Nature’s Annual Assault Up Close--Banal, Tragic and Surreal

They just don’t have things like this where I grew up.

In England, you don’t have to worry about raging brush fires fanned by oven-hot desert winds engulfing thousands of acres of countryside and suburban developments.

Rampaging soccer hooligans, torrential downpours, the national cricket team--all make the list of natural disasters there, ones that I have endured.

But not blazing wildfires.

So this week’s conflagration that started in Thousand Oaks was an opportunity of sorts, a chance to experience Mother Nature’s almost annual fire assault on Southern California up close for the first time.

What I found was a strange mixture of the banal, the tragic and the surreal. And always a sense of the unpredictable, the only certainty being that nobody really had any idea what Nature would do next.

My first impression was how normal everything seemed. While Southern California drivers will slow down and gawk at the most unexceptional of fender-benders, rush hour commuters were proceeding smoothly on the Ventura Freeway Tuesday, oblivious to the stuff of a cinematographer’s dreams before them--a setting sun that burned orange directly behind huge plumes of black smoke rising above a ridgeline.

In Ventu Park, people were busy with their usual late-evening pursuits, jogging or walking the dog. For others, the fire raging above them was like a massive drive-in movie. To view the spectacle, they set up lawn chairs in fields, pulled their convertibles to the side of the road or took snapshots with Instamatics.

The Wendy Drive entrance to Point Mugu State Park, a spot I know well from hiking expeditions, was a prime viewing spot. To the east, the smoke billowed over the mountains that separate Newbury Park from the exclusive, celebrity-populated Hidden Valley area. To the west, a different glow as the sun set.

Above the fire hovered a small, fire-fighting air force of buzzing helicopters and lumbering fixed wing DC4s. The smoke’s choking, acrid smell was everywhere but longtime residents weren’t too concerned.

“We’ve lived here 25 years so we’ve seen quite a few of them,” said Janet Madden, who, wearing high heels, was watching the fire with her daughter.

“If the wind shifts direction, this whole thing could go,” predicted Dan Mesta, who was equipped with lawn chair and police scanner.

But mixed in with the almost casual atmosphere was some drama. A petite woman in a T-shirt implored a sheriff’s deputy to allow her to drive into the now blockaded Hidden Valley to look for her friend’s exotic birds that had apparently been abandoned by the side of Potrero Road.

“They’re her livelihood,” she said. “She’s a wreck.”

The deputy was unmoved: residents only allowed into the Valley.

After dark, all you could really see of the Hidden Valley fire were the helicopter lights darting across the sky like shooting stars. The popular consensus, now that the wind had died down, was that the fire would too.

As I discovered Wednesday morning, that consensus was very wrong.

A few hours earlier, the fire had taken on new life, leaping across Potrero Road and storming through Point Mugu State Park as it carved a path toward the ocean. Surveying the Wendy Drive entrance--now a nuclear-scape of blackened earth and skeletal trees--I finally comprehended the ferocity of the disaster.

Those chaparral-fringed trails now weaved through what looked like acres of burned toast. Local resident Jack Short captured the loss. “So much for the chaparral,” he said. “Our ambience is gone.”

Further down the road toward Hidden Valley, a spot fire was still raging on a hillside covered with oak trees. The strongest sensation was the intense heat both from the winds and the fire itself, a heat that dries your mouth and parches your throat.

A motley crowd had stopped to view the flames. Middle-aged women stepped out of Oldsmobiles, bearing camcorders; bare-chested young men in Bermuda shorts stepped out of pickups, bandannas over their mouths.

Hidden Valley was the most surreal sight of all. On the idyllic valley’s floor, where white picket fences surround the ranches of celebrities like that guy from “Magnum P.I.,” I saw perfectly groomed horses grazing contentedly. But the hills to the north were almost completely charred from the previous night’s blaze and now fire was threatening to leap into the valley over the hills to the south.

Following Forest Service trucks and horse trailers, I drove along Hidden Valley Road which dead-ends at Hidden Valley Ranch. There the fire danger was imminent. Several ranch buildings had wood shingle roofs, a house under construction was still only a wood frame and the fire battalion chief reckoned the flames would crest the ridge within an hour.

But again there was a strange calm. It somehow didn’t seem possible or even plausible that such a savage calamity could overtake such a peaceful setting. A woman from Pomona visiting her ranch-hand husband was glad she wasn’t home because “then I’d get worried because he was staying here.”

I felt like I was visiting a movie set and these firefighters in yellow jackets were just extras.

It was left to a pizza delivery driver to add the final touch. He’d been let through a roadblock to deliver four party pizzas and 45 sandwiches to the hungry Hidden Valley Ranch firefighters. “Yeah, it is kind of weird,” he admitted.

But it was also kind of very American, very business as usual.