Rein the Burning Monster

Fire is an awesome adversary, rising out of the canyons and over the mountains with the ferocity of a demon emerging from hell.

It spins and whirls over the startled landscape and gathers energy as it rushes down the slopes, creating storms of wind and flame with expanding appetites for destruction.

To watch a brush fire coming toward you and to feel its overheated storm-winds blow against your face is to witness an elemental force of nature gone surrealistically wild . . . and to realize, with sobering fear, how pathetic we are to face it with a hose.

I write all that knowing I risk being told I have substituted Gothic prose for journalistic presence, that I trade on syntax to inflate fact. Not so.

I have stood on the rooftop of my home in the Santa Monicas and watched the demon come up over the mountains. I’ve heard its howling gales, and I’ve felt its searing breath on my face.

Believe me when I tell you I do not begin to describe the fury and power of flames running wild in the high country. Superlatives die like twigs in a firestorm, inadequate to explain the extremes of disaster that engulf them.

And now in the autumn of the year, as the winds blow and the brush dries, the monster stirs again.

I’ve been thinking about this since last weekend’s fire blackened 4,000 acres in the mountains around Malibu.

A day after the last flames died, I drove the twisting canyon roads along a route that had been turned into a moonscape.

With me was Allen Emerson, civilian coordinator of the Malibu Sheriff’s Station Arson Watch program and team leader of the Topanga Arson Watch.

We talked about fires.

Emerson has been patrolling the canyons without pay for the last six years in an effort to cut down on arson fires and offer early warnings of fires ignited by other factors.

About 200 radio-equipped volunteers join with him during critical fire times of wind and heat to patrol the mountains as long as the danger lasts.

“This is the worst time of the year,” Emerson was saying as we studied the charred slopes of Decker Canyon.

The acrid smell of fire and water hung in the air. Burned laurel sumacs reached skeletal fingers toward a cerulean sky.

“We get a little rain and we think the danger is past, but don’t fool yourself. It’s drier than hell out there, and when the Santa Anas blow, this is what happens.”

He nodded toward the burned mountains. The ravages of fire notwithstanding, they were molded in gentle symmetry. Beyond them, the ocean gleamed on a day so bright it was blinding.

“You ever see anything so beautiful turned so ugly?”

Emerson, 64, is no stranger to the consequence of nature in a rage. He once owned a restaurant in Topanga. In 1980 when floods washed out the canyon road, business came to a standstill for five months, and he went broke.

“I can’t do anything about that now,” he said as we drove through the fire’s desolate aftermath, “but maybe I can at least do something about fires.”

There are roughly 300,000 acres in the Santa Monica Mountains, some of it populated, some of it not. In the last two decades, eight major fires have swept its slopes, killing and destroying.

Those who study fires believe another one is due.

A fungus is attacking and killing the mountain foliage, creating a natural fuel as combustible as gasoline. Whole hillsides of scrub brush are dying in the harsh sunlight.

Fire experts blame fluctuating extremes of rain and heat over the years for creating the conditions that have allowed the fungus to kill.

In addition to the lifeless foliage building on the slopes, moisture levels are dangerously low in the living plants, increasing their flammable oils.

A county battalion chief estimates that what we’ve got in every 100 acres of dead and dry chaparral is the potential for destructive energy equal to the Hiroshima bomb.

Using new methods in 1985, three mountain areas revealed shrubbery with excessively low levels of moisture. Since then, two of the areas have been the scenes of destructive fires.

The third area is Topanga.

Emerson worries that arsonists will zero in on the news as a challenge.

“We’re a powder keg waiting to blow,” he said, “and that ought to scare hell out of everyone. This whole area could become a graveyard.”

As we drove out of the mountains, the smell of dead fire followed, like the haunting memory of a woman’s perfume. The imagery it evoked, however, wasn’t beauty. It was the howling, burning demon of a nightmare.