One Resident Sees Fire as a Part of Laguna’s Beauty

It’s Saturday morning and, judging by the view outside the window at the office, the Grand Cinematographer has slipped one of those lens filters into the camera in the hope of creating a dramatic mood swing.

He’s succeeded.

Instead of the bright sunshine we take as a Southern California birthright, a rare orange-yellow overlay that seems as picturesque as it is ominous hangs over the county. Not to mention the flecks of white ash wafting in the breeze.

Just wondering: Is the end of the world near?

Probably not. It’s just that we aren’t accustomed to change around here, especially in the color of the sky. So when fires burn as intensely and over as wide an area as they have been in recent days in the eastern mountains, they bring their own color-coded reality.

And, in a quirk of anniversary timing, the surreal visuals take us back exactly 10 years ago when fire swept through the hills above and around Laguna Beach and, for a few frantic and superheated hours, had some people thinking the community was going under.

It didn’t, but hundreds of people returned to their homes to find them gone. On that day, if they hadn’t already appreciated what it means to live in a place like Laguna Beach -- with its beauty and its hazards -- they did then.

One who didn’t need to learn the lesson was Jeffrey Powers, then 43. He had a 1929-vintage home on a knoll with a panoramic view. His house survived the fire’s first rush but, probably ignited by an ember, caught fire a few hours later and burned to the ground, leaving behind only a 24-inch-tall white-ash mock-up of what had been a 1,700-square-foot home.

Eighteen months later, Powers had rebuilt the house on the same spot. Far from traumatizing him, he says today, the fire deepened his sense of the awesome potential of the forces at work in a place like Laguna Beach.

“I love its beauty and I love the natural dynamic,” he says of the community and its relationship with nature. “There’s a real appreciation, a reverence and awe from living in this. I’m standing here and all I can see is chaparral and dry shrubbery for miles and miles out toward the canyon and I’m seeing ash as we speak raining down in front of the window. It’s awesome.”

In a very real way, Powers says, the hazards of fire and flood intensify the magnitude of its other aesthetic pleasures. That is, he says, they’re all part of the cycle of life here.

And that’s why there will be no haunted flashbacks on the 10th anniversary of losing his house, even as he recalls flames that were 30 feet high and 60 feet from his doorstep that day.

“It’s a joy,” he says about living in Laguna Beach. “What makes it a very real experience to live here is just watching nature’s beauty throughout the seasons, in all its dynamics. And part of that is fire and flood.”

So when Powers matter-of-factly says “Southern California burns,” he means that as part of the natural order of things. He had seen fire in the hills in other years before the big one came, and as a teenager he’d hosed hot embers on the roof of his family’s Villa Park house as it was threatened.

No one with that history talks about the wonders of living in a dry canyon in a semi-arid climate and complains about fire hazards.

So, Powers will keep an eye out for danger this weekend but not cower. To better protect against another disaster, he did what he could when he rebuilt his house -- but knows there are no foolproof defenses.

Perhaps that’s why, as we’re talking, he describes the sun’s rays pouring into his living room, shining on the couches and chairs.

It was a bright, beautiful red. The scene, he says, is a thing of beauty.

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Dana Parsons can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or dana.parsons@latimes.com.