket brigade than inclined to divining the meaning of things. I grabbed a heavy terracotta pot with strawberries planted in cups around the sides and heaved it at the patio door. That decision almost made me a casualty of the fire. The pot rebounded off the tempered glass like a wrecking ball right over my shoulder. Had it struck me I would have certainly been badly injured or knocked unconscious, possibly even burned up with the house in circumstances as strange as the lady immolated on her front steps rushing out with a flaming casserole.

I went around to the front door and smashed in the beveled glass window. After I ran around the rooms and saw that art work had been taken off the walls, shelves emptied, and Isabelle’s collection of vintage clothes were gone, I stood in front of the painting. It was a second version of a painting Arnaud had given me a few months before, of an old country barn standing alone in a snow storm. Unlike my version, the barn in this painting had no warm tones, but was black and abandoned. It was such an obvious symbol of what was going on in his life.

Later I realized that Arnaud had tricked me. He knew I would come to find him when I could. The easel and painting were left there to distract me. I walked out carrying them both, never thinking for a second that he had left his life work of paintings in the garage. His wife must have left his art work up to him when she evacuated with their daughter. This was how he wanted it all to end. All up in smoke. Nothing to salvage. Not me stacking his gorgeous work of 30 years in pathetic piles on the road.

 

The backfire burned itself out for lack of fuel before reaching further up my road. I walked back up our black asphalt driveway in the clayish haze of dawn with Arnaud’s painting and easel under my arm. The charred skin of the mountains vented grey smoke. There were no buzzing insects, no crows cawing, and no breeze brushing eucalyptus leaves against one another. Even the sea below was mute in the memory of grasslands and oak forests, helpless against the shore to awaken nonexistent things.

As the morning draped sunny blue skies over the melted mountains, I was amazed to see patches of color, the orange and blue blooms of bird-of-paradise around the ashen edge of our lawn, and a cluster of purple bougainvillea dangling from the corner of our arbor. Not only was there color, but the sounds of life. I heard birds, a lot of them in the green trees that had survived behind our house. I peered inside the prickly foliage of a huge conical juniper. In the fishbone tangle of branches was an entire countryside of little field birds hopping about, not the least bit worried over my presence. Then a movement caught my attention on the foot path leading down to our avocado tree which had also survived. Several deer, ears flared and leaning back on one hoof, held their ground when I showed myself. We were all like one family in our little refugia in the incinerated hills. None of us there had anywhere else to go. The coyotes had raced after each other’s tails down into the safety of deep rock-sided gorges. There they, along with mountain lions, splashed along natural spring-fed creeks hidden under winding green canopies of sycamores.

My breath struggled back into this new day. I had arrived on the other side of vanishing, emerged from the unknown. I could not even mentally articulate what I remembered. All that had once been familiar and sacred had been reduced to an unrecognizable chemistry. For one I felt no sense of disaster. I knew I could not explain that to anyone, not even to myself.

An urge to cover my tracks became suddenly irrepressible, as if I could put my life back together like nothing happened. I dragged a trash can and a push broom from the garage and began push-brooming the ash off my walks. Then I hurried inside. Fine ash had sifted past the window insulation and door sweeps, and had layered the table tops and floors. I put everything back in order, working furiously after no sleep and all I had been through. I had to be back in order, going to appointments with clients, maybe even the next day. I had to be me again with my wonderful family soon back home. My heart beat wildly, and my breath grew short. I leaned on kitchen counter with my head hung down, and tried to relax.

I needed to drink water. The animals needed water. I carried out a 5-gallon jug of Arrowhead Spring water to pour into a laundry bucket for the deer and rabbits, the birds, the snails, and the creatures concealed about. In the gurgling from the spout I heard the sound of a large vehicle straining up our steep driveway. My first thought was that it must be a fire truck, the first to arrive down our narrow road, now that there was no threat of fire. I hurried back around to the front of the house, but instead of a firetruck, a large Channel 9 News Truck pulled to a stop and reversed into a diagonal parking position across our driveway. A tall antenna telescoped up from the roof, and the door burst open. Annica jumped out and threw her arms around me. She whispered excitedly, “I told them you had stayed with our house. They sneaked us past the road blocks in their news truck so they could get an interview.” A cameraman stood to the side already filming our reunion.

The News Channel lady introduced herself, and then me to the camera, me the humble homeowner who, she explained, had risked his life to save his home from this devastating fire in Malibu. Her arm waved like a wand over our spookily ash caked house.

“Weren’t you worried you might lose both your home and your life,” she asked.

 “No,” I said. “I really didn’t have time to think about that.”

“But no firefighters came to this neighborhood. Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“But you still managed to save it. Even after there was no more water up here. How did you do that?”

“I am not sure,” I admitted.  “I was lucky.”

And so the interview went on… No, I was not afraid… No, I was never relieved at any point… No, I never felt the house was threatened exactly. The fire never felt threatening, not in a personal way. It just burned… No, I never felt things were in or out of control. That’s not what I felt… Yes, there was one point I figured my house might not burn, but I never felt I had won.  It was not like that…

Then the news lady squinted at me, with kindly but professional eyes. Taking me by the arm to the edge of the hill, “Is that the hose you used when you had water?” she asked.

I nodded like confessing to a crime.

Then turning to the camera, “And here is the hose Frank saved his home with. Frank will you demonstrate for us how you used this hose to save your home.”

 “You want me to pick it up?”

“Please, just so our viewers can try and imagine how little you had, to face what you did.”

My fingers pulled up a brittle baked section of hose embedded in a crust of ash and mud. I straightened looking at her with it in my hand. My heart beat hard and the mountain seemed to be shaking under my feet. I gestured with the hose over at Marlene and Hal’s foundations, my neighbors who lost everything. The morning sun glared in my eyes. I struggled to stand up to the breakdown in my composure, to cling to another sentence, but my attempt rebounded like the strawberry pot off the glass at Arnaud’s house last night. I could only feel my love for Annica and my family, and now with shameless tears for the world to see.

The visible fire had burned itself out, but for many of us who had been exposed in one way or another, the fire had just begun. The deadwood of human indifference was quick to go up in smoke. The owners of hotels in Santa Monica allowed evacuees to choke their hallways with personal belongings, cages, cats and dogs, parrots, and even pet goats. Neighbors who had never met after years living in the same neighborhood, consoled each other and watched news of the fire together on TV, with their hotel doors left open. Thousands of firefighters from 12 states came to help with their fire trucks lined up for miles along the Pacific Coast Highway. At time it was the largest deployment of fire fighters in California history. Annica and I got word Tareana had been left by the small man at a home in the Pacific Palisades. We found her standing Jurassic sized on a scrap of lawn in a tiny backyard surrounded by well-manicured beds of flowers.

Oxidation of one kind or another is an inescapable life process. Life cannot be renewed without it. The ensuing divorces and split ups around the neighborhood had of course been smoldering for some time. Our neighbor Phil, a soft-spoken man with a stutter and a cocker spaniel went into his garage a few months after the fire, and struck a match. Neighbors scarcely said a word about it. To this day it seems too bizarre to be true. But there was an unspoken connection or even an awakening to the fire within us.  Others unable to cope psychologically with the indomitable nature of fire in our hills moved back to the flatlands, that included many of the elderly and more vulnerable. Our neighborhood was soon repopulated with a new generation of homeowners. Young mothers appeared pushing baby carriages along our roads which were already blooming with the fire propagated plants such as California fire poppies, manzanita, ceanothus, ash hungry bulbs, and serotinous cones.

 

We eventually sold our house in Malibu, and moved to a wild forested property on a small island in British Columbia. Summers were alarmingly dry. I advised neighbors to clear dry brush around their homes, to limb up their trees, and to get smoke masks and firefighting equipment. That was years before the devastating fires in BC in 2017. I think my new friends thought I had not recovered my senses after my experience with the Old Topanga Fire in Malibu. Then I discovered three fire-blackened stumps on our property, They were in old growth rainforest on the bluff over the sea that I heard had burned a hundred years back. One was a tall shard of trunk pointing skyward like a monument. I sat beside it, and to my astonishment when I touched a glossy spot, it was sticky with wet sap oozing from the crack. All these years it had been secretly alive, hidden in the forest. After being in the Old Topanga fire in Malibu, I felt like one of them. I knelt down and made an altar of shells in the hollow at its base. I often went there to sit and listen to the sea with my shoulder up against its trunk.

A few years later I drove back to visit our old neighborhood in the Malibu hills. I didn’t know if Tim was still alive, but his garage door was open. The pine trees along the house had grown back. I could still see their charred bark camouflaged in shade. Over in the front garden Tim’s rusty water tank for firefighting peeped from the overgrowth of shrubs, and his water barrels were still lined up under his rain gutters, the same barrels Olaf’s son, our lawyer neighbor, and I had sloshed our buckets into that night. I walked up to the garage and peered inside.

Tim stood over his oily tool bench, working on his chainsaw as if it were yesterday. He must have been in his late 80’s. “Hi Tim.”

His shoulders and torso turned together. His eyes lifted, warmly surprised with the same beads of sweat across his heavy boned brow. “Oh, there you are,” he said.

I confirmed we had moved to BC. I told him about the dangerous fire conditions I saw there, about the old burned trunks I found still alive in the forest, and how nobody much listened.

He smiled and held my gaze, just as he always had, as if he had always known that I would eventually discover my true nature in these hills.