Some Flames Are Best Seen From an Armchair

You never forget your first brush fire.

The way the acrid smoke infuses your clothes and hair and lingers for days. The way the heat washes over you as you watch the flames leap over new subdivisions and freeways, the way the wind shoves the firestorm over the mountains across the canyons all the way to the water line. The way the animals dart from the brush into unfamiliar streets, fur smoking, feathers fluttering as they skitter to the ground in a deathly dance. The way the panic-stricken residents scream obscenities at you for taking notes when their houses are about to go up or your guilty desolation in response. The way you huddle in the photographer’s car, terrified you will asphyxiate, as a blizzard of ashes swirls outside and the fire roars past your puny little self on its way to the sea.

You never forget, either, the stunning relief that enfolds you when the fire passes, the noise stops, when you can breathe again, nor the roar of adrenaline that extinguishes your fatigue the minute you sit down to your deadline.

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It is fire season again, the first blazes having started where they usually do: in the scrubby canyons where the counties of Los Angeles and Ventura meet, and in the tinder-rich areas of Orange County.

Probably every reporter around here can tell a brush fire tale or two. Some can tell scores. And what most would agree on, I’d guess, is that despite the tragedy, the suffering and the all-too-real cost, fire stories get to be familiar after awhile. Change the dates, change the details, but the story line doesn’t vary much. The fire that started two days ago in Calabasas and burned to Malibu followed roughly the path of the fire that burned from Canoga Park to Malibu in 1982 and the one that burned from Agoura to Malibu in 1978.

Each time the ashes are borne across town by the Santa Anas, and every time the sky is clarified by wind but redolent of smoke, I think of my first brush fire.

I was a newly minted reporter in 1982, months into my first job at a newspaper north of Los Angeles. We were rounded up, the tiny news staff of the Ventura County Star-Free Press, on Saturday, Oct. 9. It was a day very much like Monday of this week, the sort of day when the winds blow hard and the sky finally proves what is often taken on faith: No matter how well the smog erases the contours of our geography, we live among foothills and mountains and brush and we are vulnerable.

On that day in 1982, it became apparent that a brush fire originating in a place near the western edge of the San Fernando Valley--Dayton Canyon--was heading south, and fast, for Malibu. Propelled by 60-mph winds, the fire would burn through 54,000 acres in 12 hours. Twenty-four houses and 39 mobile homes would burn. At the same time, a fire in the Anaheim Hills would consume 18,000 acres and devour 17 homes.

Most people who were not directly involved, if they remember the particulars of the Dayton Canyon fire at all, might recall it as the one that claimed a chunk of Paradise Cove, where the fictional TV detective Jim Rockford lived, or as the one that destroyed the outdoor set of the TV series M*A*S*H in Malibu Creek State Park.

This, and the inevitable puzzled speculation about the grip such a calamity-prone place has on its residents, is why a fire in Malibu is always national news.

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For my first brush fire, I was assigned to accompany a laid-back photographer to the point where the flames would probably jump the Ventura Freeway, a place called Liberty Canyon. Later, a deputy L.A. County fire chief would tell a reporter that one thing he’d learned from the 1978 Malibu fire was that as soon as the flames broach the 101, you deploy firefighters along Pacific Coast Highway, 12 miles away. Then you try to guess as fast as you can where it will hit.

As the photographer and I neared the blaze, which was hopscotching a subdivision of fancy homes, he simply pointed the car to where the smoke was blackest and thickest and drove.

“What are you doing?” I demanded.

“I’m covering a fire,” he replied. Smiling. Delighted.

A self-conscious cub, I was too afraid to show my fear. But my insides were goo.

The photographer shepherded me through the fire. He told me when to get back in the car when the flames bore down on us, why we didn’t need to worry when I knew for a fact that we were going to suffocate. He sympathized with me after the wife of a man who let me use his phone screamed that I was horrible and subhuman for calling my editor when flames were licking at her backyard.

This photographer also happens to work at the Times now. His name is Bob Carey, he still has a penchant for wildfires, and on Monday afternoon, he drove out to Malibu and waited to meet the blaze. For the next 16 hours, until 6 a.m. Tuesday, he roamed the coast highway in search of great art.

I thought about what it would be like to cover a brush fire again with Bob. So I stayed in the office and watched it on TV.

* Robin Abcarian’s column appears on Sundays and Wednesdays. Readers may write to her at the Los Angeles Times, Life & Style, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, CA 90053.