As disaster draws near, ‘fire bags’ are packed once more

They’re here again, the crazy ladies with fire in their eyes and smoke in their hair, blowing hot winds into Southern California.

As the locals call them, the Santa Anas blast down from the northeast, roaring and howling, while residents of the mountains and canyons watch and wait.

I’m one of them.

My wife and I live in Topanga Canyon, and I can see the smoke gushing up over the Santa Monica Mountains as I write, laying a thick, white layer over the horizon that separates us from Malibu.

The air is calm around our house now, but radio reports tell us that winds remain in a fury elsewhere, blasting furnace-hot gusts all along the state’s southern coast and inland to various communities.

There are, as of late Monday afternoon, 17 fires burning, but the one that concerns us most continues to rage less than a dozen miles from the center of Topanga. It doesn’t matter that at the moment the winds are blowing the fire away from us. The winds blow with an evil caprice wherever the devil takes them.

They blow fire across valleys and canyons at the speed of a scream and laugh at efforts large and small to stop them. Only an army of firefighters and the Pacific Ocean, a relentless barrier of deep water, can halt them.

I rush off to keep a heart appointment and rush back to be at our house, flashing credentials to Highway Patrolmen blocking the entrance to Topanga Canyon Boulevard, closed to all but local residents and emergency personnel.

I pass campers heading out, fleeing grim possibilities; a jogger on a daily run, locked into a schedule that knows no peril; and a squat, slow mail truck on a routine route, true to the postal workers’ motto of sleet and snow and God knows what else.

I rush into the house to find my wife, the solid Cinelli, packing bags just in case, going about the business of preparing for evacuation before word comes, which I am sure it will. We’ve heard it before in the 32 years we’ve lived here, sirens wailing, public-address systems blaring the command to get out, get out, get out -- choppers directly overhead, filling the air with calamity.

We’ve packed “fire bags” at least half a dozen times in the past, but it never becomes routine, even though we take essentially the same items we have always carried when we have been ordered to leave the canyon: photographs, important documents, basic clothing, artwork, souvenirs from world travel, dog and cat food, and certain awards I value. The dog and cat go with us, and the turtle, too.

And what do I do now as disaster looms? I hurry to throw a few things into a suitcase, and I sit and I write, looking out sometimes at a view of trees and mountains, a vista that has sustained me for years of good times and bad, leading me into a garden of words that have always been my release and my salvation.

I sit and write in the face of chaos because that’s my job. How else would I be able to feel pain for those who suffer the results of fire and the anxiety that stirs all kinds of emotions in my gut? I need a flow of words to understand my own feelings, and to reach out to our neighbors in Malibu and to those in danger to the north, to the south and to the east.

Charter Cable went offline Sunday and hasn’t been restored, taking with it our television sets, all but one telephone and the Internet connection for one of two computers. The power remains on, but the lights are beginning to flicker, so we aren’t sure how long it will be before it all goes dead.

I pause and listen to the news stations that play almost minute-by-minute reports of the many fires, much like sports commentators working a football game, but with a greater sense of dread. They’re our messengers at the front, bringing us what we need to know, when we need to know it.

We knew from the first winds that trouble was in the air. Humidity hovered near zero, the brush on the hillsides in every canyon was as dry as a politician’s kiss, and the rain that fell only days ago did little but dampen our rooftops.

Blasts of Santa Anas rattled our windows and sent tree branches slamming against the sides of our house before dawn Monday, reminding us that more pruning is needed. The devil winds have no limits.

Now it’s up to the men and women on the fire lines; up to the helicopters that will chop-chop-chop overhead, and the fixed-wing aircraft I can see occasionally in the distance, plowing through the smoke, steadfast in combat with a terrible enemy.

In Topanga, there is a strange and unnerving silence. The boulevard is free of the traffic that normally roars past. Distance separates us from the heavy sounds of firefighting equipment. Even the aircraft I can see move soundlessly, like ghosts, through the sky. Only faint whiffs of the fire in Malibu and the layer of smoke along the ridgeline speak of the danger that is not far away.

Who knows what the next hour or day will bring? Our bags are packed with the artifacts of our lives, mine and Cinelli’s. All we can do is watch and listen.

All we can do is wait.

almtz13@aol.com