I used to live there. I never much cared for it and, even now, there’s only a handful of places I’ll spare when the great quake comes: the city of San Francisco, the town of Santa Barbara where my son was born, the town where my parents live, my brother Scott’s living room (just so long as he kept serving sushi and gin & tonics), a particular parking lot in Anaheim (although I expect it’s long gone by now, alas), and a small stretch by the ocean called Summerland.
But that’s about it.
I can remember the hot desert winds, the Santa Anas, that used to blow. They pulled the mositure out of everything, dried you to the bone. When the Santa Anas blew, my mother would get nervous. We used to live in the hills (seems like half of California lives in the hills) and when the winds blew, they brought fire with them.
Here in Michigan last week, a warm wind was blowing and it reminded me of the Santa Anas. I was telling a friend about them and missed an opportunity to quote Raymond Chandler…
There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot, dry, Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that, every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen.
Once, when I was in junior high, I went to a friend’s house for the weekend. On Saturday morning we went over to his dad’s office to play the original text-based Adventure game on a mainframe computer. We spent eight hours inside and, at the end of the day, we went out to find the whole horizon blanketed with thick dark clouds, glowing red in the sunset. We went to dinner and then a movie, getting home late.
When we got home, my friend’s dad turned on the news to find out the football scores.
The hills were burning.
There was helicopter footage, neighborhoods ringed in fire. I recognized my street. I could see my house. There were people on the roof hosing it down, smoke billowing around them. The footage was from the afternoon, hours old.
This was long before cell phones, no way to reach us all day or all night. I’d been playing computer games. My friend’s parents called home to find out that, miraculously, everything was fine. The fire had come within one hundred yards of our house and then the winds shifted.
The next morning my parents came and picked me up, telling me of their adventure (in my mother’s world — and in mine, I suppose — every crisis becomes manageable if you can make it into an adventure). They woke up to the threat of fires, the fire department coming round to warn people. May parents were ordered to evacuate once the fire got within a certain distance. My dad said no, he’d stay to water down the roof. He told my mother to pack up some things (family pictures and other irreplaceables) and head out. She packed but then refused to leave him alone.
Meanwhile my brother Jim, who was living in Huntington Beach at the time, was trying to get through police blockades to get up to my parents’ house. The fire department wouldn’t let him through so he drove, in his beat up Karmen Ghia, across miles of dirt roads and fields, to get to Mom and Dad.
We drove back through the canyon towards home. They warned me ahead of time but I wasn’t prepared for the gradual shift from brown, dry hills and dusty trees, the slow hint of blackened soil here and there, moving like a cancer to cover everything in mottled charcoals.
It must have only taken months for things to grow back, for the scorched earth to be erased. But after that weekend, whenever I looked at the grassy hills, all I could see was fire-blackened earth waiting below the grass and brush.
I can remember the hot winds, the fire season. When there were fires anywhere in California, we’d get calls from family back east asking if we were okay — even when the fires were hundres of miles away.
They’d seen it on the news, grandparents and aunts and cousins, and they had assumed that when the anchors said “California is burning…” it meant all of California.
Now, safe in the midwest, I hear that California is burning . . . California is still burning.
And I resist the urge to reach for the phone…