Days of the Devil Winds

We thought we were past the brush fire danger when the first rain of the season fell about three weeks ago, but we hadn’t counted on the Santa Anas. They swept down from the high plateaus of the Mojave, draining moisture from the overheated air, and then blasted through the passes that linked them with the desert, causing calamity in the city on their way to the sea.

Temperatures climbed like the rising intensity of a silent scream, and soon the silence became sirens as fire appeared with almost mystical timing across the face of the basin, burning houses and brush with capricious abandon in the flatlands and on the hillsides.

Flames that might have been subdued with minimal force in more rational times became roaring conflagrations in the hands of 100-m.p.h. winds that tore off roofs, slapped trees to the ground, toppled giant trucks and mocked our urban lifelines by blowing us into pockets of powerless darkness.

We were children in the storm, fighting awesome forces of nature with thin streams of water and bug-like helicopters that darted through the smoky sky, massing courage to face mountains of flame at a time when courage just wasn’t enough. Homes and memories burned with fierce intensity Thursday in Baldwin Park and La Verne, and when it was over, only damp ashes remained.

I knew before dawn Friday that trouble was riding the devil winds again. An oak tree that stands next to our home in Topanga Canyon pounds a warning of its own against our exterior bedroom wall when the Santa Anas reach an intensity that defies sanity, and it was pounding like a bass drum by the time the sun rose.

I looked out from our second-story window to trees whirling madly in the howling winds. From the perspective of height and distance, the tops of the oaks resembled a moving green landscape that stretched off to a far horizon, rising and plunging in massive swells that mirrored the wild cadence of the wind.

We knew there was fire somewhere close that morning because a thick but blurring ribbon of smoke stretched over the Santa Monicas, full of grays and browns and golds and violets, reflecting fire and light and soot in refractions of color that are almost impossible to describe.

Fire needs a lexicon of its own because there is too much drama and too much fear and too much calamity to compress into the limits of journalism’s prose. I just can’t tell you how a tendril of smoke or a whiff of burning brush or hellish flames on a hillside impact on the inadequacies of those who live in the mountains.

News of the holocaust in Granada Hills and Porter Ranch came in bursts over the radio: Winds of 40 m.p.h., winds of 50 m.p.h., winds of 60 m.p.h. Four homes burned; 22 homes burned; 36 homes damaged or destroyed. The scope of the disaster grew in a pattern wildly disproportionate to the amount of time that had passed. Glowing embers were tossed miles ahead. Schools shut down; evacuation centers opened.

No one knows better than those of us who live in the mountains how frightening fire can be. Twice over the last 15 years flames higher than power poles have come so close to our home I could feel the heat on my face as I stood watch on the rooftop, alternately mesmerized and terrified at the wall of raging reds and oranges that wrapped me in the roar of a thousand jet engines. Standing small and flammable in the path of a firestorm is bearing witness to an angry god. Only a shift in the wind saved our house.

Similarly, no one knows better than a mountain-dweller how alone one is when flames encircle a community. While it seems that the whole world is burning, we know that it isn’t, that beyond our circle of pain and fear, life goes on in a rather ordinary manner, and those outside the circle have only faint empathy with what we are enduring. Nature protects. Too much horror from too many sources is beyond capacity to endure.

No one else will ever quite know the anguish of those who have borne the terror of wind and flame these last few days in Los Angeles. New brush will grow where the old brush burned and new houses will be built where the old ones died, but there are accouterments of our humanity that can never be replaced, and, sadly, we saw them taken from so many during this week of the devil winds.

It is late afternoon Friday as I finish this column, and the Santa Anas around our house have died but for a few last bursts of defiance through the trees. Our world rests quietly. Flames settle into churning smoke. Water wets the ashes.

We wait listening in the silence.