Fire Victims Saved What Mattered Most

Rick Tyne figures he had 10 minutes to get out. The fire had crested the hill and was galloping toward his home in the canyons of Pasadena. He put his teen-age son and his baseball card collection in the car and Oliver, the old English sheep dog, climbed in the back. The photo album too was packed.

Tyne went back inside, with minutes to spare.

“I looked around and said, ‘None of this matters,’ ” Tyne said. “I got in the car, with all the cinders coming down around us, and drove out. It was real sad to think of all the stuff gone, but we got what we needed. The kids were safe, we were safe.”

Tyne paused and slowly closed his eyes. It is the day after the inferno picked his home to spare, and now he can meditate on the choices that nobody wants to make, those ordered by catastrophe tangled with emotion and common sense.

People take what they need--a change of clothes, insurance policies, the credit cards--but they also take what succors the soul: the family photographs, a grandmother’s cameo, a wedding gown now several sizes too small.

Some, steeped in the tradition of partyers toasting a hurricane’s approach, denied the danger until it was almost too late. Later they will feel grateful for anything--a blackened coffee cup, an unmelted key--that can serve as a talisman connecting them to their past.

Experts in human behavior do not have a single catchy name for this phenomenon of people’s attachment to their possessions in times of crisis, nor can they recall any formal studies that might have been done. But abundant evidence shows that in such situations, people tend to behave in similar ways.

“There is the hope that they are going to be able to carry with them the essence of what counts,” said UCLA psychiatry professor Roderic Gorney, director of the university’s program of psychosocial adaptation and the future.

“Frequently people will say: ‘I have to get the jewelry, or the guitar, or the family pictures.’ The hope is they will have taken the heart of what is home, and therefore it will not be such an agonizing deprivation to have lost everything else.”

Often, however, people react in ways they later wish they could change. The adrenaline coursing through their bodies, as the fire approaches or the earthquake rumbles for far too long, wrestles with the logic of the brain. There is no time. They hadn’t planned for disaster. They aren’t quite ready to accept that such calamity could befall them.

“My husband was watering, but I panicked,” said Carole Lorenzini, recalling those harrowing moments when she and her husband were forced to abandon the six-bedroom home in Eaton Canyon where they had lived for 11 years. “You don’t know what to go for.”

Lorenzini grabbed some Christmas decorations, a bottle of Scotch and a box that held the only remaining photographs of her late mother. She said she will send them as Christmas presents to her relatives in Ireland this year.

With her home consumed by the flames, she has precious little else.

Just a few blocks away, 71-year-old Harlan Tripp had the presence of mind to retrieve a tin box filled with important documents and his homeowner’s insurance policy. But he also took an abstract oil painting that his eldest daughter made when she was 13 years old.

“It won a number of prizes,” Tripp said as he swept the ashes on the driveway of his home, which the fire finally passed by. “That was her earliest success.”

And Pauline Howland, who has lived in Eaton Canyon for 17 years, made sure to grab the photo albums starring her four children and six grandchildren just before she and her husband drove away early Wednesday morning to escape the flames that devoured their home.

“I left the TV on when I left and the coffee maker, too,” she said while standing in the space that had been the family room of her three-bedroom house.

“I did make the bed,” she added. “I always make it in the morning. I guess it’s automatic. Maybe I didn’t want the firemen to think I was a slob. I guess the firemen never even noticed.”

Such seemingly irrational behavior, said clinical psychologist Robert T. Scott, can indeed make sense when viewed in the context of stages people tend to go through when confronted by disaster.

Scott, head of the Los Angeles County Psychological Assn.’s disaster response team, has counseled many victims of tragedy and says people balance their physical safety with their emotional needs.

“Your body is in a state of survival,” he said. “It is a very primal stage. It’s fight or flight. Of course, the whole issue can be skirted if people would do some (planning).”

And this would force people, in cooler times, to think about what really counts.

Sierra Madre resident Andy Dotson might not have needed to breach security barricades to return to his threatened home. He had forgotten his tattered, 19-year-old blanket with the distinctive penguin design.

“The kids and the animals are my security blanket, they come first,” he said. “But my family didn’t get (the blanket), so I went back there. It means something to me. I was gonna bust through the barricades if I had to.”

In calamitous times, the security blanket is an apt analogy.

Said UCLA’s Gorney: “People revert to their basic psychological defenses. A security blanket is a psychological defense against anxiety. And, of course, it is not conscious.”

The concept might seem odd to somebody who hasn’t experienced a severe loss. But it is in the small detail of our lives--the odd mementos--that remind us of who we are, giving true meaning to the phrase “sentimental value.”

An elderly woman in Pasadena’s Kinneloa Ranch Estates illustrates the point. Anxiety lined her face and tears wet her eyes as she stood against the brick foundation of what was her home, now merely a receptacle for black and white ash.

But her husband has made a find, and she leans closer to see. It is a small bowl and pitcher with an Oriental motif, blackened by smoke. The woman wades into the rubble to retrieve them, then carefully carries them to the car. She might have been transporting gold.

Mental health experts stress that underlying the trauma is a great sense of loss, even among those who might dismiss the damage as just material possessions, no big deal.

“I don’t think most people realize how important mourning is,” psychologist Lilli Friedland said. “Some people might think this is being overdramatic, but it is not. You need to mourn.”

Claron Oakley, 68, lost everything but a basket of photographs and his camera from the home he had lived in for 35 years in Kinneloa Ranch Estates. He had just stepped out of the shower moments before and knew he would have to run.

Still, he fumbled to unplug a favorite lamp--but was stymied by a tangled cord. The lamp was a treasured memento of his late wife.

His neighbor, Arnold Yasuri, was watering the smoldering embers of the guest house behind his blackened home when he spoke about his parents’ loss. They had just moved into the guest house from Highland Park in the hope of escaping the gang violence.

“They are devastated,” Yasuri said. “They didn’t take as many photographs as they would have liked to. They didn’t think it would be this bad.”

Yasuri, who was forced to evacuate his house, later hiked back up the canyon alone after he and his wife watched on television as their neighborhood burned. Like another neighbor who jogged back up the hillside after police forcibly removed him from his house, Yasuri spent the night bailing water from his pool.

Rosalind Yasuri had grabbed the insurance files, other documents and genealogy records. The dog, a keeshond, also came. Cinder is its name. The irony almost makes Yasuri laugh.

Amid such devastation, there are those who have touched upon some goodness that no fire can destroy.

Even before he and his wife, Pamela Warrick, thought to look for their important documents as they prepared to evacuate their Altadena home, Joel Greenberg was relieved, and touched, to see that she had remembered to pack the ashes of Woody, his black mutt who has been dead six years.

Woody’s photograph adorns science and medicine editor Greenberg’s desk at the Los Angeles Times.

“I think what this says about my wife is that she is extremely understanding of me,” Greenberg said. “I guess in a situation like this, you really realize what is important.”

Diane Lewis knows this, too. She and her husband, John, lost nearly everything when their home burned in Kinneloa Ranch Estates. Gone was the artwork, the family heirlooms and the mortgage business office they operated out of their home. None of it was insured.

“Last night, I made a list of everything I lost in the fire,” Diane Lewis said. “It’s still only stuff. I’m thinking maybe this is an opportunity to make some changes.

“This is like the test of who you really are. What are people going to think about me when I don’t have this beautiful house, the antiques and all the art. And who am I ?

“What you see is what you get,” she said. “This is the real distillation of that concept.”