Carol Black

 1. Fire

On November 2, 1993, I was driving around Los Angeles with three daughters in my car: one dead, one living, one as yet unborn. It remains my private definition of irony that when the fire came, the one thing I saved was a small box of ashes. As we merged onto the freeway, my pregnant belly squeezed behind the steering wheel, my three-year-old strapped in her car seat, the monstrous black cloud at our backs, the cool gray cinders of my firstborn rode shotgun on the seat beside me. 

Janie had been in the tub singing softly to herself, lifting the water and letting it fall like pearls between her fingers when three miles northeast of us the dry brush ignited. Santa Ana winds had been blowing all morning, fierce blasts of clear hot air that come roaring down from the desert and over the coastal ridges until the sea dazzles and bristles with whitecaps like an animal with its hair standing on end. Through the window acacias and eucalyptus whipped their heads in the sharp gusts. Calvin slept in a pool of light on the floor, black fur heating in the sun. He sighed and stretched, paws quivering for a long moment and then falling to rest as unseen the flames raced toward us. 

It was not until I had Janie dried off and dressed that Denise called from the office to say that Thor had called to say that he heard on the radio that there was a fire near where Old Topanga hits Mulholland Highway.

You’re kidding.

No.

Shit.

Is that bad?

I knew the lay of the land and the speed and direction of the wind and the moisture index of the chaparral well enough to know exactly how bad this was — bad — but when I opened the north-facing door of the house and saw the size of the black cloud beyond the ridgeline, I quailed. It was like a mushroom cloud, a column of darkness spiraling six miles into the sky, its billows and curves defined against the blue air with a surreal and malevolent clarity. Our house sat just over the crest of the ridge, directly in its path, and with the heat rising and the wind accelerating straight at us, life as we knew it now existed within a delicate little bubble of time that could be measured in minutes.

Quickly I walked to the closet and picked up a white cardboard box. In it were a small stack of photographs, a pink satin pillow shaped like a heart, an infant nightgown dotted with yellow and blue teddy bears, and a small gold-toned container with a sticker that read Eva June Gray, September 5, 1988 – October 1, 1988. Then I called Calvin, picked up Janie in the other arm, and we left.

Although what happened next is really quite simple, I find that it’s difficult to tell it in a straight line, because aside from the confusion that usually attends such events, a sense of fatigue sets in, a fog. It's hard to hold the pieces in my mind. In fairness, there were quite a few strands to the situation, streams that converged at this particular bend in the river before diverging into a many-veined delta falling to the sea. In those years, you could say my body was the river, gathering in life and death from my forebears and then parceling them out to my innocent offspring. 

And the fire swept over us.  

Our house tucked itself into the slant just below the top of the mountain called Kaspat Kaslo’w, nest of the eagle, by the Chumash; on settler maps it’s called Saddle Peak. Above us a red shelf of sandstone angled out of the hillside like the wing of a crashed airplane, warming in the sun and studded with fossils of sealife. Below us the land plunged precipitously into the soft salt-mist air, tumbling south and west down a fractal of mini-ridges and seasonal drainages studded with boulders and tangled chaparral. To the far west the ridgelines layered themselves in precise linear formation, rising, lifting, staggering, and falling with heartbreaking randomness to the sea.

The transverse coastal ranges of southern California are young, simultaneously among the fastest growing and the fastest disintegrating mountains on the planet. Marine sedimentary formations intertongued with volcanic rock give you a sense not of timelessness, but of living right now in geologic time. You feel the sandstone pushing itself up from the ocean floor, lifting armfuls of seashells, chitons, prehistoric snails into the sunlight, angling for the sky. But the rock is soft infant rock, a fontanel in the skull of the earth; you can break it in your hand. It crumbles obediently between the iron roots of sumac, coyote brush, ceanothus, native oak. And from time to time these mountains shake themselves like wet dogs, spraying boulders like droplets of water from their shoulders and haunches. In a storm whole hillsides unlatch and move, drawn by gravity like love back to the seabed they rose from. 

And of course, these mountains, they burn. The chaparral and coastal sage scrub grip the crumbling slopes through the deluges of winter, but in summer they must live on sea-mist. The rich oils in their stems and leaves soothe and protect them through the endless dry days, filling the warm air with the fragrance of sage-blossom, monkeyflower, deerweed, chamise; eloquent tangles of light and shadow, alive with small butterflies and iridescent bees, shading and hiding dust-colored rabbits, coyotes, rattlesnakes, quail, dust-colored birds that peck and scrabble in the crackling dry leaves. But when ignited they explode.

In the fall Santa Ana winds whip scorched air up to eighty miles per hour over this rich fuel-laden web of tinder, carrying a spark two miles on a single gust. Anything, any small thing, can set it all ablaze. And once triggered, like a single restless bison triggers the entire herd, the wind-driven flames stampede unstoppably to the sea, helicopters hovering like gnats overhead, trailing scarlet streams of flame retardant that fan out in the air, delicately, like bright feathers.