A MALIBU WILD FIRE, CIRCA 1990
THE
FIRE
A
The advertised Santana started to materialize in the
evening in ever stronger bursts until turning into a fierce steady storm,
between 50 and 75 miles I judged. I started to worry about the tin roof of the
shed being torn off, and what then of my papers spread on the tables, and that
the huge Juniper tree at the edge of the shed might snap - the soughing of wind
in needles was a feature of my childhood sound scape, a re-assuring susurrus as
the lapping of waves on a shore, though I could not recall having experienced
this kind of wind in Northern Germany. Vornbach-am-Inn, in South-East Bavaria, at
the edge of the Bohemian forest, had a visitation one winter that flattened
half the fir trees in the forest – now that was impressive, however I had been
secure in the fortress monastery with its three feet thick walls and had slept
through the event. Sleeping during this kind of wind in present circumstances
seemed impossible. - I had also heard of the famous event in Siberia that had flattened
the trees in the whole huge area – I had not only heard but read about it - momentous
events of that kind inscribed themselves impressively on me, I recall their making
me feel awfully little, memories and thoughts of that kind infused my nervousness.
However, when the roof seemed to hold and the Juniper did not snap, around
midnight, I decided to take a chance and laid down on my pad in the south east
corner of the main space of the shed. If
the insecure cement blocks started to cave I would have a few seconds to bound
to my left and onto the kitchen area which was secure, solid ground. – I lay down, the wind, rattling
the adjacent garage door, the pepper tree whipping huge scratches on-to the tin
room like a berserk drummer’s brushes, an analogy that made the sounds, the cacophony,
more interesting; though I had to admit that brush work of that kind had
invariably been of the most delicate kind, brushes were used to accent –
compared to the amazing drum solos I had heard, from just about all the great
jazz drummers of that era.
The way I lay,
my head slightly elevated my sightline, to the west-northwest, during daylight
it would reach as far as the crest of Deer Creek Road, at about the spot where
my dirt Houston Road diverged from it as I saw a spark, electrical, yes there
was a box there on the light pole as I noticed that the electricity which had been
flickering was now no more: the electric clock on my night table would show when
the box blown… as a slight glow burst into flames and what became known as the
Deer Creek Fire was on its way. And I stood up and went to the far west window to
make out what was transpiring, an instant conflagration at the ridge that the wind
swept into the canyon where it propagated itself “in leaps and bounds” was the expression,
it leapfrogged in the form of red hot embers that set an array of fires – I sure
had never seen or imagined anything like it.
I had fought
fires in Alaska, there the chief danger was from hot-spots that the fire dug in
the permafrost when it went underground, you might step inadvertently into a
hotspot – that advertised itself with white hot ash – and have your foot blown
off.
I had been dropped in front of a line of advancing flames
in a grass-lake, a thin wave of six foot high flames and had not been worried
in the least, that was straw burning and it barely singed my eyebrows as I
walked into it and beat it down. The idea of confronting a wind-driven chaparral
fire in the same manner was nothing short of terrifying. Dense Chaparral brush
burnt hot and thick and smokey: Would the Swiss hippie contingent at the bottom
of Deer Creek Canyon who lived by a spring that was sheltered by a fine set of California
Live Oak survive was an instant thought, would the fire suck up all their oxygen
if the Oak Trees did not protect them? I had now gone outside to the steep edge
of the DeWitt property. The wind was not driving the fire in our direction but
straight down into the canyon – swiftly was not the word, I think within 15
minutes the entire canyon was aflame down to the PCH.
B
Having stayed up late to
watch the conflagration reach PCH and leap to the ocean and then subside I woke
late of course and immediately wanted to check what if anything the fire might
be up to; but, on stepping outside and rounding the shed to accomplish the view
from the veranda escarpment front of the main house, what if my landlord, all 6 feet
6 beanpole Ysbrand DeWitt, gun-nut and photographer of porno shoots, an oedipal
case if ever I had realized the moment I saw him flinch when his father Maarten
had called him while ringing the cowbell – instant transport back to the lowland
farmers of my youth it had been - garden-hose in hand and spraying across the
edge of the deck… Pissing to put out the fire? which I noticed was creeping up
along the canyon edges, half a mile across it was midway up and threatening
Dick Clark’s TWA Kennedy airport
terminal style fortress compound, though it looked as though the fortress’s immediate
surround had been cleared – Dick Clark a millionaire of American Bandstand Fame
our nearest wealthy neighbor, Ysbrand telling me that nonetheless Dick Clark had
been observed scooting away in his car, a jeep if I recall correctly.
The fire obviously was no longer propelled by Santana winds from
the north east, which only rolled night-times down from Nevada and Utah,
accelerating all the way, but was now assisted by the ocean breeze nudging it upward both to the right and left
of the canyon – if the wind would change to an easterly or westerly the fire would
be driven into Ventura or the Malibu part of Los Angeles. At Deer Creek Canyon it
basically straddled county line, the big divide. We live at the mercy of the jet-stream
and in Malibu at the whim of the wind.
On our eastern side the fire was threatening perhaps the oddest of
the invariably odd structures that the individualists who lived in these
unincorporated parts of Ventura had erected: a three-story-high palisade tower
built of logs…. not plain old log-cabin logs but of logs that had been laminated
with a precious extra shiny plastic that made the tower glisten like a jewel in
the year-round sun. - What was the purpose of this structure? Who had it built
on seeming no-man’s land? A deer look-out? Perhaps, not many deer, but some
Lynx and my beloved coyotes, I had spotted on Deer Creek Road driving my 1974 Malibu sedan.
The fire – brush, chaparral fire –surrounded the structure on all
sides. You need to appreciate the density of this chaparral, it is not navigable
like ordinary woodsy brush, it is dense, great for rabbits and coyotes, not permissive
of larger animals. The area around the tower had not been cleared the advisable
75 to 100 feet, but some clearing had occurred during the construction process,
20 to 40 feet which however is not enough distance to protect a structure from
a chaparral fire. It is
not just the flames, but the heat that an intense chaparral fire throws out
that endangers everything near and dear - as it did in this instance, with the
fire all around within 20 to 40 feet the entire laminated three story
structure had been baked from all sides and instantaneously burst altogether all three stories into plastic
enhanced flames, in other words: the all around heat had heated the entire structure
to the point where it exploded and imploded, burnt spectacularly and collapsed in a heap of
cinders.
Whoever the owner had failed to avail himself of the services of
the only two useful workers in them thar hills, my friends the Sanchez brothers
who made a good living bulldozing 100-foot clearings around these often hugely
expensive properties that their owners wanted to protect from the inevitable
wild-fire.
During my
first week in them thar hills I had lived with the Peacock of the two Sanchez
brothers - he was such a one and had a collection of them prancing in his
property – who told me that Ysbrand DeWitt was looking for someone to look
after his aging parents while he was at work. Aside the Sanchez brothers [the
third had been the Mayor of nearby Oxnard which had a huge Mexican strawberry
pickers populace] I could not think of a single useful person in these hills once
old Maarten DeWitt, Ysbrand’s Dutch milk-boy to wealthy and lucky flower
farmer, had expired of an aortic aneurism at age 88. A retired hoofer at the
inception of Houston Road, whom I rather liked for her New York humor and
hoofer spirit, had built herself a fairly normal two story Dutch-style big
craftsman house; the retired, perverted weird primary school graduate WW II
palm tree gunner Georgia beekeeper Marvin Bell whose garage I would rent in a
few years, had a built a normal ranchette type house; Suzy, L.A.’s most expensive
brain surgeon’s millionaire divorcee sought to turn a magnificent improbably
huge Adobe structure at the edge of Breadloaf valley into a “party haven” and she
and her closest girl friend both flew to Mexico on weekends to get laid {in Suzy’s
own small plane}, it’s triangular guest house I occupied when she needed
someone to look after the property and her two Lhasa Apsas… I for once smart enough to avert her overtures:
fucking your divorced super-horny land-lady could not end well - I loved the
guest-house and the view of Breadloaf valley all the way to the the Camarillo
madhouse, the top of Bony Ridge nearly toppling us each time there was a
serious tremor, until it was sold from out under me and I moved a half a mile
west along Boney Ridge road to Marvin Bell’s.
Where I lived was just a hop-skip whence the
Manson gang had hung out, an area rife with crack dealers. The Swiss hippies
must have had foreign sources, I liked the blonde and spry head of the family, they
partied at night where they resided at the bottom of Deer Creek Canyon, at the
spring, the inception of the creek, under cover of the live oaks, cocaine - I
had had my fill of it in New York, Ysbrand’s wife to be, a dental assistant, the
hugely overweight 23 year old daughter [“I an American girl” singing}
of one of the richest men in
the peninsula,
supplied the laughing gas and
would be the death of poor foolish Ysbrand - I had never lived among a
collection of such odd and useless folk - who found me, working 12 to 16 a day as
a writer scholar [I didn’t tell them that I was pursuing a second analysis and
contemplating becoming a shrink} and who did a lot of walking on the dusty
chaparral paths – “bizarre” Suzy’s word for me. One of the men whom I came to
know at Neptune’s Net, the local surfers’ eatery at the bottom of Yerba Buena
Road, whence I dropped down for my morning coffee and the papers [an L./A.
Times then ambitious to become the nation’s best] was in the business of towing
cars and had the kind of tow-truck onto whose bed you could pull a car, he
careened up and down exceedingly tricky dangerous Yerba Buena. Lots of folk
with mishaps who ventured into these canyon roads. Neptune’s net was run by what
I told myself was the “Elaine of West Virginia Crackers”, that is she was a
good business woman and had a sense of humor but didn’t take any gaff, with her
two cracker brothers, the aboriginal American angry whit men, they were so
angry their prominent neck veins had visible stents, they were so near
bursting.
On the road
down to Breadloaf Valley - where the Sanchez brothers’ father had been the
foreman before the farm had become part of the St. Monica Mt. Preserve - one of
Hollywood’s most imaginative production designers had assembled a Shangri La of
sorts, a wonderland of fantasies some of which had been part of productions,
others were superfluous rejected designs. My own favorite beings in the area
were the Quail – what I loved most about them was that their young seemed to roll
after the mother in the dusty paths as though they were still inside their eggs.
With the fire at most an hour I judged before
it would reach the shed I decided that I better pack my computer – I had one of
the earliest, a Leading Edge, and the most important manuscripts. Ysbrand
objected that I ought to help him save the property. I did not feel that the
German-built brick and boulder main house stood in danger, unless the surround
of spruce trees caught fire. But one more garden hose was not going to save my
shed or anything else. But as I was packing the Ventura County Fire department
finally showed up, about 12 hours after the fire had started, and in sufficient
force to stop the fire cold on both canyon sides. There were of course fires in
or around Malibu nearly every year, major or minor, but the one in Deer Creek
was my only dangerous call.
w
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I had lucked out, most improbably, and found myself living in an unimaginably – I could not even have imagined a more idyllic spot: a Dutch flower-farmers former flower shed at the end of an agave-lined dirt road at 1500 feet above the Pacific Ocean, a pepper-tree sprinkling pepper corns and a Juniper dripping sap onto the tin roof; song-birds, Colibri; a south-facing beach and the swell from the south-sea storms pounding at long intervals, a distance-muffled sound that spelled what the former inhabitants of these hills, the Chumash, had called Ma-li-bu – huge carpets of water, wave-swells breaking in stages, the ultimate whale-tail slap onto the beach is was what did it. Windows at the south, ocean facing, and on the west mountain sides.
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had
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