Fire in the Wind

I heard from my sister Emily in Oakland again. Her telephone calls follow disaster the way pimples follow chocolate. This time it was the Topanga fire.

She said the reason we were spared was because she prayed for us from 1:45 p.m. until 7:32 p.m. the day the fire began. That wasn’t easy, because Emily has bad knees.

It was a record session. She hasn’t prayed for me that much since I ate ant poison when I was 2 years old.

“I’d have prayed for Malibu, too,” she said, “but I don’t know anyone there. Anyhow, they’re different.”

It is Emily’s perception that because celebrities live along the golden shore, everyone in Malibu is rich and famous and can have elegant homes built for them at the snap of their tapered fingers.

The truth is that it is mostly populated by people with mortgages who worry about car payments and doctor bills and whether or not their children are healthy and smart.

They have dogs that bark and annoy the neighbors and cats that scratch the furniture and washing machines that break down when there isn’t an extra cent in the house.

Some of them are celebrities. But a firestorm is a great equalizer. Ali MacGraw lost pictures in the flames that destroyed her home. Sean Penn lost mementos of his past.

Walk their streets of disaster and you soon realize it doesn’t matter who or what the victims were. Fire in the wind defies class standing. Ashes bear faint trace of status.

*

Topanga was lucky this time. Although some homes were lost, most weren’t. We’re grateful for that, of course--and for Emily’s novena--but there is a sense of uneasiness to the gratitude.

It stems from a feeling that Topanga, as one local put it, was nothing more than an “inhabited firebreak” between Malibu’s Pepperdine University and the upscale coastal community of Castellammare that lies to the east of Topanga Canyon Boulevard.

If you watched the television reports, you heard great details on the status of Pepperdine, which was only slightly threatened, and even greater details on the danger to Castellammare if the flames leaped the boulevard.

What rankled Topangans were comments repeated over television that, when the fire was finally held to the west side of the boulevard, the worst was over . . . even though a shift in the wind was driving the flames toward us.

Sadly, it was mostly L.A. city officialdom, including the mayor and the fire chief, who were mouthing these idiocies, as though their interest in life and property ended at the city border. To hell with the rest of us.

Fortunately, that feeling did not prevail among those who were actually in the mountains fighting a nightmare that crawled over the tops of the ridges behind Fernwood and to the south of Joe’s Market and down Old Topanga Canyon Road.

The firefighters were magnificent. They stood in the face of the firestorm like soldiers of a last brigade, a thin, brave line between disaster and salvation, holding off the end of the world.

If there exists a grand moment in chaos, it is the reality of what some will risk to save others in the face of an enemy that can kill in a dozen different ways. That image will last a long time.

*

In addition to praying for my survival, my sister Emily has recently added a P.S. to her supplication. She is praying that I’ll move out of the canyon.

Her prayers reached new heights of passion after Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt said, as we burned, that no one should live in the mountains anyhow.

“ Now are you going to move?” Emily wanted to know. Her tone indicated that if I did not, she might lead me out by the ear.

I said I had no intention of moving, even though I feared for a time I would have no home to move from. If the house had burned down, I would have rebuilt on the spot. If it burned again, I would rebuild again.

There is a quality to the Santa Monica Mountains that lowlanders don’t understand. Position has nothing to do with it. Prestige is not a factor.

What counts are the quiet nights and misty mornings; the long, lonely wail of a coyote; the sudden appearance of a deer or a bobcat; the slow circling of a red-tailed hawk.

There is a lure to Topanga that transcends danger. We are an integral part of nature here, absorbing nutrients of the spirit that feed our intention to remain where coyotes call.

We know that time will heal the land, and when it does, we’ll still be here. You can stop praying now, Emily. We’ve survived again.