A Burned Place in the Road

I know that eventually the sun will bleach out the scorched place on the narrow highway. I know that eventually thousands of tires that pass over it will erase its existence and wind will scatter its dusty particles.

But meanwhile, the dark image, spread like a handprint on Topanga Canyon Boulevard, keeps reminding me how fragile life is, fluttering like a butterfly on the edge of time, never far from eternity.

The dark place of which I speak is where Bud and Christina Emerson, two people very much in love, lost their lives four months ago when their motor home overturned and burst into flames.

Fire scorched the surface of the pavement a half-mile from the beach and darkened the earth on either side, leaving the motor home a burned-out shell and ending the lives of the Emersons on a day in spring that should have been too glorious for death.

I had read about the accident, but in L.A.’s canyons, where so many perish through speed or miscalculation, death is no stranger. Small, white crosses on the sides of the highways too often memorialize those who died there.

But I had never encountered the kind of symbol the scorched pavement came to represent. I had passed over it many times after the accident and one day suddenly realized its origin. It began to seem sacrilege to cross it so casually, as though I were violating a burial place.

Two human beings died there with scant notice of either their lives or their deaths, and the big city was rolling over them without a backward glance. I couldn’t let that happen.

*

I came to know them over the following days.

Bud Emerson was 82, Christina 88. They had been married for 56 years and were seldom apart. They owned a small cleaners in Pacific Palisades and traveled the world together from Latin America to the Orient. Their lives were rich and full.

He was a tall, good-humored Texan who loved to ride horses and she was a small, fragile lady who took no guff from her towering husband. “She’d tell him how things should be,” Ruby Hicks says, “and he’d say, ‘OK, OK, OK’ and laugh.”

Hicks is Bud’s sister-in-law. She wonders if he’d suffered a heart attack as their 23-foot motor home began its uphill climb toward the crest of Topanga Canyon on May 3. He had undergone bypass surgery a few years earlier.

The California Highway Patrol doesn’t know exactly what happened. There were no witnesses. Bud was at the wheel when the big vehicle went out of control. Its butane stove may have exploded on impact. The Emersons were trapped inside.

“Their new house had just been completed,” Hicks says, wondering at the cruelty of a fate that gives and takes so easily. “Their home in Malibu had been destroyed in ’93. They were just beginning again.”

Fire was their enemy back then, too.

The Emersons lost everything in the flames that swept through the Santa Monica Mountains from the San Fernando Valley to the ocean in a firestorm that ignited the very air and set palm trees burning like tiki torches in the wind.

But they vowed to build again, and Bud told a reporter that next time they’d make it through. “All we need,” he said, “is luck.”

*

The lives of the Emersons unfolded before me like a blossoming rose. I could feel their closeness. I could hear Christina’s gentle scolding of her big, noisy man. I could hear Bud shouting, “We came to ride, let’s ride!”

“He used to say that all the time,” Bruce Bailey says. “It was his favorite expression.” He repeats it softly now. “We came to ride.”

Bailey was Bud’s best friend. They were both members of the Santa Monica Mountains Mounted Police and had known each other for 40 years.

On the day the Emersons died, that day of sunlight and promise, they had been on their way to the Peter Pitchess Honor Rancho in Castaic to join in a fund-raising ride against drugs.

“Someone was bringing Bud’s horse and we were going to ride in the hills around the county jail,” Bailey says. “We waited and waited but Bud never came.”

Nature has a way of dealing with evidence of calamity. Flood waters recede, wildflowers bloom in scorched earth, winds drive storm clouds away. And so it will be with that dark imprint on the pavement where Bud and Christina Emerson died.

This column too will fold into the openings that time allows and be gone with the days that erase the burned place in the road. But it satisfies me at least to have given some substance to their dying and to have shaped the memory of two good people who drove into fate’s way on a sunny morning in spring.

Al Martinez can be reached through the Internet at al.martinez@latimes.com