THE FIRE THIS TIME
Confusion.....
“There appears to be a vast amount of confusion on this point….from the Bible in song by a slave: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water,
..The fire next time!”
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
THERE WERE, OF COURSE, MANY REPETITIVE WARNINGS. The winds will come, they will come from the East, they will be dry winds parching the already dry and overgrown brush that has not been cut. Our science seems to have enabled us to predict weather with remarkable prescience. But not able to predict human behavior.
A Water tank, too small, at the top of Pacific Palisades
I had, a few days ago, been at Jonathan’s house in the Palisades, You walk up the wide concrete steps, linger for a moment on the porch and consider his two surfboards resting on the couch to the left, peer though the glass paneled door into the hallway’s warm light and wait for Sarah to come to open the door. It usually takes a while.
We’re late, and there are a dozen people fingering the canapés. Jonathan as always, pours me a glass of Stags Leap Cabernet while he sips on his Bitburger Pils beer.
We all move out to the small patio beside their sculptured water cascade. It’s a warm night.
Conversation ranges from film story plots to politics. Jonathan puts forth a proposal that we forgo, for tonight, discussion of what our children have been doing. We agree.
Sarah’s delicious halibut dinner is more than enough for us all to enjoy seconds.
It’s an early evening. We drive back to Ocean Park beside the Pacific Ocean waves.
That was the last time we saw Jonathan’s house.
Next day an ominous smoke clouded the sky to the north. The flags flapped frantically, tortured by Santa Ana Winds, reaching for the ocean, We didn’t think much about it except that this wind would make the temperature unusually hot.
The streaming NFL football games began to be interrupted by warnings of “potentially dangerous” conditions and maps of pressure gradients and wind arrows. Then the animated fire icons. Deep in the Santa Monica Mountains.
But then one popped up in Palisades, Where we had dinner last night. Jonathan and Sarah’s
I had been through a dozen fires since moving to Los Angeles - it was alway blowing wind and distant flames leaping above the ridges when propane tanks exploded.
But always in the distance. Never close.
Then Jonathan called. Almost apologetically, he said they were packing a move out bag and leaving their house. Just to be sure. Just in case.
I went out to our porch
“Where will you go Jon?”
“Dont know..”
They checked in to the Shutters Hotel by the beach.
“My neighbor Barbara says her house is gone”
“We don’t know if we have our house any more.”
It was as if they were if speaking of the death of a friend, “It’s gone”
My mind wondered… How much gone? just scorched? Gutted? Burnt to the ground??
The impact was unknowable, a never before experience.
The time was passing at high speed, alarms came cascading faster than we could geographically comprehend. Palisades, Malibu, stretches of the PCH, then the Hollywood Hills
But from here, it was a sad spectator event.
The heavy clouds of smoke conjured images - Images that were soon confirmed by the news. The Palisades was burned, destroyed. Schools destroyed, Cafe Vida destroyed, the fire station burned, and what other of my friends’ homes?
Unlike the previous fires in Malibu that seemed to strike houses intermittently: two burned one intact, one burned two intact…
This time it seemed monolithic destruction. And yet, often the adjacent trees seemed less flammable that the houses.
We watched from our Ocean Park distance, even as Jonathan called to say his house was burned in entirety. He hadn’t gotten much out.
We asked Jonathan and Sarah to come over for dinner, for some time away from the reality of figuring what to do.
The no one wanted to cook, Priscilla sent out for Goop chicken dinner which arrived on plastic containers so we put it all into White China Bowls.
The blank reality of the future hovered in the air
What will we do? We don’t want to think about it. Not right now.
All we could do was watch our 50 Inch television five feet away - images of their neighborhood three miles away
After dinner , our friends walked out into the night, onto our porch and onto the dark street All they had now was a car and a reservation at Shutters Hotel.
Along the beachfront, houses were burned to the water line. Black timber spilling into the sea. When a friend dies there may be an open casket funeral - but these homes have disappeared, cremated and no urn for the ashes.
No matter how often I’ve thought about starting life anew in some new place, some new adventure, some new challenge, the reality of bring forced into it by circumstance took away the edge of appeal.
The problems attributed to the fires in LA run much deeper than people realise . As far back as 60 years now the infrastructure for fighting fires has slowly been cut financially and left behind . It was Governor Pete Wilson who sold off the state agency that repairs roads and bridges and sewer systems and the electric power grids and lines and water systems and so on and other such services . These private companies that now run these services are slow to respond and actually not very efficient. The other side to this are those in areas like Malibu and Pacific Pal who block putting in a water supply system that you find in most city’s , the idea behind this is,, then people will move here and we will lose are Paradise. In the hills above Pacific Pal and Malibu most people have septic tanks and water is brought in from trucks or very small tanks up above the hills . And the push back to build new aqueduct to hold water as also been slow or blocked ,, no one wants this near there million dollars home or the building of them is tied up in red tape over cost .. Same thing with putting power lines underground . The city of Santa Monica has these extreme rules over building anything from houses to roads in the hills and putting power lines underground and building water reservoirs. And the huge wealth estate use up loads of water , watering plants and British style lawns 24 / 7 and filling swimming pools up .. Change is now coming at a cost , a human one and the people in Eaton canyon where the city of LA would not spent the money to up grade the water system and put power lines underground is at fault and so are the local government officials .. global warming is real and the hills above these areas and LA are so dry ,, the heat sucks the moisture out of the ground making it as hard as concrete and unable to absorb rain water and this causes mudslides and the plants roots are to thin and to weak to hold the ground from moving .. as the great Irish play writer Samual Beckett once said,, “ We are on earth and there is no cure for that “ .. it’s time to re-think about all of the above problems and completely change direction .
Incredible Sad Intensely personal account. What can anyone do but take the next unfortunate step. Well posted Paul.