And Now to the Wildfires in Southern California
They interest almost no one, really, except those who live there or have a parent there. . .or have some part of that multi-billion-dollar investment at the top of Mt. Wilson. The darling (or menacing, depending upon whether you have a tasty or a low-water garden) deer care. And so do the mountain lions who have been roaming the local hillsides over the last ten years. Their food, what’s being called “the fuel,” is now up in smoke.
The Station fire in the Crescenta-Canada Valley started up in eerie competion with another “elite fire” blazing away in Rancho Palos Verdes. It made a brief appearance on the CNN Airport Edition just as I boarded my flight from Boston to LAX, and my mom, waiting for me at our family’s La Crescenta home of 42 years, was eager to get out for some good old-fashioned fire-gawking and to get better information than the TV had to offer. We found it at Deukmejian Park, which had already turned into a major staging area. An ex-Forest Service firefighter, longing to be out in the action, carefully explained the mechanics of the park’s giant toilet-tank type water system that continually tops off a huge water reserve for pumping by airborne helicopters with long dangling dip hoses. Unable to survive on Forest Service pay, he had started his own “home pond service” and said, disgusted, that customers hadn’t figured out for themselves that ice was real good at keeping carp cool.
Town administrative jurisdictions often overlap in the LA suburbs, and so no single agency was really “in charge” of the Station Fire. It was more “incommunicado.” Our family home is in a part of La Crescenta officially known as unincorporated LA County, which is indistinguishable yet still distinct from the City of Glendale part and from western La Canada/Flintridge. Bless his heart, my brother, a macroeconomist, attempted to rectify the situation by micromanaging us from his home office in Pennsylvania via the LA Times website (which actually had excellent information) and high school friends who still live in the three different La Crescentas. Saturday TV was all Kennedy funeral coverage, Sunday brought only sports and infomercials, and the first substantial news we got on Monday was about Jaycee Dugard.
All the jurisdictions, however, use the “reverse 911″ call system to deliver the mandatory evacuation order that occupants must leave their homes immediately. These evacuations are only mandatory because somebody has a mandate to set the call system in motion. A lot of people are so afraid of looting, they won’t leave. One couple decided to wait it out in their hot tub. . . and boiled to death.
My mom and I responded like good little citizens when our robo-call summoned us at 2:30 a.m early Saturday morning. Even though we both knew it wouldn’t be necessary, we had gathered together her metal boxes of pictures, letters, and “important documents” earlier in the evening. I wondered why I didn’t even have any important documents. When we were leaving, I grabbed her address book, calendar, two paintings, and some glass dog bookends that had belonged to my dad. I had been too cheap to pay the $15 bag charge to Virgin America for a week-long visit, so my stuff crammed easily into a single slouch purse. My brother later asked if we’d possibly been able to take the old rocker.
The tiny branch of our family still living in the area—my cousin, her husband, and their twelve-year-old daughter—welcomed us unconditionally into their beautiful home that barely escaped destruction two years ago in the Burbank/Verdugo Hills fire.
We were actually quite lucky. Several days later, after monster controlled back-burns had not stopped the advance of the fires, middle of the night robo-calls were made to parts of La Crescenta miles from the fires. Families of immigrant Armenians, Mexicans, Koreans, and “white people” carted possessions, babies and elderly neighbors down to the high school cafeteria through the hazardous air to find that “human error” had robo-called the wrong half of the valley.
The Glendale School District waffled on whether or not to cancel the opening day of school, even though the high school cafeteria was filled with refugees. My cousin’s daughter was so like not entertained by all of this. Tensions mounted. The air got worse, and voices got gravelly. I finally lost it and cried watching a mammoth control-burn of the entire mountain directly behind our house—acres set ablaze all at once with little flame rockets—and made a break (without a filter mask) for Starbucks. The house blend at my cousin’s is half-caff.
Hordes of police cruisers at the local Dn’ D’s immediately convinced me that things could not possibly be as bad as they smelled. It was more like Vietnam, or at least the Vietnam I imagine. But dry. Temperatures hovered above 107, and the humidity seemed to stick at 8%. Miles of mountain face would simply vanish into 100-foot flames as we sipped our iced tea protected by the low-e argon picture windows at my cousin’s home. Helicopters made water drops day and night, whenever the clouds of smoke and toxic ash cleared enough for them to see. A friggin’ DC10 was brought in to spray retardants from just a few hundred feet above the ground.
News from the plate glass window predicted blue afternoon skies, following a horrendous morning of smoke, ash, and orange air. My brother in Philadelphia preferred up-to-the-minute hazardous air alerts from the Times site and wanted our mom out of the valley. She refused to leave. None of us could agree. Much of the time, we all sat and didn’t say much. Or we ate, bantered about this and that, and checked email. One night we watched More to Love. It got that bad.
What my mom most missed as we began to settle in was her flowered shower cap. She had just had her hair done the previous Saturday and would take only sponge baths. I was determined to get that cap and to bring a sense of normalcy back into her life. I thought I could get by security and into her house by flashing her driver’s license. Why Rite-Aid did not beckon is beyond me. As it happened, City of Glendale police welcomed me right past their barricade. The LA County police, four blocks away, scolded me for trying to enter a protected zone, and besides that, the woman in the picture didn’t look like me and no way was I eighty-nine years old. La Canada/Flintridge police first suggested that I try another way in and then, suddenly, invited me to do whatever the hell I wanted. Their shift was ending, and as one of the officers observed, “by now you know the drill.”
The terror and horror and sheer magnitude of the whole thing faded for us surprisingly quickly as The Fire moved on to burn Pacoima and Lakeview Terrace several days later. I called my brother to say that Mom was home and with the good news that we would no longer have to worry about fires because there was no more “fuel.” A fifty-mile stretch of mountains nearly 3000 feet high had burned from the top all the way down to the street above ours. He was silent, and I could hear the sadness. “But what about the deer?”
