The Fire This Time
By Pico Iyer
You learn to keep your diaries and photographs in a safe-deposit box in the bank. You never burn candles or let the washing machine run when you're away from the house. For five months of every year you instinctively look to the hills as soon as the temperature rises or the wind picks up. If you're living where people were never supposed to live -- as many of us in the hills of California are doing -- you learn that you are living on borrowed time.
I flew back to Santa Barbara a week ago, and as I drove home from the airport, I looked up to the foothills where we live and saw two small rivulets of orange surging through the darkness. My heart stopped. Eighteen years before, almost to the day, a forest fire had broken out very close to our home. For three hours I had been caught in the middle of 70-ft. (21-m) flames, whipped on by 70-m.p.h. (110 km/h) "sun-downer" winds. This time, I pushed down the pedal and raced around the curves of our narrow, hill-framed mountain road to tell my mother and sweetheart that our most loyal, if unreliable, annual visitor was on its way.
By now, 1,500 fires were burning up and down the state, from Big Sur down to San Bernardino. Slashes of orange began to tear up the hills two or three miles from our house, and the sky turned bloodred, then black. For 24 hours we remained in a state of limbo, leaving the house as a precaution and then returning when it appeared the fire had subsided. I went down to the local post office in late afternoon, and as I came out, the whole residential suburb next to the sea was all but buried under a mud-brown haze. Up in the hills, orange gashes were appearing everywhere.
I started driving home and turned on the radio to hear that we, and a few neighbors, had been given an "evacuation warning." As I began the ascent up our road, the warning turned to an order. I careened around the curves, with plumes of orange seeming to rise in every valley around our house. "We have to leave now!" I shouted to my wife and mother as fires cut across the dry brush with a speed and efficiency I remembered from before. The air was so clouded with smoke, we could hardly breathe. Driving up our road was like driving into an oven.
Brakes screaming, we swerved and skidded at crazy speeds down the mountain as the flames rose behind us, and within 10 minutes or so we were in downtown Santa Barbara in the middle of a quiet, blue-sky midsummer day. Firefighters and planes started arriving from every corner of California. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger announced a "state of emergency," which meant that resources would soon arrive from around the country.
Then came the wait. Ash was falling over the city like snow. Hillsides disappeared permanently behind a gray-black haze. Sometimes the wind receded, and our home came into view. Then the sun grew more intense, and we could imagine the heroic firefighters surrounded by flames that were barely 10% contained.
They tell you how to prepare for fires, but you can prepare no more for them than for a sudden death. Eighteen years ago, I had been sitting in my house when I saw a waterfall of orange a few hillsides away. I tried to call the fire department, but the phone went dead. I tried to turn the lights on, but the electricity was gone. Within 10 minutes the flames had so encircled my home with smoke that I could not be seen by helicopters above.
In that conflagration, which wiped out our house and more than 500 others -- at the time the worst fire in California history -- I sat in a car on our mountain road, watching the fire pick apart my bedroom, our living room, all our past and present and (for me, a writer, who had his next eight years or so in notes) my future. Now it was all happening again. The phones were dead. Electricity was out across the city. Reports came that the fire had receded a little but still was most intense and threatening right next to my house. All I could do was sit in the town below -- the traffic lights around me blanked out -- and listen to the blades of the helicopters above, watching for the turning of the wind.