What is it like to lose every last material possession in an instant? I hope I'll never know. But a friend of mine, Per Wehn, does know. In one of those roaring California fires, everything that he owned went up in smoke. I first got to know Per at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference. I think he's a wonderful writer, and I still marvel at his resilience. Who was it who said that writing is the best revenge? I don't know if you can get "revenge" on a fire, but in any case, I asked Per to share his experiences with the Living Single readers. Here's what he wrote.
A CALIFORNIA CRAPSHOOT
by Per Wehn
Sharing the dry hills of California with coyotes and sagebrush has a choice of hazards. Whenever the 1906 incident is mentioned, old-timers from San Francisco still jab at you to make their point: "It wasn't the earthquake, it was the fire." After last November's Santa Barbara disaster, quaintly named The Tea Fire (after the old structure where it began, The Teahouse), I can only agree.
The Tea Fire Crapshoot left most of Santa Barbara intact, but in 231 houses the inhabitants lost. I lived in one of them.
On the thirteenth of November last year I started the spaghetti at six. At ten past six the hamburger went into the pan as the phone rang. A friend called to say there was an evacuation warning for East Mountain Drive on channel 3. I should check it out.
I can cook and watch television at the same time. Done it many times, and I had the black pans to prove it. The remote brought up channel 3. Yes, there was an evacuation warning, and it was local.
To gage my time frame I looked out the window to see if there was smoke on the horizon. There, down the ridge from the Teahouse, a sheet of flames, three stories tall, waved at me from across the narrow ravine. Had Ogden Nash lived in California he would have worried more about fire and less about panthers: When fire wags a finger, don't linger.
Riding on a hot and dry Santa Ana wind, gusting to 70 miles per hour, a fire is faster than a speeding bullet, able to leap canyons in a single bound. Clouds of glowing embers take flight to find and mate with any tinder. In a drought year that drifting spawn of the inferno can pick and choose its targets to destroy.
Not wanting to scorch the spaghetti while I was gone, I turned the gas off under the frying pan. I took a minute to alert a fellow tenant. Then I packed the car. Expecting to be gone no more than a day or two, or possibly just hours till the all-clear signal came, I grabbed an arm load of clothes, enough for a few days, and stuffed the back seat of the car. The trunk had stuff in it already. Rushing back inside, the mind was spinning with choices. An eye on the flames gave urgency to the decisions.
There were too many boxes under the bed, too many books on the shelves. It was all good stuff, a collection of humorous prose I would hold up against most, but to sort through a thousand books in five minutes (three?) (2?) didn't seem a good bet. The computer held my personal project of the last ten years. Peripherals are replaceable. I disconnected the keyboard, the mouse, the printer, and the monitor (which I never liked anyway), and ran the computer and my floppies to the car.
I asked my fellow tenant if she needed help. She said: "No, thank you." And I was rolling down the hill out of harm's way.
For ten years I had been nervous about the possibility of a fire. Before I lived there flames had swept the hillside twice, both times sparing the house where I rented. But I was not prepared. The whole thing had to be played ad hoc.
When I tried for an emergency hamburger the disaster followed me. The place filled with smoke when the lights went out, along with the cash registers, and the exhaust fans above the grill. I gave up and headed out of town.
No all-clear came. We were not supposed to go back up on the hill for a day or two. In the meantime there was the denial. Disasters happen to other people, in other countries. Everything of mine wiped out? There must be an exemption for people who stay out of trouble, wait for green to cross the street, and eat vegetables?
Camping in a stack of comforters on a friend's floor gives plenty of sleepless hours to mull on the possible losses. Couldn't a miracle rescue just one house, the one that makes a difference? Fires often play leapfrog, and one small house that didn't burn is always featured in the national news, standing proud in a field of ashes.
The mind oscillates between hope and dread. The maybe of a miracle tumbles into despair at the touch of a memory. Then it bounces back when the mind refuses to accept the clearly impossible.
When I drove up on Mountain Drive again the sign said "Road Closed." I veered around the sign and onto the stage set of "Waiting For Godot." Leafless black branches tried to scratch the sky in revenge. The house was cinders. No miracle. Clearly, the impossible can happen.
An old typewriter was still recognizable, but no more. The cast iron frame of a piano was leaning against a concrete block wall. One book lay half open, words visible in black on black. Trying to read the second half of the line I touched it. It collapsed into ashes. A thousand books were light flying grey ash when dry. When the rain came, ten days late, the ashes turned into a clinging black mud.
The stove was still standing, with the frying pan on top. Black charred lumps hinted at a dinner that never was. So much for not wanting to scorch the spaghetti.
I thought I was clever to rescue the computer. Talking to other fire victims I found this is now the norm. People keep their lives, their friends, their relatives, and their tax records on the computer. That allows a quick patch back into the mainstream of life.
In a hot dry year, with 200 houses on fire in rough terrain, there is little the fire department can do. These sweeping fires are thorough. They leave no in-betweens. There are no half burned houses partially rescued. In a wildfire crapshoot the winners and the losers face a stark existential either/or, and we don't get to toss the dice either.
When a raging fire tosses the dice for you, that's it. All you can do is try to keep a few things out of the pot. If you win you don't notice because everything is back to normal. If you lose the loss is permanent and complete.
It was all gone, from my toe-nail clippers to my top hat. (Yes, I had one.) My old copy of Frommer's Europe on $5.00 A Day is gone. On my next trip London will cost more.
But I was lucky. I lost things, and some are irreplaceable, but I was a renter, and I didn't lose five minutes of my income. My landlady, at 85, lost her home of 55 years, and her income.
The couple who lived two houses up the road didn't get a warning in time. They had to run through flames to get to their car. Airlifted to the burn center in Orange County, they spent weeks sedated. Skin grafts and therapy will be part of their lives for some time to come.
Life adjusts with remarkable speed. Evolution has built us to be flexible. We didn't become the dominant species here on earth because we give up. Reduced by (or relieved of?) extraneous possessions the nimbler person moves on. The stacks of papers, the dreary notes to sort, all are gone. The fire was also the funeral pyre for a bag of boring duties. Ask me, and chances are I will tell you: "I lost it in the Tea Fire." (I wish they had a more dramatic name for the blaze where I lost so much. "Tea Fire" is much too drawing-room cozy.)
For me the fire is not erased but fading. I didn't keep money in the mattress, and I was a tenant. With help from my friends life is getting back to better than normal. A few hundred of the books cannot be replaced, but pianos are plentiful. Day by day the post-fire realities of a new apartment and a different dictionary became the norm.
For weeks the fire haunted me, catching me unaware at odd moments. Spotting an item in a store I would nod complacently: "I just bought a spare, I don't need to buy another deodorant."
Yes, I did, but that didn't count: "I lost it in the Tea Fire." From toilet paper to ice-cream it was the same: "I lost it in the Tea Fire."
It got old.
Life is now so normal the mass mailers have found my new address. The first offer came from the Neptune Society. They would fix me up with a pre-paid funeral so my heirs wouldn't be bothered. As an extra inducement they offered to cremate me for free.
For a free cremation I could have stayed with my spaghetti, and possibly had some too, before it scorched.
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