Fire Contains Time, and the Fire Was Moving Fast

Wednesday, Oct. 27: I am writing this piece during the season’s first powerful Santa Ana winds. Outside, ash and dust mute the sun in an apocalyptic, post-nuclear haze. The morning’s eastern sky, broadly illuminated in orange, is a brooding thing that seems imported from a Great Plains state. To the west the sky is blue and streaked by low cirrus clouds that point northward like some great weather vane, into the wind.

In the north, smoke pours upward. The smoke is dark black, vicious, roiling. Sirens wail. It is probably a small brush fire, perhaps even a vehicle that is burning.

Inside, windows and doors blow open and slam shut. The house creaks like a wooden ship. Photographs curl, hair crackles, and blue electricity arcs from fingertip to doorknob. The air is oddly still, while the great invisible wind bellows just a fraction of an inch away, on the other side of the window panes, transparent demilitarized zones through which to view the assault of the Santa Anas.

I like these winds, but not the fire growing quickly in the north. It is probably already under control. The Santa Ana optics are wholly unique--the world never looks this way except when they blow. All things participate, from the stoutest building against which the dust builds a thin layer, to the tree leaves that shift in unison like schools of bait fish. The Santa Anas are a perfect lens to watch our world through.

But there is certainly more to them than meets the eye. Raymond Chandler wrote about them; Donald Fagen sang about them; researchers have tried to study their effects on the human psyche, crime rate, sex drive, you name it--most of which boils down to positive-negative ion babble that, typical of human effort to biopsy the majestic, yields only speculation, contradiction and nonsense.

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Oh my. The brush fire burning to the north is clearly dangerous. I can see flames now, a forest of orange rising, leaning in this direction. The neighbors are on their roofs and decks, trying to see what is happening. Writing a column on enjoying the Santa Ana winds is a stupid thing to do. I’ve just decided to pack up the truck in case I need to get out.

Novelist Elizabeth George just called to see how I was doing. I told her I thought I was evacuating. Then I walked around the house and looked at all the stuff that might burn away. You can’t say goodby to a lifetime of stuff in five minutes, so I didn’t try. To the north, the smoke is heavier, and the perimeter of the fire is burning toward my street and toward Laguna Canyon Road. The winds continue to howl, pushing the fire my way.

Fall is our season of most dramatic change, because our springs and summers tend to connect rather smoothly, and our winters are brief. After the longish May through September “summer,” we sense in October the winter that will shortly arrive. And if fall is the season of change, then a Santa Ana-blown fire is certainly the most concentrated form of it--nothing is still, nothing is accorded peace, everything is a riot of movement, activity, destruction.

Five minutes outside just confirmed this. The bougainvillea bracts are swirling. The eucalyptus trees crash in one direction, straighten, then crash in another. The recycle bins have been blown from their neat stack and are bouncing across the driveway. The hill sage quivers, flattens, flattens more. Even the staunch prickly pear cactus wobbles in the gale, red fruit detaching in the fury and rolling through the dust. Clusters of brown needles, dislodged from green interiors, blast from the pine trees and slice through the air.

The fire is maybe a quarter-mile away now. Here the air is hotter. The winds are pushing it south and west, and I can imagine what it will do when it hits the dry canyons between here and Corona del Mar. I have the distinct feeling that just about everything I own might not be here in an hour or two.

I sprayed off the deck, for what it’s worth. In a moment of illogic, I got out my three-foot foam glider, saved for such an occasion, which looped grandly into the sky, rose against the wind, then bulleted directly into the house, wings and tail stabilizer exploding, changing--that word again--from a functional toy to a heap of you-assemble parts in less than a second.

Is it time to get the hell out of here?

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The western hills have been changed from stands of oak and chaparral to a genuine inferno. Along with all this physical chaos comes a deeper feeling of change within. The motion outside becomes motion inside. Thoughts pop up and rocket like embers; the mind burns. It is suddenly, during a disaster, very easy to see the past. Thirty-year old memories are vivid and reveal heretofore hidden detail. The faces of the dead swirl back into focus--a particular grin, this hat she wore, what Mom’s back felt like when I hugged her.

Likewise, between moments of rising panic, the future is clearly imaginable. I can see quite specifically how I will look as an old man; I can conjure images of what I will look like as a husband, a gentleman, a washed-up alcoholic writer, a father, a tennis addict attempting to make the 120-year-old-and-over tour, a beach bum, an aging bird hunter walking his last meadow, a gigolo, a weird recluse, an American Book Award nominee, a corpse. Everything is in flux, and anything can happen, when a fire jumps across the nearest road and directly into your brain.

The present moment, of course, is most filled with the inevitability of change. The fire contains time, and the fire is moving fast. I realize, staring out with a feeling of profound helplessness as the flames creep downward toward our street, that I will never again be what I was just one second ago, never again be what I am right now. There is no measurable right now, just a linear progression of former right nows, all driven forward by the fire.

The flames have crossed Laguna Canyon Road to the south, and the hillsides are now burning toward us from a new, unexpected direction.

All available fire units seem to have disappeared from the canyon, bound for more acute situations to the west. My fine neighbors are arriving here now, the highest point on the road, to witness our own judgment.

It is time to pack up this typewriter. It is time to abandon the words no longer sufficient for describing these hours. If this column does not appear Nov. 4, it will not be from lack of trying. Consider it a minor victim of the fire.

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Postscript: At 5 a.m. Thursday morning, firefighters stopped the fire one-quarter mile south of our street.