Roads From the Ashes. Megan Edwards
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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