Visiting Another World

The weather was dazzling Thanksgiving Day in the hills above Oakland. The morning sun was bright, the sky pale blue. It was only cold in the shadows, and standing on Proctor Avenue, looking down at the bay and all its beauty, there simply weren’t many shadows.

There weren’t many shadows because there was not much left on Proctor Avenue to cast them. Houses, trees, people--almost all were gone. Proctor Avenue was in the fire zone, and about all that’s left is flattened rubble, protected by signs declaring: “This Property Has Not Been Abandoned.”

I had been drawn to this street by a newspaper picture. An aerial photograph, it had framed one square block of destruction, dozens of houses knocked down to their foundations. At the photo’s center stood two houses, inexplicably spared.

The image stayed with me, more than any television footage of imploding houses or pathetic newspaper quotes from people who lost everything. I wondered who lived in the houses and what it now would be like for them, alone on a block, surrounded by ruins.

I had passed by the houses the day before. A writer named Nancy Pietrafesa was giving me a tour of the fire zone, telling her own story about life amid the rubble. The fire had stopped one eucalyptus tree short of Pietrafesa’s house. Her husband and three children had fled, certain it was lost. Later, they dialed home and, surprisingly, the answering machine picked up.

“Hello house,” Pietrafesa’s husband said into the machine. “We love you.”

As we drove past neighbors who had not been so lucky, Pietrafesa described the powerful emotions that have tugged at her since the fire--relief, sorrow, guilt, fear. She’s been overcome by an impulse to give away clothes to fire victims, to cook for families night after night, to make school lunches for the “fire kids,” as they are called, to console. She also has nightmares.

The fire has made her, and no doubt a whole lot of others, reflect on the deeper meanings of homes and, more to the point, neighborhoods. At a time when houses are spoken of as “good investments,” and the people next door “seem nice,” but are really strangers, such concepts are often sold short. They are not sold short any longer in the hills above Oakland, where they now hold regular block meetings even on blocks where there are no homes.

Eventually, we stumbled upon Proctor Avenue. After a few blocks, rechecking a copy of the photograph, we found the two houses. One looked pretty badly damaged, and no one was around.

Driving back the next morning, I noticed people standing solemnly in knots at several of the lost houses. I wondered if the Thanksgiving holiday had brought them back to mourn. Something in their faces made it seem not the time to interrupt.

On Proctor, I saw an old woman staring expressionless out a window toward the row of rubble across the street. Her house, just outside the block encompassed in the photograph, also had survived.

Through the kitchen window, she told me she was thankful for herself but felt “terrible” for all the others. When I left, she returned to her seat by the window and resumed her watch on the wreckage.

Next door, a man was straightening a temporary fence. This hadn’t been his home, John Giovannini said. His was the house directly below, on Modoc Street, and it was still there.

“It’s weird here now, totally dark at night,” Giovannini said. ‘I can see the moon now from my back yard. It used to be homes and trees, but now I can see the moon. It’s like another world.”

I pointed out an animal trap and asked if that was to catch the rats that had invaded much of the fire zone. No, he said, the rats had gone away after the sewers were capped. The traps were for the stray cats.

When I finally worked my way to the houses in the photograph, a truck was backing out of one of the driveways. Dan and Tessie Ochoa said they had been forced by smoke and water damage to rent another house, but had come back, as they often do, to spend the night.

The neighbors, too, had moved out. The Ochoas talked quietly, almost reluctantly, about the fire. They have no idea why it spared their house.

Ochoa said it is “eerie” on the block now. He talked about waking that morning and being startled by the view of the bay from his bedroom window.

“You are used to seeing rooftops,” he said. “Now there are no rooftops. Now there is nothing.”

I showed the Ochoas the picture and they asked to keep it. But they didn’t seem all that interested, and I guess that shouldn’t have been surprising. They live with the image every day, on a street without shadows, and will for a long time to come.