The Scent of Danger Is Blowing in the Wind

I was up on the roof the other day sniffing the wind when I noticed someone across the way also sniffing the wind. Later, down the block, I saw a third person, a woman, on her roof sniffing the wind.

The practice of wind-sniffing isn’t another nutty Topanga ritual having to do with ancient Chumash traditions, overflowing septic tanks or efforts to contact alien spacecraft, although they are frequently seen hovering over Joe’s Market.

Wind-sniffing is an event that occurs every fire season, which is almost all the time these days, but it becomes absolutely necessary when the heat is high, humidity low and fires are bursting out all over. We’re sniffing to determine if they’re near.

Experts tell us that this is the worst fire season since 1887 or maybe 1961, depending on which expert is speaking, due to the driest rainy season since then. Not that we are blase about this, but we are told almost every year that we are in the midst of the worst fire season since (fill in a date here).

When the storms of El Nino raked the Southland, experts warned that because of the rapid growth of everything that grows, the following year would be the worst fire season on record. That’s because everything that grows also dries, creating more fire fuel.

Due to the confusion of those who predict things like rain, fire and winners at the Kentucky Derby, we are always on the alert in the Santa Monica Mountains, tucked in, as we are, among grass and chaparral and trees that explode like tiki torches.

Many of us live in all-wood houses, and some even have shake roofs, both of which are almost as dangerous in a fire season as living in one of those grass shacks in certain parts of Botswana.

I mention this today because fires are beginning to break out in various parts of Southern California. Los Angeles, Riverside, Ventura, Orange and San Diego counties have already smelled the smoke and heard sirens screaming like women in peril through their hills and their neighborhoods.

One observer described a fire just south of Riverside by saying that moments after it began, “It shot up like a blowtorch.”

That’s an accurate description of many brush fires which, given the right conditions, suddenly explode into flames and roar through hills and homes, dwarfing the efforts of the men and equipment we throw into the fight against them.

I’m a great admirer of firefighters and always have been, even before their heroics at the World Trade Center. I’ve seen them walk into billows of smoke so dense that only the twisting reds and yellows of the fire itself were visible. And I’ve seen them stand in the face of the flames, pouring water on a monster that seemed almost alive.

Fire is high drama, involving all of the senses at the same time. It roars, crackles and explodes against the background of sirens, the whomp-whomp-whomp of helicopters overhead and the growl of air tankers skimming over the burning hills.

All of this is mesmerizing theater for those who stop to stare at flames as high as heaven coming toward them through the rolling clouds of smoke, creating their own storms, demanding the land and all that occupies it.

Wind-sniffers can never forget the firestorms of 1993 that burned 1,241 structures and 197,225 acres of trees and brush in Southern California, killing three people in Topanga who tried to outrun or outthink the blast-furnace flames.

Wildfires roared from the valley to the sea with incredible speed, turning much of Malibu into heaps of charred debris where homes had once stood, leaving only chimneys, stone walls and soot-blackened swimming pools.

Dick Riordan, that foolish man, stood in Pacific Palisades, where the southern edge of the fire had been stopped, and grinned his great pleasure at the fact that it had not burned into the city of Los Angeles, while the rest of the hills were in flames. One wonders occasionally why God, who gave New York Rudy Giuliani, has saddled L.A. with the Riordans and the Little Jimmy Hahns.

It was after I had watched television reports of fires burning throughout Southern California the other day that I climbed onto the roof where it dips almost to the ground, and sniffed the air for the wind-drifted aroma of burning wood. I saw others doing the same, and there we stood like aging sentinels in a battleground of hard memories. As I looked around, I flashed back to that day nine years ago when flames clawed over ridgelines to the west and bore down on us with teeth bared. I remember standing there with a garden hose, embers falling around me, and thinking how pathetic I was against so awesome a force of nature.

Why live in an area susceptible to wildfires? For nights as peaceful as Eden. For the morning mist that creeps over the hills and into the canyons. For the howl of a coyote and the hoot of an owl. All those things and more. Life is a constant trade-off. Peril for peace, months of serenity for a few days of terror.

So I sniff the wind. I watch the ridgelines. I listen for sirens. And I wait.

Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. He is at al.martinez@latimes.com