The Fire-Touched

The womb of Southern California: hot, dry, barren

©Bryan Zepp Jamieson
http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/Sociology/firetouched.htm
10/23/07

They call them the devil winds, but that’s not a good name.

One thinks of Efrits: also from hot and dry places, but capricious, even mischievous, and always malevolent. The devil winds can be capricious, flickering into lives and destroying them and sparing others, but they are not mischievous, nor are they malevolent.

They simply are. They are the hard, cruel power of nature, a black scream across a red sky. As remote and indifferent as the furthest galaxy, pregnant with fire and dust, they are oblivious to the plight of the humans they encounter.

But the fire that they carry IS mischievous and malevolent.

The Santa Ana winds have their own majesty. I remember the first time I encountered them, on a cool, damp September evening some 44 years ago on California’s south coast. What they now call “the fog monster” – night and morning low cloud – had moved in before dusk, turning the evening chill and damp. I was outside, walking my aunt’s dog, accompanied by my uncle, who spun tales of a magic land where the televisions had six channels and the folks up on the hill were getting color televisions. It was almost full dark, but my uncle pointed to the mountains. I looked.

I could see the mountains. That was the first wonder for moments earlier they had been obscured by the fog. And then I saw (yes, saw, not felt) my first Santa Ana wind. The foggy sky was being drawn back in an almost straight line, a horizontal curtain being raised toward the beaches. Stars sparkled under the lifting canopy. They were bright, brilliant. Northern stars like those you see on a cold, clear winter’s night.

Thus it was doubly shocking when the heat hit me. Outside of the oven at home, I had never felt such heat, not on the hottest day of my life. 90? 95? I couldn’t begin to guess. My uncle, guessing that I was a bit frightened, explained the phenomenon. A thermal low would form in the desert valley behind the mountains, and if the winds came up out of the east, they would press the hot desert air into the canyons that led down toward us. The air would be squeezed and compressed, both by the canyons narrowing and by the lower elevation, until by the time it reached us, it would be even drier and hotter than it began. With inexplicable pride, my uncle noted that because of these winds, which he called “sundowners,” the town had, for nearly a hundred years, been the official hot spot in North America, with a high of 133 degrees, until Death Valley finally had a day that was hotter. My uncle didn’t mention fire, and I don’t remember thinking of it, even though the mountains behind the town were grey and stark, bare after a massive (by 1965 standards) fire had threatened the town. The Coyote Fire, long eclipsed by far greater fires, was a sundowner fire.

Southern California stumbled into and out of my life a half dozen times, an intermittent drunk, and I learned to hate the sundowners. It wasn’t just the fire danger; people would be tense, irritable. It was an oppressive feeling because you couldn’t breathe right, and there was nothing to do but wait the winds out. They were the one thing that could get people to miss the fog monster.

My last encounter with the winds came in late June one summer. The winds came up, hard, fierce and terrible, bedouin breezes intent on pillage. As always when the winds blew, I felt antsy, apprehensive. I knew it was dry out; the town had been in several years of drought, and outdoor sprinkling and car washing had been banned. The mountains were thick with mesquite and chaparral, ready to explode.

In mid afternoon a white plume of smoke rose, only to be battered down and sent sprawling to the ocean by the relentless winds. I listened to the radio anxiously. A small fire at the dump, it turned out, not a major threat.

I left work early, and my boss didn’t mind. Like me, he was finding it hard to get any work done. We both kept glancing out the window at the mountains.

I got home to the apartments my wife and I managed, and I got out of my truck and walked down to see what the small group of tenants in the parking lot were up to. These were good people, and I rarely ever had to worry that they might be “up to” something, but the way they stood talking earnestly with grim faces caught my attention. The last time I saw them doing that was the day Reagan got shot.

Barry looked at me and said, “Do you think we’ll have to evacuate?”

“It’s just a small dump fire,” I replied. “They expect to have it out in an hour.”

Barry pointed over my shoulder with a what-in-the-hell-are-you-talking-about expression. “They expect to contain THAT in an hour?” he demanded.

I turned. Gone was the little white column of smoke. In its place was a vast, churning black mass of smoke, a giant tornado on its side, seen from its top. I stared in utter disbelief. It simply hadn’t been there ten minutes earlier when I left the office.

It was coming right over our heads, and rule number one with Santa Ana wildfires is “If the smoke is passing over your head, you are in the path. Move.” Even though this fire appeared to be miles away (seven, I later learned) I had little doubt it was going to come right at us. Already the first specks of ash were beginning to fall, a snowfall from hell.

If Mt. Shasta ever erupts in my lifetime, I suspect I’ll watch it with a sense of déja vu. Trying to keep my voice calm (I doubt I succeeded) I said, “Barry, everyone, start grabbing your irreplaceables and get them in your car. We may have to bug out on this one.”

I thought we would have four or six hours before it reached us – if it did. In front of us was a three lane road, and immediately beyond that was a six-lane highway, and beyond THAT was a two-lane frontage road. And beyond that was a seminary that had been turned into a school for special needs kids, and featured a vast expanse of green lawn. Normally this all would make a pretty good fire break.

We got thirty minutes. There was a culvert just beyond our property line that crossed under the freeway and the roads, and the fire erupted from the mouth of that twelve-foot wide tunnel like a blowtorch, setting the hillside of eucalyptus trees behind us ablaze. I watched, stunned, as the fire swept three hundred feet through the stand of trees in a matter of seconds. The oil-based trees bloomed into fireballs. Some actually exploded.  Now the fire was behind us, too.

I was as packed as I was going to be. Only one of my four cats was in her crate in the truck, and she wasn’t happy about it. The rest had vanished. Crawled under the building, no doubt, and if it caught fire, the poor things were doomed. I had my important papers and more valuable items in the truck. I looked down the row of apartments. Barry was gone, so was Mona, Ed was just leaving. One vehicle other than mine remained.

I went and banged on Walt’s door. Walt was a level headed old Swede, hard to impress. He answered the door. “Let’s git, Walt. Fire’s here. We’re bugging out.”

Walt shook his head. “I’m watching it on TV. It’s still a couple of miles away.”

“Go look out your kitchen window.” He complied, and came back moments later with his suitcase. “Head east, into town. I don’t think you can get out any other way.”

I took a look around as I went back to my vehicle. The fire was on three sides of us. I started to climb in and someone I didn’t know ran up to me. “Have you got a bucket?”

I did, and he had me fill it with water and run to the restaurant next door, where the cedar shake roof was burning in one spot. I dashed the water on it and it went out. I wasn’t sure what good it would do, since large red-hot brands were coming down out of the wind all around us, but later it turned out that we had saved the restaurant. I came back to my truck, in which my poor cat was mewling piteously. I pulled out, and encountered a small station wagon with the logo of a local television station on it.

“Can I get through there?” he asked, pointing west into a dense wall of smoke.

“I wouldn’t try. What’s it like that way?” I pointed east.

“Clear. No smoke.” That sounded like a good place to be. He drove west, and I watched him drive into the smoke, into the barely discernable silhouette of an iron railway bridge. The bridge collapsed just as he went under, and he just barely missed being crushed. I shook my head in disbelief and turned east. I could only see about twenty feet, and brands the size of house cats were falling around me In moments, I was out from the smoke and the air was clear, clean – and cool. The winds were shifting again.

I watch the people who talk about camping out and having no idea if their homes survived or their pet, and who express their deep frustration that they can’t even go and LOOK, and I know exactly how they feel. My wife was safe – but on the other side of the path of the fire. I couldn’t see her. I spent that night munching Lunchables (never again!) and driving around well-known streets, probing the defenses of the fire and the police, trying to find a safe way to either see what became of my home or at least to get to my wife. I saw million-dollar houses burning with nobody trying to save them, and watched tornadoes of fire dance across the lawn of the County Building. (Several days later I saw the evidence of those fiery twisters in the Efrit script burned into the lawn).

Late the next day, after a confrontation with an exhausted cop who actually put a hand on her gun in the face of my wife’s frustration, we laughed at my boss who, oblivious to what was going on around him, had actually driven right through the fire zone over a freeway that was supposedly closed to all traffic in order to get his suit in to be dry-cleaned (the guy was a sort of Inspector Cluseau who could fall in a tank of alligators and be saved by the plastic tips of his shoelaces and never notice the alligators).

About noon they let us in, and we were amazed to find that not only was our building still standing (one of several in a neighborhood that was otherwise devastated), but that all our cats had survived unharmed. We didn’t have power for four days, or cable for two weeks, but we didn’t give a damn. We still had our place, and our pets, and we had survived the fire. We were incredibly lucky.  The tips of our shoelaces saved us, but we DID notice the alligators.

It touches you. You develop a whole new calendar, BF and AF. Before the Fire, and After the Fire. I gazed in awe at the broken thermometer and the melted screens, and wondered without introspection how we were untouched, and if we were deserving. Many people feel that way when they walk through a disaster.

I watch the horrible images from the southland tonight, far worse than the fires of my childhood or even just 15 years ago, and I understand how scared and lonely and desperate those people are, even the ones in the tents in the baseball park or safe in the armories. They wonder if they have homes, and After the Fire, telephone poles will be mute witness to heartbreak as the “Have you seen this dog?” or “Cat missing” posters go up.

I know how those people feel, as do many in the fire-touched regions. Now maybe you feel it too, just a bit.

And, like me, you wish them all the luck in the world against the Efrit fire.

[And now, an opposing point of view from the Nazi Pig segment of humanity, albeit barely human]

On the October 22 edition of his nationally syndicated radio program, host Glenn Beck stated, "I think there is a handful of people who hate America. Unfortunately for them, a lot of them are losing their homes in a forest fire today." Beck continued: "There are a few people that hate America. But I don't think the Democrats are those. I think there are those posing as Democrats that are like that." Beck's comment came as forest fires ravaged parts of Southern California, leaving one person dead, four firefighters wounded, and forcing about 1,500 people from their homes, according to The New York Times.