Roads From the Ashes Read online

  Also by Megan Edwards

  Strings: A Love Story

  Getting Off on Frank Sinatra

  Full Service Blonde

  IMBRIFEX BOOKS

  Published by Flattop Productions, Inc.

  8275 S. Eastern Avenue, Suite 200

  Las Vegas, NV 89123

  Imbrifex.com

  ROADS FROM THE ASHES: An Odyssey in Real Life on the Virtual Frontier

  Copyright ©2018 by Megan Edwards. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations used in critical articles and reviews.

  For information, write to [email protected].

  In order to protect privacy, some names of people and places have been changed.

  All photos by the author, except as noted in the captions of the photos.

  IMBRIFEX® and ROADTRIP AMERICA® are registered trademarks of Flattop Productions, Inc.

  Publisher’s Cataloging in Publication (First Edition)

  Edwards, Megan

  Roads from the ashes : an odyssey in real life on the virtual frontier / by Megan Edwards —

  I st ed. p. cm.

  ISBN: 1-891290-01-0

  I. Edwards, Megan—Journeys—United States.

  2. United States—Description and travel.

  3. United States—Social life and customs-1971-

  4. Automobile travel—United States. 5.

  Journalists—United States—Biography. I.

  Title.

  E 1 69.04.E39 1999 973.929

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 98-61898

  E-Book and Cover Designer: Sue Campbell

  Cover photo: Salvatore Ventura, Unsplash.com

  Author photo: Benjamin Hager

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  First Edition Paperback: March 1999, ISBN 18912190010 – Trilogy Books

  E-book: December 2018, ISBN 9781945501333 – Imbrifex Books

  This book, along with my heart, belongs to Mark

  Together we dedicate it to our parents:

  Margaret and Charles

  Betty Lee and Spencer

  Foreword to the 20th Anniversary Edition

  What a difference twenty years makes. When an intuitive, resourceful, creative couple lost everything in a fire, they didn’t wallow. They hit the road. Along the way, a literal journey became a metaphorical journey. They found freedom devoid of material items. They found themselves. Their motorhome became their chariot and the then-new Internet became their connection to finding their future.

  Today, twenty years later, I think Megan Edwards’ on-the-road memoir resonates just as powerfully, if not more so than it did when first released. The technological world has changed so much that we marvel even more at how she and her husband Mark managed to utilize new technology in the old world. In that respect, it’s nostalgic to look back at what the world was like that, but it also helps us make sense of how far we’ve come.

  While the world may be different now, some things never change, like the survival trigger when faced with catastrophic loss. These are brave, practical people, and it took more than a devastating fire to stop them. Megan’s engaging storytelling is powerful not just from the humor and honesty, but from the vivid details that bring this journey to life. The coast-to-coast trek is what many will do for a vacation, but this time it’s about survival, rebirth, and renewal.

  But it’s also a travelogue and like any good travel tome, this one places you right in the front seat, squeezed between the two of them as you visit majestic places far and wide, ocean to desert to forest to the Big Apple. As the world becomes aware of them and the media start taking notice, we are there as their lives change.

  The timelessness of a book like Roads from the Ashes is obvious from page to page, because the challenges and hurdles encountered have a universality to them. I’ve no doubt that in the next twenty years, regardless of how technology may morph at some light-speed pace, this book will remain relatable and relevant. In the end, as Edwards clearly understands, it’s not about technology, it’s about the characters and conflicts. That said, she gives technology its own personality throughout this adventure, because that is how they experienced it.

  I’m glad I took the journey with them years ago. I’m even happier I took it again, now, twenty years wiser, and more in tune with beauty of her many on-the-road revelations.

  Chris Epting

  Author of James Dean Died Here, Roadside Baseball, and so many more books that have inspired untold numbers of road trips

  Introduction to the 20th Anniversary Edition

  As I write this, twenty-five years have passed since an early morning firestorm roared across the hills above Pasadena, California, and left a smoldering swath where hundreds of houses had stood. It’s difficult to believe it’s been a quarter of a century since I stood in the rubble of my former home and gazed out over the valley below from a spot that didn’t have a view the day before. Two dozen trees had gone up in smoke, and in their place was an unobstructed vista over Los Angeles and all the way out to Catalina Island. The winds had carried all the smoke east, leaving no evidence in the air of all the fire had destroyed. It was a crystal clear view, a view long enough to reveal the curve of the earth.

  I wish I could say that my own vision was as clear and as long as the view that day from our smoldering citadel. I know it felt that way at the time. Perhaps the promise of freedom always feels that way. It’s what makes horizons so appealing, and open roads so alluring. They stretch perfectly into the distance, uncluttered by the mundane and unblemished by mishap. On a road untraveled, nothing shows except adventure and independence.

  Hitting the road was the only idea that occurred to me that day. I was immediately convinced that there would never be a better time, and that if I didn’t seize the moment while it was fresh, my feet would soon sprout new roots, and my “stuffless” status would rapidly disappear in new accumulations of humdrum possessions. I had nothing left to lose, and it would be a fleeting gift if I didn’t accept it on the spot.

  That day was October 28, 1993. Bill Clinton was winding up his first year as president, and people were still talking about the amazing effects in the first Jurassic Park movie. I remember those things well. What I did not know was that 1993 was the year that Mosaic, the first real Web browser, was released. For that matter, I didn’t know what the Web was, and “browser” was still just another word for window shopper. Some people were using email, and just as many were hoping they’d never have to. We all knew change was in the air, but few of us realized we were already in a state of revolution. While I had no idea that a virtual firestorm was gaining strength the day a real fire burned my house down, I look back and marvel at the synchronicity. The fire that tore through the hills above Pasadena in October, 1993, just happened to wreak its havoc when the virtual world was igniting, too.

  While I was on the road, I enjoyed reading books by and about travelers. Kerouac’s On the Road led the list, but also at the top was Mark Twain’s Roughing It. In his descriptions of traveling in the Wild West in the years after the Gold Rush, Twain captured the energy and entrepreneurialism that defined that other era of discovery and rapid change. I found it to be the perfect analogy for the vortex I found myself in as I traveled in the 1990s. No chapter illustrated this more perfectly than Twain’s account of riding the Overland Stage. In it, Twain captured the experience of traveling by a means that was created by overwhelming demand and that ended
abruptly with the completion of the transcontinental railroad. Twain also described the Pony Express, another short-lived phenomenon rendered obsolete by the transcontinental telegraph.

  As I look back now, the years I traveled the country were a little like the short span of years when a stagecoach was required to travel from Missouri to California, and messengers on horseback relayed mail across the continent. In 1994, people were just beginning to grasp the enormous potential of the Internet and wireless communication, and technology had only just begun to deliver on the promise. When I struggled to use an acoustic coupler with a pay phone, it reminded me of Mark Twain getting hit on the head with an unabridged dictionary every time the Overland Stage lurched across a stream.

  As much as this book is about the beginning of the Internet revolution, it is equally about STUFF. Everything began with a great and sudden loss of stuff and a desire to enjoy the vacuum for as long as possible. But as anyone who has ever lived in a motorhome can tell you, stuff is a big issue. Too much won’t fit, and even if it does, you have to make sure it won’t break an axle. Looking back, I realize that Mark and I worried about our stuff just about every day we were on the road.

  Even digital possessions took up quite a bit of room. When we hit the road in 1994, computer stuff was, for the most part, stored on floppy discs. Later on, it was ZIP discs, followed by CDs. Because we were fully aware that disaster could happen, we kept backups in places other than our motorhome. We didn’t need a storage locker for household belongings, but we did need a repository for boxes of discs and CDs. What stands out as I reflect on the progression from floppies to ZIP discs to CDs is that as storage got smaller and smaller, it also got cheaper and cheaper. A floppy disc back in 1994 cost about a dollar and held as much as a megabyte. ZIP discs held 250 megs and cost maybe $12. CDs were a huge breakthrough, offering capacities three times as large as ZIPs and costing a fraction. And the trend has continued. If the price and size of storage had remained constant, a 5-gigabyte thumb drive would cost $5000 and outstrip an elephant. But the price went down along with size until we got to the point where it all evaporated into a cloud. Which brings me circuitously to a realization that occurred to me recently. I lost all my stuff in a cloud back in 1993. Now all my stuff lives in a cloud. It’s a full circle of a sort I never could have predicted.

  Some might say the revolution is only just getting started. I’m one of those, too. In years to come, it will be easier to gain perspective on the profound changes the birth and growth of the Internet have wrought. For now, we’re still in the trenches, still connecting dots, still surprised by the physical effects of invisible phenomena. Who would have guessed that smart phones would have an effect on the car-buying habits of a new generation? Who could have predicted that an app could challenge the very existence of the taxi industry, or that a guy named Craig could wipe out classified advertising with a single website?

  As fascinating as it was to observe the Internet hatch and grow during my years on the road, it is the travel itself I am most grateful for. Thanks to my years on the road, when I look at a flat political map of North America, I no longer see just a vast expanse bookended by two oceans. Even if the map is just an outline, my mind automatically supplies the mountains and rivers and cities and towns. I see canola fields in Alberta and potato fields in Maine. I remember a sculptor in Idaho, a singer in Big Bend, a juggler in Seattle. I see the dogwoods in Yosemite and the eagles in Minnesota and the alligators in the Everglades. I do hope you enjoy a trip down Internet history lane, but my sincerest wish is that reading about the journey makes you want to hit the road.

  Megan Edwards

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  December, 2018

  Chapter 1

  Life’s Ballast Lost

  A Suitcase, An Arrowhead, and A Set of Red Underwear

  You don’t keep extra clothes when you live in 200 square feet. It’s a question of being able to put your plate down when you eat dinner or owning an evening purse. I haven’t owned an evening purse since 1993, and the one time I needed one since then, I found a perfectly good pearled specimen at a thrift store in New York. It cost a dollar, and I gave it to a bag lady in Grand Central Station after a dinner party at the Knickerbocker Club.

  Okay, I confess. If you were to find yourself looking through my underwear box (yes, box— there aren’t many drawers in motor homes), you’d find a red bra and pair of red panties at the bottom. They never move. I haven’t worn them since before I owned an evening purse, but there they are. I can’t throw them away. They’re survivors.

  That red underwear, one suitcase, one husband and one dog are the only things I have that antedate the fire that ended Phase One of my life. It arrived with perfect timing. I was 40 years old, and I’d just been wondering if this—a nice house in a nice neighborhood full of nice stuff— was all there was. Just like a jillion baby boomers on the exact cusp of middle age, I was sick of exercise videos and women’s magazines and nylon stockings. I was having a hard time believing that the road to serenity lay in losing ten pounds, highlighting my hair, or giving my kitchen a country look.

  And then, only a couple of months before I turned 41, Los Angeles caught on fire and didn’t stop burning for seventeen days. My house was one of the first to go. One day, I had an answering machine and high heels and an eyelash curler. The next day, well, the next day things were different.

  The fires were headline news for weeks, as Altadena, Laguna, and Malibu each hosted a conflagration bigger than the last. In dollars, a billion went up in smoke. Over 1,100 houses burned to the ground, and 4 people died. My loss seems minuscule in comparison: just one average middle class woman’s stuff.

  Yes, just stuff. That’s all it was: high school yearbooks, photographs, wedding presents, diplomas, my grandmother’s piano. I’d had ten minutes to pack ahead of the firestorm. I’d grabbed a suitcase. I’d grabbed—only God knows why— my red underwear.

  I did take one other thing as I left the house. I paused in front of a cabinet filled with silver and wedding china and keepsakes. I opened the door and took out an Indian arrowhead I’d found in Wyoming on Mark’s family’s ranch.

  I guess that’s how you pack when you’re off on a new life. You get ten minutes, and there’s no second chance. I can’t tell you why, as the flames roared nearer, I chose red underwear and an arrowhead that would have survived the fire anyway. I can only say this. Where I was headed, I was overpacked.

  One Crystal Clear Autumn Morning

  The fire started before dawn on October 27, 1993, and like most blazes near populated areas, it was set by a human, a homeless man named Andres Huang. He had hiked into the Altadena foothills during the night. He’d fallen asleep, and when he awoke before dawn, he was cold and shivering. He lit a little camp fire to warm himself up. It was a windy night, and the fire immediately got away from him. Frightened, he fled. Unable to see in the darkness, he fell over a cliff.

  At 3:48 a.m., someone called Fire Station 66 at the foot of Eaton Canyon and reported “fire on the hillside.” It was impossible to know it at the time, but that call mobilized the first unit of a force that would grow to include nearly three thousand firefighters from 62 different agencies, 200 fire engines, fifteen water tenders, four bulldozers, eight helicopters, and fifteen airplanes.

  Andres Huang was found, arrested and taken to a hospital. He was later charged with “reckless setting of a fire.”

  Mark and I were sleeping at home, a couple of ridge lines to the east. The telephone rang a little after four. It was Mark’s mother, calling from her house, a couple more ridge lines to the east. She had awakened early and seen a tiny bright spot on the mountain. “There’s a fire above Eaton Canyon,” she said.

  Mark and I got up and slid open the glass door that led from our bedroom to an outdoor patio. We could see a tiny, brilliant feather of flame on the dark slope.

  We’d seen fires on the mountainside
before. We’d grown up here. There were fires every year. Even though we lived in the hills, there were houses and streets between us and the native brush. Our house was nearly a hundred years old, nestled on a slope overlooking a reservoir that held a million gallons of water. The mountainside might burn, but our house? Unlikely, we thought. If the fire got close, we had the reservoir and a pump and a hose. On top of that, Mark used to be a fire fighter for the forest service. Whatever might happen, we’d be able to handle it.

  “It’s awfully windy,” said Mark. And then we went back to bed.

  We couldn’t sleep. We got up, and I set to work addressing invitations in calligraphy for a friend. Mark went outside to work on the exhibit we were preparing for a fair. He’d cleaned its large red carpet the day before, and we’d stretched it out on the driveway to dry. Mark started to vacuum it, and ten minutes later, he called me.

  “Look,” he said, pointing at the rug. “Those are ashes falling on it.”

  Maybe the ashes should have warned us, but we couldn’t see any flames. There was no smoke, no noise. Only soft white powder kept landing on the carpet.

  “I give up,” said Mark. He turned off the vacuum cleaner. The only sound now was the wind. “It sure is windy,” I said. I went back inside and turned on the television. News reporters had started talking about a fire in Altadena, and they showed pictures of fire engines lined up on streets about a mile west of us. They weren’t doing anything, just waiting. It was quiet outside.

  At about seven o’clock, Mark walked down to the end of our street. As soon as he left, I heard a new sound. It was more than wind. It was a roar, not loud, but huge somehow. Then I felt the heat.

  Just then Mark ran back. “Get in your car and get out of here,” he shouted. “All of Kinneloa Villa is burning!” Kinneloa Villa was a community of big houses west of ours. “I just saw a policeman drag a woman in a nightgown out of her house!”