Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

Clear-eyed wisdom comes easier from a distance. Consider, for example, wildfires. Almost every summer a big fire will light up some California mountain or sea canyon. People in the fire’s path grab what they can and bolt, stopping only to stammer into the microphones about the treasures left behind to burn. “That was my life in there,” they moan, pointing for the camera as their house blazes away.

Eventually the fire is extinguished, the firetrucks roll out and the insurance adjusters roll in. The whole ritual can, to the detached, sage eye, seem almost silly. Why this fuss over one more fire? What did these people expect, living where they do? And, yes, it’s sad to see these charred keepsakes, but are they truly worth the tears? Forget the old dishes and snapshots. Weep for the taxpayers who must underwrite that steak-devouring, gas-guzzling, firefighting army.

See. Easy wisdom. Except.

Except today the place in the fire’s path is not some distant dateline but a mountain community where generations of my family have spent summers. That evacuee interviewed on the radio, faltering a bit as she describes the chaotic decisions over what to carry out--she is my sister. And how could she have left behind the blurry snapshot on the kitchen wall, the one of me taking my daughter on her first canoe ride? And those fire crews pouring in from across the West--today it seems they couldn’t get here too soon.

*

Huntington Lake sits high in the Sierra, about 50 miles east of Fresno. It is a man-made lake, created in the early 1900s to generate hydroelectric power for Los Angeles. There’s not much here, a few rustic resorts and summer camps, some campgrounds and a few hundred cabins. Not too many Californians know about it, which does not exactly bother those who do.

My dad and I drove up here Monday, keeping watch all the way on thick columns of smoke that rose up from the mountains ahead. The fire had been burning for five days. It was started when a squirrel shorted a power line down below the dam, near the town of Big Creek. Now we weren’t sure what to expect at the top. The deputies who evacuated my sister had told her to pack like she’d never be back. Other cabin owners had been calling my dad. Some grieved openly for what they assumed had been lost. All seemed shocked that this could happen here, to this mountain, their mountain. My dad had adopted the language of a stoic.

“If it burns,” he said as we wound around the lake toward our tract, “it burns. We will rebuild. Why get excited? It’s just wood.”

My father, the reader should know, is a terrific salesman. He’s moved everything from DDT to adjustable-rate mortgages. And as he repeated his lines about staying calm, taking what fate delivers, wasting no tears on a pile of lumber, it occurred to me that, understandably enough, he was giving himself a sales job. Because the smoke was everywhere, and the wind was up, and the lake was abandoned, taken over by fire crews. Nothing looked good. We turned up the last road toward the cabin in silence, and I think a little smoke got in both our eyes.

“It is,” my dad said at last, “kind of eerie, isn’t it?”

*

That was Monday. By now, as I write on Tuesday, the suspense is over. Our cabin made it. All the cabins made it. Big Creek made it. The smoke has begun to thin. Nothing was burned but 5,000 acres of trees and brush, and they needed a thinning anyway. Still, this was a close one. It’s easy to see. Right behind our cabin runs a crude fire line hacked by a bulldozer in the worst of the fight. Black cinders cover the porch and roof. If the wind had kept up . . .

In the paper today, the cost of fighting this fire was reported to have exceeded $4.5 million. Money well spent, I’d say. And I’ll say it again when it is spent, as it will be spent, on some other mountain, in some other canyon. Hallelujah. The boy’s got religion. And so what if wiser heads call it silly, all this carrying on about some fire, some family cabin, some fuzzy snapshot?

I am looking again at the picture on the kitchen wall. It shows a man and a baby girl in a green canoe. He is paddling. She seems to be studying him, happy. Three years old, it was something new and wonderful to her then, at that moment in her life, on this lake. Someday it might mean something to her, as much as it means to me today. At any rate, it’s still here.