Last week my husband and I drove from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Excitingly, when we were not quite half way there several friends who knew that we were driving down pinged us to let us know that a new wildfire had broken out near I-5 on our route. During the minutes when Danny and I were discussing whether this would impact our drive the fire grew so fast that we decided to head west at Paso Robles and take the coastal route the rest of the way. Thus our tidy six hour drive became a squalid 9 hour drive. But we got there and I moved in to the apartment upstairs where I stay when I visit, while Danny continued onward to Anaheim and the trade show he was going to.
By 11pm I was in my jammies and on the edge of sleep when Danny called. I thought this was just a “g’night, I love you” sort of call. Instead he said “you know about the fire, right?”
Um. Did he mean the Hughes fire which had caused our detour through Paso Robles and San Luis Obispo etc.? Or the Palisades fire which was (at that point) still not entirely under control. As it turns out, he meant neither. A brush fire had broken out a couple of miles north of my aunt’s house. Um.
I got hold of my daughter (in another apartment in the building) and my aunt’s caregiver’s daughter (a PhD candidate who also lives in the building) and we were discussing what, if anything, to do, when an alert siren went off on our phones: the area we were in (Bel Air, right next to the San Diego Freeway) was now on Level 2 alert, meaning “get ready to get the hell out.”
I was, by now, fully dressed. I threw the things I’d taken out of my bag back in, and my daughter and I packed her car with various stuff. Then we went to my aunt’s house. There, things were in motion to move my aunt to her caregiver’s house in Central LA. Since other than standing around making un-useful suggestions (my aunt’s caregivers raise Awesome to a new dimension, and have their act down) and entertaining my aunt (who has lived in this neighborhood for over 50 years and, even with dementia, has a sense of humor about all this shit) there wasn’t much we could do to help, we took off to the valley and my daughter’s beau’s family house, where we spent the night. This meant actually driving past the fire that had rousted us out of our beds. It was, as these things go, small–I don’t think it got bigger than 45 acres (the Palisades fire, in contrast reached 23,448 acres; while it’s still active, it’s 94% contained, thank God). But driving past it, seeing the tongues of flame going from one dark patch to another, and seeing the firetrucks and a helicopter (I think it was a helicopter) dropping water on the area, was terrifying and impressive.
Years ago I was in London, walking up Baker Street toward Marylebone Street, and realized that there was a serious fire two blocks ahead of me on. I stood and watched, riveted, as the London firefighters took after this elemental force, fighting it with water and foam and all the tools they had. Gradually the tide turned; they kept the fire limited to the one six-story building it had started in, then began to quell it, one section of the building at a time. I was left kind of breathless: there are people who go out and face down this force with nothing more than water and the tools that science and experience has given them.
As I’ve said before: fire doesn’t care. Neither does water (if you have ever been caught in an undertow, you know this). Based on my experience with fire and water, I’d go so far as to guess that earth–in the form of earthquakes and mudslides– and air don’t care either. And yes, I realize that calling water, fire, earth and air “elements” harks back to ancient times and isn’t scientific. But these forces are powerful, and they do not yield to persuasion. Given my choice of facing down a guy with a gun or a wall of fire, I’d go for the guy with a gun. Who knows? I might be able to figure a way out, or talk the guy down or something. But Fire Doesn’t Care. Period.
In the end the fire fighters got the Sepulveda fire sufficiently contained that the “get set to go” alert was cancelled, and my aunt got to stay in her own bed. The next morning my daughter and I returned from Tarzana (a 20 minute drive that took almost two hours; thank you, LA traffic) and the rest of the visit went on as planned.
On Sunday Danny and I drove back to San Francisco. We’d had some rain on Saturday evening, and the rain on I-5 turned to snow on the grapevine (a twisty high-elevation bit of the highway above Santa Clarita), and then alternated with torrents and blue skies most of the way north. So we got more of the elements, which was occasionally exciting in the pejorative sense. We Modern Folk tend to discount the elements–it’s only rain. Or snow. It’s only fire. Or an earthquake. Or Santa Ana winds that draw every last iota of moisture out of the air so that a Los Angeles hillside is an easy target for a spark–any spark.
All I’m saying is that the forces of nature don’t care, so we have to.
Having been very close to a very large and destructive tornado at one point, I can confirm that air doesn’t care either. I hope I never discover how little earth cares, though living as close as I do to the Hayward Fault makes me doubt that as well.
Glad you made it home. I hate driving over the Grapevine in good weather. We came back to the Bay Area from San Diego a couple of years ago by driving a long way to the east because of a storm that was bringing snow north of LA. We got back to the Grapevine after the storm had passed and managed to make it all the way to Altamont Pass before hitting torrential rain. It was more exciting than I like, especially since I have seen nothing to dispel my opinion that Californians do not understand driving in rain or any other adverse conditions.
I’m so glad you’re all OK.