How About a Fire That Is Only That?

Let’s go back. On a night when the wind blew hard, a small fire started next to the Caldecott Tunnel in Oakland. This fire had legs, and soon it was eating houses all over the Oakland hills.

We know now that it was the worst. Three thousand structures gone and 25 people dead, more or less. They’re still counting. In the history of California, no urban brush fire took so many homes or so many lives.

But, of course, it was not merely a fire. This is California, and we don’t have mere fires. We have symbolic events.

In the days that followed, you could watch reruns of the fire on the network news and then you could listen to the commentary. It didn’t matter which network. Or which commentary. They were all the same.

In California, it was said, Armageddon had come again. The people out there have made a bargain with the devil. They dare to live in the hills, which burn. They build hospitals on the San Andreas Fault. And the day of reckoning always comes.

That, at least, was the version offered by TV. Basically, it implied that we get what we deserve in California. A heavy message of original sin.

But there are permutations on this theme. Here is one from Gore Vidal, writing about a visit to L.A. in the late 1970s:

“Los Angeles had been on fire for three days. As I took a taxi from the studio I asked the driver, ‘How’s the fire doing?’ ‘You mean,’ said the Hollywoodian, ‘the holocaust.’ The style, you see, must come as easily as that.”

There’s a cheerful sense of doom contained in this version. A blank and pitiless god torments the city and there is nothing to be done. Except, maybe, go to lunch.

But you get the idea. California cannot have a simple disaster. There must be, somewhere, a meaning to each flood, each fire, each earthquake. And that meaning, one way or the other, has to do with doom.

I cannot think of any other place on Earth that carries this burden. By way of contrast, consider last week’s freakish, “extra-tropical” storm that raked hundreds of miles of coast. The Atlantic coast, that is.

The storm struck suddenly, unexpectedly. Waves 20 feet high sailed over breakwaters and demolished houses. Scores of homes were destroyed. Hundreds more damaged. An entire town of 1,300 souls in New Jersey was abandoned when the storm breached the seawall and began to float houses off their foundations.

As you probably recall, the same storm swept over a rocky point off Kennebunkport, Me., and flooded President Bush’s summer home. Waves broke through the doors of the house and carried off the contents of the first floor. A guest cottage got flattened.

A bad, malignant storm. But as of yet this storm has inspired no talk of Armageddon. No one has mentioned bargains with the devil. Or the foolhardiness of Easterners who have chosen to defy nature by living along the Atlantic coast. And after the President said he planned to restore his house and return for more summers, I have seen no television commentators shaking their heads in wonder.

This storm, you see, remained merely a storm. It had no moral quotient and carried no meaning about the spiritual corruption of its victims.

But, you know, I think I like our disasters better. I remember, years ago, walking up to the police barrier of a big fire in Southern California. This one had swept through several thousand acres of the San Gabriel foothills and turned the skies a pale yellow. When you walked outside, ashes fell like snowflakes.

Next to the barrier, three sidewalk preachers had set up shop. They were working the big crowd that had gathered to watch.

Their message, of course, was doom. I remember one of the preachers balanced a paper cup on his head. There was no explanation for the cup. It seemed to be his way of gaining an edge on the competition.

Behind them, you could feel the heat. You could hear the flames working through the brush. And all the time, the preachers had their Bibles out, pounding the pages with their knuckles.

The world was burning. The rough beast was coming. This was our kind of disaster, the kind that is never simple, and the kind you will never, ever see in Kennebunkport.