Roads From the Ashes. Megan Edwards
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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!”
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