Marathon Fire: Life in Southern California

My experience with fire; what I’m reading; plus book ban news

Toyon bush

Hello Friends,

Now that the Los Angeles fires seem to be under control (that is, not growing), I want to share an essay I wrote about my experience when my own neighborhood was on fire.¹ to give a sense of what it’s like to live in So Cal with constant fire threat. And to show what it feels like after the danger temporarily passes. I’m not able to make an audio recording this week because I’m doing a sleep study and need to get to bed. 😴🛌

Marathon Fire

The midnight blast of sirens and bullhorns startled me awake. Blaring up and down our street the voice of a bullhorn, with its automated urgency, commanded, “You must evacuate.” When I had fallen asleep, two cities and a horizon full of rolling hills had separated my Claremont, California neighborhood from the Grand Prix fire. A friend, Marla, was spending the night. She’d come from Washington to visit and had been staying with a third friend whose neighborhood twelve miles to the northeast had been evacuated earlier in the evening. “We been through this before,” I’d said, a reassurance, before driving away with Marla.

Everything had changed in a few hours, as a hot October Santa Ana swept the fire west.

I rose, stupid with sleep, my torso and limbs aching from that morning’s 17-mile jog. In six weeks, I was due to run the Honolulu Marathon with the Leukemia Society’s Team in Training. Early that day I’d been buoyant, running better than in two previous years of training, with a realistic hope of cutting at least fifteen minutes from my personal record. My fundraising was going well; my honoree was beating her cancer.

I rubbed a cramp from my right hamstring and hitch-stepped toward the front door while I shook loose thoughts of the marathon. My husband, even more sleep-addled than I, told me he was going to take a shower before we left. I looked out into the night, to see whether I could glimpse the fire, now that it was moving in our direction. A 50-foot wall of flame covered the adjacent hills as far as I could see to the east. Even then, it must have been a few miles away, but it enveloped my senses, the scorch and ash in my nose, the heat pulling my skin as though I had stepped into a dehydrator, the infernal crackling dance of the orange-red curtain causing me to squint.

I ran back into my bedroom to find my husband picking out clothes. “Now, Now!” I said, and pointed. He, too, went to have a look.

My God, I thought. What am I supposed to take? Marla was up and grabbed the portraits from the walls of our long hallway. I couldn’t think beyond my family and the dog.

I awakened my three sons, my thoughts slow. Their pajamas, with designs of dinosaurs, planets and electric guitars, were indicative of their ages—six, nine and thirteen. Considering that span, they might have had varying reactions to the midnight awakening and the encircling fire. Yet each of them exuded a calm wonder, an awe of nature that was removed from panic. They stood in the doorway, barefoot. God knows where their slippers were, they never wore them, and there was no time to look now. “Go grab your tennis shoes. And shut the door. You’re letting smoke in,” I said.

We leashed our husky-mix of a mutt, who was excited about a ride in the car on any terms, and piled the kids into the minivan. Our street itself appeared menacing, lit eastward in blood and ginger orange, but pitch behind us. The blaze, with its swirling cinders, had the same broiler effect on us as we faced it, the heat choking us without surrounding us. We fled. I dropped Marla off at a hotel before meeting back up with the rest of my family at my in-laws. She found the hotel full and took a taxi to the airport, catching the last flight out of the local airport.

Once our children were safe at my in-laws’ home in the adjacent city of Upland, my husband and I drove as near as we were allowed to our neighborhood, about three-quarters of a mile away. It was a masochistic thing to do. The area was now on fire, and from this distance it was impossible to see which homes had gone up in flames. There was no fire brigade, the blaze having spread much farther than the local fire departments were able to reach.

We couldn’t stay—not for the grief of it, but because a weird weather system had enveloped us with fierce swirling winds, carrying ash hot enough to burn. The smoke seared our eyes and marred our vision. The campfire smell that all of my life had signaled pleasure had now intensified to a choking stink. There was that same sense of baking that I had experienced earlier.

We turned away. Lines from an antique poem rose from a memory I didn’t know existed. Several years earlier, I had read “Upon the Burning of My House, July 10, 1666” by the Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet. Those few words that I recalled were both a sound in my mind and a vision across the screen of fire.

And, when I could no longer look,
I blest his Name that gave and took . . .

Farewell my Pelf, farewell my Store.
The world no longer let me Love,
My hope and Treasure lyes Above.

With no fire trucks in sight, I was trying to let go, to release hope, and with it, all my material possessions. It didn’t work. I wanted the fire department, and I wanted my home, the tiny things that, gathered together, reminded me of who I was.

Back at my in-laws, I tried to close my eyes, but each time I did, a wall of flame appeared inside my eyelids. I wondered if I was hallucinating. A list of what I should have taken from the house—beginning with my computer—started a spinning cycle through my head.

Just after we quit our vigil, the fire crews arrived from hundreds of miles away in Northern California, coming in on the only open street and facing down flames in three directions.

Along with our neighbors, we had the opportunity to thank the fire crews the following afternoon. Packed tightly in the local high school gym, the crowd clapped as the city fire chief was introduced. “You’ll be allowed back into the area tonight. Some of you are not going to like what you see,” he reminded us. “But, the important thing is that no one lost their life.” As he detailed what was known of the damage, a contingent at the south end of the gym became agitated. Their neighborhood of over fifty houses had burned to the ground, except one. The fire crews hadn’t attempted to save it because the street into the sector was too narrow for a fire truck to turn around in. This was a known hazard and houses there were uninsurable. The owners had gambled and lost everything. Now they needed someone to blame.

The vitriolic shouting blanketed my survivor’s euphoria, snuffing it out. My husband and I left to buy a flashlight, so that we could assess the damage to our home through darkness, as soon as we were allowed to return.

That night, we drove slowly, disturbing haunted ground. Under the shadowy street lamps, it appeared that the Almighty had played a game of ‘Duck, Duck, Goose’ in my immediate area, arbitrarily tapping a sprinkling of homes for destruction. The street below mine had many charcoal patches where houses stood two days before. The houses on my short street stood, though some were roofless, open to the sky. My own home was whole.

After tripping over lawn furniture that must have been thrown hastily aside by firemen as they entered the yard to do battle, I shone the flashlight in the center of a pile of ash that had been my dog’s house. My knees buckled with my first real sense of proximity to loss. I pointed the flashlight up to the burnt pine tree that had dropped embers not only on the doghouse, but on all the surrounding bushes as well, igniting even the succulents growing along the wall of my home—which survived simply because the roof was gravel and rock, and the large wooden eaves were entirely covered in plaster.

Dumb luck, I thought, sympathetic to those neighbors who were now homeless. Armed with a guilt-stained gratitude, I vowed that if people could face cancer, surely I could face the remainder of my training in the charred conditions of this new proving ground. My job was to get over it and get moving.

An intellectual understanding of this was simple enough; emotionally, I faltered. The immediate area was filled with fire crews monitoring hot spots that dotted the remaining tinder. So small that they shouldn’t have appeared threatening, these mini flames rattled my spine. I couldn’t douse the images of fire spouts from the underworld. My midnight evacuation had altered my sense of home. I had become afraid of danger that had passed.

Taking “you are what you pretend to be” as my motto, I overlaid my dread with a mask of self-assurance. As demolition crews and landscapers worked the surrounding streets, I dug and planted in my yard, tossed out the patio furniture, its mesh seating melted by falling cinders. I grieved to have my lanky pine cut down, now certain that the fire had killed it.

Through the weeks of falling snowflake ash, I jogged slowly, wondering what I was breathing in, stopping regularly to blink the soot from my eyes. I surveyed the bare brown hills, which from a distance had a gentle, rolling sensuousness. But nearer, the physical flaws appeared. The stubs of burned Manzanita and the prickly black twig remnants of other chaparral now appeared as bristles bursting through the backs of monstrous beasts. I came upon the remains of what had been a giant cactus patch, its blackness slick, almost oily. A few pale yellow paddles poked out in each direction, a compass to orient me in the center of universal destruction.

By November, I had stopped jogging and only attempted to walk—at night, through darkness, where the fire damage was indiscernible, except in the beam of my flashlight. I could only manage a few inches of the devastation at once.

A week into December, my training schedule expired. I reunited with my teammates at the airport and traveled to Honolulu to run. Long hours into the flight, I peered out the airplane window, thinking green and blue, not as adjectives to describe the lush vegetation and deep ocean of Hawaii, but as nouns, alien things, forgotten in the blistered landscape of my home.

Despite the beauty of the racecourse, and although I didn’t hit the proverbial ‘runner’s wall,’ I was weary of being in the race by the halfway point. By the time I had reached the 20-mile marker, other marathoners began to pull up beside me and ask, “Are you all right?”

“Oh, yes!” I answered with false cheer, thinking it a strange question. I was certainly moving slowly, but so were they—or they wouldn’t have been in my vicinity. Why would any of them worry about me?

When I looked up to see professional photographers and a finish line banner, I pulled myself into an attitude of victory. The photographers, however, missed my finish and the pose was lost. Instead they caught a candid image, just before I thought to pose. It showed a woman with her back slumped, shoulders curved in, and her leg and foot pulled up rather than out ahead. I looked a lot more like I was trying to curl into the fetal position than make forward progress. Now I knew why fellow runners had shown concern. This was no victory. My finish was just another lap in a longer course.

Home again, I noted that the charring on the walls of my house appeared to be permanent shadows of the Grand Prix’s flames. I climbed the dusty path into the hills behind my neighborhood, taking in the panoramic view of the meadow. The landscape remained scorched, covered in black grasshoppers. Nothing that was important to me—marathon training, advancements in cancer research, a life fully lived—would ever again appear to progress in a straight line from start to finish. I had come to respect the cycle, the rhythm of the environment in which I lived. I vowed to once more participate in that cycle.

Finally, come May, I stepped into a pasture of stunted blonde grass to see eucalyptus trees, their slim trunks, stark black for months, now covered in foliage—leaves were sprouting directly out of the entire surface of trees, from base to slender tip, living fire, green flames snapping, dancing out on the few remaining limbs.

I had a new image for the burning bush that was not consumed, for what it means to stand on sacred ground.

What I’m reading

I’m still sewing (or rather cutting fabric in preparation to sew) and housecleaning, so I listened to two audiobooks while working:

The Safekeep by Yael Van der Wouden. A literary novel—slow movement, lovely language. This is a novel where I thought I’d guessed the end very early on. Then it took a twist and I thought maybe I was wrong. And then, I wasn’t. The novel takes place in the Dutch countryside in 1961, when WWII seems to be in the rearview mirror. After her mother’s death, Isabel lives alone in the home where she grew up. She’s a bit compulsive, so when her brother’s girlfriend Eva comes to stay with her, she notices every little thing that’s amiss, including missing household items. Those missing items lead to the unveiling of a terrible secret (that, yeah, you guess at the very beginning of the book). A very sensuous book. Lots of hot sex.

In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife by Sebastian Junger. I’ve been a fan of Junger’s all the way back to A Perfect Storm. Here, the author discusses his own near death (death?) experience and how it made him curious about the afterlife. He explores the medical side of death, not only by interviewing the medical team that saved him, but also in anecdotes and narratives about his experiences in war. He goes on to look at the research into near death experiences and how similar they are in all cultures. Since his dead father, a physicist, visited him as Junger was dying on the hospital operating table, Junger takes a dive into quantum physics. He looks for ways of relating what is known about the universe to the possibility of a larger communal or unified consciousness. Ultimately, since no one knows where consciousness comes from or arises, there aren’t answers. So the end of the book feels like it sort of drops out. (I was surprised to realize it was ending.) Nevertheless, the musings are interesting. I particularly like the thoughts on quantum physics and the possibility of existing in two spaces at once.

In print, I’m reading The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister. It’s a spooky tale about an Appalachian family that lives next to, and survives by working, a cranberry bog. But things are going badly as the bog is shrinking and threatened by invasive species. I’m about halfway through it and very intrigued by the dynamic of the five siblings—three girls and two boys, just like my (bogless) family. Each is a narrator.

Part 2: Libraries and book bans

Katy ISD students denied access to over 400 LGBTQ+ books from San Antonio Express-News

Katy ISD librarians have been instructed to steer students away from more than 400 books with LGBTQ+ themes, even though the school district hasn’t yet officially banned the titles, records show.

Under Katy ISD’S book banning policy, books that are flagged for review are to remain on library shelves until they’re officially banned. But internal district emails show that students are being denied access to about 450 titles while the books await review.

While the fate of the books remains uncertain, the district has instructed school librarians to tell children to “choose another book” if the child attempts to check out one of the titles, emails show.

The emails were obtained by the literary nonprofit Texas Freedom to Read Project and authenticated by the district. One message states that if a student attempts to check out a book and a “block notification pops up,” the librarians are to “ask the student to choose another book.”

Rutherford schools book banning upsets free speech advocates: 'We are banished' From Daily News Journal (USA Today)

The six banned books were among the 10 books facing obscenity challenges that school librarians reviewed and recommended for return to libraries. The majority of the board decided to return four of the books, including requirements that parents provide opt-in permission for three.

The 10 reviewed books are among 160 the school board decided to pull from libraries in November for the pending reviews from librarians to determine if the books violate obscenity laws.

The November decision pushed the total of pulled or banned books to 196, which are perceived to be in violation of the Tennessee obscenity law for being sexually explicit in at least a part of each book. The count came down to 192 with the board's decision to allow four books to return.

The most recent majority decisions of the board decided against the recommendations from librarians that the six banned books did not violate obscenity laws by the U.S. Supreme Court and the Tennessee General Assembly.

One of the banned books, "Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe," by author Benjamin Alaire Saenz, included a word that caught the board's attention.

"The word, ‘masturbate’ is used once on page 219, but is not describing the act nor does it occur," a librarian review states.

The majority of the board banned the following five other books rather than follow the recommendations of librarians to return them to school libraries for grades 9-12 or 8-12:

"I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter": by Erika L. Sanchez

"Looking for Alaska": by John Green

"Concrete Rose": by Angie Thomas

"Vampire Academy": by Richelle Mead

"Eleanor and Park": by Rainbow Rowell

How the battle over book bans is playing out in North Texas schools from CBS News

Includes the list of books challenged in Northern Texas, whether they were removed or retained.

Advocates and Authors Call on Chappaqua, NY School Leaders To Reverse Ban on Young Palestinians Speak Book from PEN America

1. A version of this essay was published in Manifest West: Serenity and Severity, 2016. The University Press of Colorado distributes the Manifest West series from Western Press Books. The press produces one literary anthology focused on on Western regional writing per year. The series is edited and produced by students in the Certificate in Publishing program and Western Colorado University.