Roads From the Ashes Read online

  Just then Marvin ran out of the house and headed directly for my car. He screamed and scratched at the door. Smart dog, I thought. No sense in leaving on foot when you can have a ride. I let him into the front seat and slammed the door.

  I ran back into the house and assembled the items that were to become my only pre-fire mementos. I grabbed some equally useful items for Mark, too: his least-comfortable shoes and a mismatched outfit. He didn’t get any underwear at all.

  When I came outside, the eaves of the house across the street were blazing, and the house beyond it was burning too. The roar was loud now, the heat frightening. Mark screamed at me from the roof, where he was wielding a fire hose barefoot. I screamed back at him.

  “Leave!” he yelled. “I’ll be right behind you!”

  Sixty foot flames were swirling down the hill above us. “You’ve got to come, too!” I yelled.

  “I will!” he screamed. “Just get going!”

  And so I left. As I did, I realized what had seemed so odd. There was no sound except the roar of the fire itself. No sirens, no helicopters. Just that quiet roar and the heat. Two blocks away, life was normal. Bathrobed ladies were just stepping outside to pick up their papers. How could they know that fifty houses were burning less than a mile away? There was no smoke, no sound, and we weren’t on television. It was just a crystal clear autumn morning, and time for a cup of coffee.

  You Can’t Go Home Again

  I headed for Mark’s parents’ house on Riviera Drive. Overlooking Hastings Canyon, it was square in the path of the fire. I’ll tell you now that it didn’t burn. Firefighters arrived in droves, and the sound of helicopters laboring up the mountainside went on all day. They couldn’t contain the fire, and they couldn’t direct it, but by soaking hillsides and roofs, they were able to save dozens of houses.

  It was a slow motion day, a surreal blur. I was mesmerized by the fire as it swept over the mountains in front of me. I watched a whole ridge line erupt in a series of explosions as the flames reached houses, cars and gas lines. Before the sun went down, the flames had blackened every slope I could see.

  That night Mark and I lay on a bed in our clothes. Through the window, we could see flames still burning on the mountain. We slept fitfully, and before dawn, we got up. “Let’s go home,” said Mark. We made a thermos of coffee and climbed into his car.

  At the bottom of our hill, a policeman was manning a barricade. He was surrounded by gawkers, but no one was getting through. “If you’re a resident, you can go up in a police vehicle,” he explained. “But you have to have identification.”

  Identification. I had mine in my purse, but Mark had left home the day before in shorts and a T-shirt. He’d had no time to go inside.

  The officer looked at my driver’s license, and then turned to Mark. Was it the sooty shirt, the wild hair? Without a word, he moved the barricade aside and said, “A van will be here in a few minutes to take you up.”

  The van turned out to be a paddy wagon, and we climbed into the cage in the back. Another man we didn’t know joined us, and we began the ascent.

  Everything looked serene and normal for the first half mile. Dawn was breaking on another cloudless day. Then we saw the first gap, a big black hole where a house was supposed to be. Then another, and another. By the time we reached the top of the hill, we’d counted at least a dozen.

  I’d known all day yesterday that our house had burned, but we’d had no actual proof. Now, as we neared the last corner, I wondered. Could it somehow have survived?

  The van turned the corner, and we saw our block. The two houses that were burning when I left were still standing. Ours was gone. The driver opened the door and said, “I’ll be back later.” Mark and I stepped outside. The ground was still hot.

  “Look, there’s the shower stall,” I said. Black and leaning, it was the tallest thing.

  Near the road stood two old chairs we’d set out for the Salvation Army to collect. “Well, that’s handy, anyway,” said Mark, and we sat down. It was time for a cup of coffee.

  Archaeologists in Tarzan’s Garden

  How many glorious places have gone up in smoke? Athens, Rome, Chicago. As we sat on our cast-off lawn chairs surveying the smoldering wreckage, I thought of Aeneas fleeing burning Troy, carrying his grandfather and his household gods.

  No, I didn’t. I can think of that now, but then, I just sat there. We weren’t looking at the ashes of Priam’s palace. Our smoking citadel was only a shower stall. It wasn’t noble, glorious, or even tragic, just a shock.

  Even so, the archaeologist in me awoke immediately. “Look at the cars!” I said to Mark. We’d each left in a car, but there had been nothing we could do about two other vehicles parked in our driveway. One belonged to a man who worked for Mark’s property management company, and the other to a friend who’d moved to New York. They had been parked right next to each other.

  The Volkswagen Rabbit was incinerated. The engine block had liquefied and poured out of the engine compartment, creating a decorative aluminum bas relief on the asphalt. The body was blackened, the windows were gone, and the inside was devoid of anything except a couple of seat springs and a skeletal steering wheel.

  Right next to it, the Chevette looked fine at first glance. Actually, two tires were melted and the paint had bubbled on one door, but two days later, Manny drove it away. “How could the fire be so selective?” I asked. “They were practically touching.”

  We spent the morning poking into the rubble and marveling. Most things were utterly gone, but we found a few interesting artifacts. The heat of the fire had delaminated a quarter and puffed it up like a little metal balloon. A can of pennies was now a solid cylinder of copper.

  We stood where we guessed our china cabinet had been, the one from which I’d extracted the arrowhead on my way out. Fifteen feet long and eight feet tall, it had been made out thick slabs of Honduran mahogany by a friend whose cabinets were works of art. It must have burned like a dream. The concrete upon which it had stood was completely bare.

  “I thought we’d find globs of silver or something,” said Mark, “Melted, like the car engine.” But there was nothing. My grandmother’s tea service was somewhere over Santa Monica in a big black cloud.

  We continued our exploration, careful to sidestep smoldering coals. We’d both melted holes in our sneakers by now, and the sun was climbing. It was shaping up into another hot, windy day.

  “Okay, here’s the storeroom,” said Mark. The piles of rubble and ash were a little deeper. We’d both picked up sticks, and I poked into a steaming pile. It was a large rectangle of what looked like bedsprings. “We didn’t have a bed in here,” I said. “What was this?” Mark picked his way over and had a look. “It’s the Slinkies,” he said.

  The storeroom had housed the inventory of a new retail business Mark and I had started a few months before. Wizards of Wonder, WOW for short, sold puzzles, games, and unusual toys at music festivals and county fairs. Our holiday inventory had begun to arrive, and most of it hadn’t been unpacked. We’d ordered cases and cases of Slinkies, a perennially popular Christmas present.

  We picked our way over the rest of the cement slab that formed the footprint of our erstwhile home. My computer had vanished entirely. The only high-tech remnants were the little metal sliders from three floppy disks. Near where my desk had been, a filing cabinet was still recognizable. It had cooled enough for Mark to touch, and he pried it open with a crowbar he’d brought along in his back pack. “You never know,” he said. “And it sure would be nice to have our tax records.” It was empty.

  Our house was unique. Built nearly a century before by Abbott Kinney, one of Los Angeles’ early land barons, it had served as the livery stable for the Big House. The Big House burned down in the thirties, and nobody knew any more exactly where it had been. The stable building and the stone pump house on the edge of the reservoir were the
last remaining structures of Kinney’s estate. The hillside was studded with oaks, palms and eucalypti, and a stream carried water from a spring farther up the mountain to the reservoir, which was home to several hundred blue gill, catfish and bright orange carp. Legend held that there were bass in there, too, but we never spied one.

  Mark had created a home inside the redwood shell of the old barn, and turned the pump house into a cozy den overlooking the reservoir. He’d never thought his hillside retreat was big enough for two, but he found space for me when we got married in 1990. He’d lived there for three years when I joined him, but he hadn’t been alone. He shared his jungle with a cat, three ducks, a pack of coyotes, a family of skunks, a raccoon commune, and an occasional mountain lion. Peacocks and a blue heron visited the reservoir, which had grown to look like a natural lagoon. Wild mint and raspberries grew along the stream. It was hard to believe that Tarzan’s dream house existed in the hills above Pasadena. Few people had any inkling it was up there, only half an hour from downtown Los Angeles.

  We looked down the denuded hill past the black trunk of a headless palm tree to the old pump house. Built of native stones, it had a brick chimney and a shake roof. A perforated pipe ran along the ridge, and we’d left the water running the day before in the hopes that the roof might survive the fire if it were wet enough.

  The pipe was still there, bent and black, but intact. Little puffs of steam burst from the holes. The roof was gone, and we could see red clay floor tiles through the rubble on the floor. We climbed down carefully and stepped inside.

  Our eyes fell first on the iron harp of my grandmother’s upright piano. It had smashed tiles when it hit the floor. Then we caught sight of something else. A ceramic vase was standing upright on a broken tile. Chartreuse and hideous, it was also intact and pristine. It looked like someone had just set it there.

  “That vase,” I said. “Do you remember how we got it?” Mark couldn’t remember. “It was one of the gifts at the white elephant party we had last year. It was so ugly no one would take it home. I stuck it into one of the cabinets against the far wall. It was on the top shelf. How the heck did it get down here without breaking?”

  “I think,” said Mark, “That even forest fires have their standards. It took one look at that thing and said, ‘No thanks. Even I don’t want that.’”

  When we arrived back at the top of our smoldering acropolis, we stood near our former kitchen sink, now a dented cast iron relic lying on its side on the ground. A eucalyptus tree nearby burst into fresh flames, and we looked down over the blackened lagoon.

  I said, “You know, Mark, this is, in fact, amazing.”

  Mark says I said, “You know, Mark, this is, in fact, great.” However I started out, I continued, “We’re cleaned out. There’s nothing here, nothing at all. We can do anything we want. Anything. Do you know what that means? We can go anywhere, do anything, start over again. Whatever. I think we should think of this as an opportunity. I think it just could be the most amazing thing that’s ever happened to us. I think...”

  “Shut up,” said Mark. “Shut up and give me five minutes to grieve.”

  View from the Black Gap

  I shut up. He was right. I was chattering. I stood at the edge of the concrete slab and looked out over the San Gabriel Valley. I could see all the way to the ocean, which was a big change from the last time I’d stood in that place and looked south. Thirty trees had met their end, but the view they left behind was terrific.

  I stood there and knew I was right. This really was amazing, maybe even great. All my stuff was gone, and that meant I had a clean slate. Yes, it meant that irreplaceable mementos were gone forever, but so were forty years of sediment, a serious buildup of tartar and plaque. Yes, my great grandmother’s wedding dress was vapor, but so were thirty boxes I’d dreaded having to sort. For every item I mourned, there was a corresponding bushel of ballast that had held me hostage.

  I felt the lightness immediately. I was a hot air balloon, and my tethers had just been cut. I gave Mark a full half hour to grieve.

  “Let’s hit the road,” I said as we waited for the paddy wagon to come and get us. “The timing couldn’t be better. We’ve got no stuff, no business, and no house to worry about. Let’s just start driving and see what we find.”

  Mark didn’t say yes, and he didn’t say no. We rode down the hill and drove back to his parents’ house. By this time, people were everywhere, surveying the wreckage. The policeman at the barricade was fending off a crowd of looters carrying shopping bags.

  Meanwhile the fire was still burning its way eastward unabated. The winds were still high. My parents’ house in the village of Sierra Madre was in its path. Blocked roads meant we couldn’t go there, but we spent the day watching television and the weather. By midnight, the Sierra Madre Volunteer Fire Department and the winds pushed the fire north into the wilderness, and the town was left untouched. The next day, the air was still.

  The fire did not leave a peaceful wake. Within hours, platoons of insurance agents arrived. Almost as fast came the contractors, carpet cleaners, “salvage experts” and “private adjusters,” vultures attracted by a fresh disaster. On hundreds of scorched lots, men with tape measures and blueprints and clipboards brought bag lunches and folding chairs and stayed all day.

  I escaped for the weekend to a meeting I’d planned to attend months before. I had no house, but I did have a hotel reservation. I stopped at a shopping mall on the way and bought some underwear and a shirt and a pair of jeans.

  When I got back to Pasadena, Mark had joined a crew of volunteers who were preparing to sandbag the hillsides. Fire in Southern California mountains practically guarantees mud slides as soon as it rains, and they can be just as devastating as fire.

  We went out to dinner Sunday night. While we waited for the waiter to take our order, Mark said, “Let’s hit the road. Let’s just start driving and see where we end up.” I have no idea what we ate that night, but we stayed a long time. The waiter filled our coffee cups four times.

  Fire. What a thing. Houses, trees, stuff, all gone in a flash. I’d been looking at the black gaps, but now, suddenly, I was looking at the view they’d left behind. I was a balloon, slowly rising over a fresh new landscape. The journey had begun.

  If life in the last decade of the century in America is a solar system, stuff is its sun. Our lives revolve around it, and its absence creates a powerful vacuum, the kind nature abhors. If you don’t believe it, try this simple experiment. Divest yourself of all your stuff, and remain stuffless for a month. Okay, I’ll allow you one suitcase, but that’s it. See if you can avoid busting out of it for four short weeks.

  Maybe the simplest road to unencumbered success would be to buy a Eurail pass and relive the days when you traveled light and traded paperbacks in youth hostels. Maybe you can find yourself a monastery and embark on a month-long retreat in a cell without closets. One thing’s certain, though. If you stay where you are and follow the stuff-attracting patterns that define American life, your suitcase won’t just bulge at the end of a week. It’ll explode. By the end of the month, you’ll be the curator of a brand new archive. Inexorably following its law, your stuff will have expanded to fill all available space.

  Back in the seventies, when the Shah of Iran was sent into exile, hundreds of American expatriates left with him. A friend of mine was a teacher in Tehran at the time. One day while he was at school, he received instructions to drive to the airport, leave the keys in his car’s ignition, and get on a plane. He left a large, nicely furnished apartment full of mementos of a life of travel and an Ivy League education. When I met him in Germany a few years later, it was in the living room of his large, nicely furnished apartment. Conspicuously devoid of Persian rugs, it nonetheless displayed ample evidence of a love of travel, a fascinating life. “Sometimes you have to swap possessions for experience,” he said.

  After a disaster, a
giant machine mobilizes, and its motto is, “Put Everything Back.” Government agencies like FEMA and the SBA arrive in a blizzard of forms in triplicate. Insurance adjusters explain about “replacement value,” and “policy limits.” Vaporized homes are recreated on paper, and the stuff they contained fills sheet after sheet of foolscap. Everywhere, scores of people began work immediately to do what people do after catastrophes: make everything look the way it did before.

  But what if you were thinking, “Well, thanks, but I’m not so sure I want everything back just the way it was. After all, how many times do you get to start over in life? Isn’t this a good time to stop and think a while? Isn’t it a chance to maybe do something different?”

  A perfect place to think materialized magically for Mark and Marvin and me. It was a guest house on a secluded estate in the town of San Gabriel. Designed as the ultimate entertainment pad, it had a huge living room, three bathrooms, and one bedroom. Sliding glass doors opened on one side to a camellia garden, and on the other to a large swimming pool. It was beautiful, which made us smile. It had enormous closets, which made us laugh.

  Don’t get me wrong. I love stuff. I love the people who brought us stuff when we had none. Family, friends, and strangers gave us clothes, furniture, dishes, pots, books, a bed, a table, food, a computer, and money. We were, quite literally, showered with gifts. Without them, life would have looked awfully bleak. After all, we live in three dimensions, where down comforters feel good on a chilly night, a dining room table is a great convenience, and china plates lend elegance to the simplest meal. I have never appreciated ordinary household stuff more than I did while I lived at the secret villa. It had appeared out of thin air. It was magic. It was love.

  Christmas Came Anyway

  We lived at “The Villa” for five months, from November, 1993, until March, 1994. One day in December, a package tied with string arrived, forwarded by the post office from our former address. It had German stamps and an illegible customs declaration stuck to the top. At first, I was baffled, but then I remembered.