The Fire Next Time

I am sitting here looking out at the bushy oak trees and the distant ridgelines, thinking how vulnerable I am.

Under normal circumstances, I would think how lucky I am. The scene is bucolic, a joy to behold, with fluffy white clouds drifting over the mountains like a Magritte painting, and a soft wind sweetening the clear air.

Life is like that most of the time in Topanga. The distant song of a coyote on nights as deep and rich as a dream. Days of aloneness on trails as sweet as silence.

But every once in awhile the Santa Anas blow. And every once in a while sirens scream like women in pain, fire climbs up over the ridgelines with doomsday flames, and what had been paradise turns into a vision of hell.

That’s what’s on our minds this fire season in the desert-dry Santa Monicas. The brush grows drier and more deadly every day, feeding the potential for catastrophe that lies just a spark away.

The federal Bureau of Land Managements calls this the worst wildfire season ever for the Western states. Smoke from 79 blazes darkens the skies in Arizona, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oklahoma, Utah, Wyoming and other parts of California.

About 1.5 million acres have already been turned to ashes, and I can’t help but wonder if we’re next.

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Elevating our anxiety, while at the same time preparing us for the worst, is a booklet by Fred Feer being circulated by the Topanga Coalition for Emergency Preparedness. Its title: “Evacuating Topanga: Risks, Choices and Responsibilities.”

Anyone who lives in a brushy area should have a copy. In the 30 years I’ve been among the chaparral, I’ve never seen written material that better explores the choices we have when fire reddens the sky and consumes the world.

The question is basic: Do you stay and fight the flames, risking your life to save your home, or do you leave to save your life and risk your home? The dangers are great if you remain, but to many the very idea of losing a house filled with memories is too much to even consider.

I’ve done both. I stayed in 1982. The first sign of danger came when the Santa Ana winds began pounding like bass drums against our windows, beating warnings into the night. Then sirens, the smell of burning wood and a dark sky turning red.

I stood on our rooftop with a garden hose in my hand, watching heaven-high flames rush down a mountainside just across the canyon. I remember the overheated air, a sky filled with embers and a roar of wind and fire so loud it absorbed me. The flames never reached us and it was a good thing. The hose was a popgun against an army.

It was an experience that stayed with me, and in 1993, remembering it, I chose to leave the path of another angry, roaring, killing brush fire, packing what I could into a car and getting my family out of there. I spent the worst night of my life wondering if firefighters had been able to save our home. They had. I owe them.

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And now, a new season of anxiety. Feer spells out the choices and the dangers that accompany each of them. Also, a group that calls itself Citizens for Aerial Fire Protection is lobbying for the county to buy two SuperScooper firefighting planes, which are now leased annually.

A debate that has always characterized the choices of staying or leaving also includes whether the big, bulky planes are as effective as they’re supposed to be. Water-dropping helicopters, some argue, can get in closer and pinpoint their targets. But SuperScoopers each hold 1,600 gallons of water, compared with helicopters that hold 360 gallons.

As I consider stay versus leave and SuperScooper versus helicopter, I wish I didn’t have to. But I know that soon the Santa Anas will come blowing down off the desert, hot and dry and deadly, sucking moisture from the air and blasting through the canyons with elemental force.

We will wait and listen like children contemplating the end of the world, embraced by an awesome force of nature. And we’ll wonder if there will be fire in the wind again, and what we’ll do if there is.

I walk through the house. I study the pictures, the paintings, the trophies and the mementos gathered over a lifetime. I see the history of our family and I know how transitory it can become in the way of the beast that is fire.

We live small lives and treasure small things. But they represent who we are, and it’s an identity we are loath to abandon. When the next fire comes, and come it will, I have a feeling I’ll be here with my popgun at the ready, wondering at the power and immensity of the enemy I face.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com