Rebuilding in the Season of Smoke

There are places in America, even in California, that welcome the fragrance of smoke on an autumn day. This is not one of them.

To smell smoke up here, in the canyons and ridges that ripple at the feet of the San Gabriels, is to smell fear. Smoke smells like wakeful nights and fretful days; it smells like memory, and loss. Two years ago this week, smoke and fire overflowed the ravines and crests of the Pasadena neighborhood of Kinneloa, between Altadena and Sierra Madre. Trees and houses exploded like bursts of artillery fire. Now there is bird song, and the tattoo of carpenters’ hammers, the grind of cement mixers and the soprano of power saws. New houses rise; so too, does renewed vigilance, for it is autumn, the season of smoke.

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The good news was that there hadn’t been a big fire in these parts in maybe 30 years. Of course, everybody laughed uneasily, that was the bad news, too. Pepper Tibbet heard that for most of the 25 years she lived in Kinneloa, in a redwood and glass-brick house that seemed so much a part of the landscape that it could have been grown, not built.

There was a fire hydrant at the bottom of their driveway and a fire station at the bottom of the hill: “We figured they’d rush right up the hill and save us.” When all those years of luck ran out, so did the water, and the power, and now Bert and Pepper Tibbet are living in a friend’s trailer until the insurance money comes through to build here again.

California poet Robinson Jeffers wrote of brush fires: “The deer were bounding like blown leaves under the smoke in front of the raging wave of the brush fire. . . . Beauty is not always lovely; the fire was beautiful . . . the sky was merciless blue and the hills merciless black.”

A drive through Kinneloa is a tour of a beautiful, merciless place. Among the seared oaks, the foliage is back, and the deer have followed. Wind flirts through the pampas grass, green spurts from the branch-ends of scorched trees. In front of one burned-out lot, a whole spiral staircase, rusted to oxblood color, lies like a spinning top. Here and there are cement foundations grown through with weeds, mere slabs, such as one finds in a trailer park raptured away by a tornado.

Those are the despair cases, whose owners have left for the city, the beach, Montana. Through the dusty oleanders, you can see the risk-takers’ handiwork. The wooden framing of a new house rises like a copse of squared yellow tree trunks. Perhaps half of the 126 burned-away buildings in this fire area are in some stage of revival. New stucco glares in the sun. Mediterranean and Tudor and Cape Cod houses with flame-defying roofs look bright and huge among the low-set, mature houses spared from the fire.

Do not envy those who are handed a check and told, now you can rebuild your life. They wanted what they had before, and they can’t have it. The Tibbets’ old house had too much exposed wood, and long eaves that hung like straw over a struck match. New building codes are in force, new seismic standards. Driveways must be wide enough for firetrucks; otherwise, sprinkler systems are required.

Bill Hazen built his own house 35 years ago. The floor plan of the new one is identical, only the rooms are bigger. The old driveway, poured two months before the fire and still edged by charred footings, flows perfectly to the new house.

The Hazens move back next week to an interior as spare as some of their neighbors’--a table and chairs, a bed, patio chaises. There is no pleasure in trying to furnish in a few weeks what took decades to fill. They don’t make it in that color anymore, they don’t make it in that size, they don’t make it, period. It isn’t that the new refrigerator is different from the old one, it’s the Christmas cards and grade-school artwork all over it--gone. It isn’t the shelving that is hard to replace, it’s the books and bibelots that filled it, that in one morning turned to ashes underfoot.

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Kinneloa, Malibu, Laguna Beach are places at the edge, built on risk and bravado. And edges break, edges burn.

A few weeks ago, when a county worker’s acetylene torch set off a small fire up the hill, it was like a dress rehearsal, or a rerun. Spouses were summoned. Residents stood ready with foam or fire extinguishers or an evacuation drill. Bert Tibbet helped a neighbor wrestle with a swimming pool firefighting pump. They struggled to hook it up, laughing helplessly at their ineptness and desperation.

Down the hill, at the family-owned nursery, his son, Lance, heard the helicopters. He hears, really hears them now. They sound “kind of creepy, like ‘Apocalypse Now,’ coming in low, with Wagner playing.” His mother pricks up her ears at the rumbling passings of firetrucks.

Vigilance is honed. A neighbor phoned the fire department, worried that another neighbor hadn’t adequately cleared the underbrush. The day I was in Kinneloa, the season’s first fires were being put out in Fontana; the haze of smoke from other people’s misfortune was perceptible. Below Kinneloa, firetrucks cruised solemnly as if, like policemen on the beat, they could frighten fire into behaving.