A Lonely but Lucky Feeling After Fire

Standing with her back to her house, looking out on her neighborhood on a canyon rim in Normal Heights, Martha Brewer can’t see a single patch of green.

She has to turn around and gaze thankfully at her front patio, where her sago palms, ferns, eugenols, begonias, azaleas and a resident chameleon named Leon were left untouched by the most devastating fire in San Diego’s history.

To Brewer’s left, her neighbor’s metal garage door frame stands alone, an entranceway to upheaval where blackened rubble from Sunday’s fire chokes an oval pool. To her right, another neighbor’s newly installed aluminum fireproof roof has disintegrated, and the home’s only recognizable remnants are a front-yard lamp post and the address tacked on a crumbled stucco wall.

The house where the 60-year-old Brewer lives with her husband, Lee, and her mother is an oasis of flora and fauna in a desert of smoke and ash.

The Brewers’ concrete and stucco home at 5082 Cliff Place is perched high above Interstate 8, across from the mirrored Commonwealth Bank building at the intersection with Interstate 805. From the highway, it’s the only house in the scorched area still visible on the rim.

“We feel guilty,” she said, looking from her deck at the wreckage of the other homes along the canyon. “But mostly we feel sorry for the people. They don’t resent it. They’re glad for us. I haven’t heard one person say, ‘Why did your house get saved when ours didn’t?’ ”

She said a group of people spied her house from the other side of the finger canyon during the fire Sunday night. “When they saw the house was saved, a big cheer went up.”

Brewer found out the house was intact Sunday evening after firefighters told her husband that one house on the end of the street had escaped damage. He persuaded them to let him see if it was his. Then he went to find his wife, whom he had lost in the crowd soon after they were evacuated.

When he found her, “he called out to me that the house was safe, and I started to cry,” Brewer said. “He was standing there in just his stocking feet, we left so fast.”

When they returned to their house, their neighborhood of quiet homes had become a thoroughfare for small truck traffic, as workers from San Diego Gas & Electric, Pacific Bell and Cox Cable traced lines and cables that now lead to melted kitchens and leveled living rooms.

“Our first thing back yesterday morning we fed the doves,” Brewer said. “They were waiting.”

The hummingbirds that frequent the Brewers’ slightly melted bird feeder on the back concrete patio were waiting, too, as were the fish swimming in the aquarium inside the house. But the wild foxes and coyotes that occasionally run through the canyon haven’t yet returned.

“We used to have a road runner that would run across the (patio) and over that humpback ridge,” Brewer said, pointing at a hill that has turned the color of charcoal. “I haven’t seen him.”

The Brewers bought their house in 1968 because they liked the view, Martha said. Now they don’t want to look outside.

“It’s like a war zone, exactly,” she said. “I know it’s going to be lonesome. When you drive up the street you get that sinking feeling. It’s horrible.”

In all, 12 homes on the block were damaged or destroyed. The closest one to survive stands three lots down on the other side of the street, bordered by burned rubble on either side. Owners Laura Parks and Andy Sierra said the iceplant they grew and the brush they cleared behind the house saved them from losing more than their garden, woodshed and a hammock on the back porch.

They had planned to have a party and barbecue to watch Tuesday night’s fireworks display over San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium, but police said that guests from outside the area, as well as any other people planning to watch the fireworks from the canyon, would not be allowed near the rim.

Parks and Sierra said their remaining neighbors still were welcome to barbecue with them. “What can burn now?” Parks said. “There’s nothing left to burn. Now this is a fireproof house.”

Like Parks and Sierra, the Brewers had grown iceplant and cleared brush away from their house for 50 feet. They also erected a chain link fence going down the canyon. Despite those precautions, the flames licked as near as their pyracantha hedge, burning the leaves off the branches, and wilting plants on the back patio. An aluminum ladder leaning next to the hedge melted from the heat. The paint was stripped from one side of the flat roof, two plate windows were cracked, and soot was blown inside the house through the closed slats of a louvered shutter. That was the extent of the damage.

“Some of it was luck, I guess,” Brewer said. “I guess God was looking out for us, too.”

Brewer was just glad she and her husband never got around to building a wooden deck out over the iceplant. “That might have burned down the house,” Brewer said. “Well, we’re not building any wooden deck now.”

She was also glad they decided not to grow plants over the edge of the back patio. “Our neighbor had juniper hanging down. It’s just like turpentine. Wssshhh!”

But mostly, she was glad for the reminders of nature that were left in the ruined landscape.

“I think it’ll be all right,” she said, surveying the gray canyon where water used to run down from Cliff Place through a drainage pipe. “A couple of heavy rainfalls will cover it with green.”

A bird swooped down through the canyon as she spoke. “Look!” she said. “Our golden hawks are back.”