All the way into my thirties the smell of wood smoke in the night would always wake me up suddenly. Maybe not exactly a case of PTSD, but nonetheless weird - like waking up in a sudden start from a nightmare.
I don’t like fires, fireplaces, and probably, most of all, I dred chopping wood. Ok. I grew up in a wood heated house. Before I was 16, I had already chopped, hauled, and stacked my lifetime’s share of firewood.
I’d also hauled the block and bricks and mixed the mortar and concrete to build a couple of large fireplaces before middle school.
Call Me a Tin Woodsman
There is nothing romantic about wood fires for me. I will freely admit that my ambivalence towards romantic nights by a roaring fire never made my wife all that happy. I only put up with a fire in our family’s fireplace on Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve.
As that famous Eagles’ song says, “You got your reasons.”
Speaking of 1973 rock anthems and the current goings on in LA – we might want to consider that Deep Purple hit…
Smoke on the Water Fire in the Sky
Maybe that makes sense? Smoke on the Water was written about a Frank Zappa and Mothers of Invention concert that got way out of hand. A fan with a flare gun started a fire that burned down a famous casino and venue on Lake Geneva.
I grew up hyper conscious of Southern California Santa Ana winds that we hear too much about these days. I survived a couple of major wildfires in elementary school.
I grew up in the mountains behind Santa Barbara in Southern California on a decent sized chunk of chapparal covered land next to one of our nation’s National Forests. My parents both claimed that I discovered the building site that we built our house on by crawling around under that brush.
I learned later on that if you are going downhill it is faster and easier to travel on top of the brush. Just watch out for the cliffs and other sharp drop-offs. Somewhere brush skiing probably is a sport like creek running.
If You Build It - It Will Burn
My father built our house with his own hands. I recall cleaning the foundation ditches for that house when I was five. I already mentioned our fireplace building. Rural “housework” was an inescapable daily family effort.
When I was 7 or 8 the Forest Service and the County Sheriff arrived one smoky night to burn our house to the ground.
“Aren’t these folks supposed to be there to save our house?”
Nope. Not exactly. Sadly, I learned that young that burning houses spread wildfires better than anything else in or near a National Forrest. The authorities were there to eliminate a problem. An armed man, his wife, and their three little children sitting on our front step were in the way. Our kiddy presence certainly helped dissuade them.
Earlier that same night, I’d already watched more than one distant neighbor’s house literally explode as the wind-driven, 50-100 foot flames approached. These house combustions have nothing to do with natural gas or propane tanks in case you don’t know.
Fire doesn’t care. Fuel is fuel.
Those same authorities returned a couple of years later on another fire night to try again.
Luckily for all concerned both times the wind changed while all the armed men talked things over. I recognize that probably these days our powers that be in CA would just call SWAT. Things were maybe a little more neighborly back then in our backwoods. The men who talked it all over knew each other by name. Most of them had seen a war or two.
Our Right of Spring
Each year our family spent every weekend from late February through June clearing our land so our house might have a small chance to survive such a fire. My father’s often stated goal was to do better than the average 30-year survival mark for mountain houses. In the end our house didn’t quite make that.
I learned the names of those friendly Rangers who looked in on our work. They were there to protect the National Forrest. Fire fighters were my heroes, and you could talk to them. My parents took food and drink to the fire crews when the command and deployment centers were reachable.
I handed a Styrofoam cup of soup or coffee to the first convict I ever met.
When We Live on the Mountain
Many of the people I knew as a child lost a house once and some even twice. One of my parent’s better friends had one fire hop over his Mountain Drive adobe house a number of times. His roof and house finally burned on that fire’s last big night.
One night coming home late from the store, my father and I caught our nearest neighbor trying to burn his own house down with his wife inside. The man tried set fire to the hillside below his house with a can of gas. Lucky for her and us it had rained recently.
The man pled guilty to attempted arson and insurance fraud.
He was not charged with attempted murder.
As one might guess his wife refused to bail him out, divorced him, and moved out of state after she sold the house.
Our House was a Very Very Fine House
Our house vaporized in minutes in another Santa Ana powered wildfire years after I was grown and married. Parts of those fireplaces actually melted. The entire property that then included many large trees was reduced to nothing but a few inches of ash. The place looked like the surface of the Moon.
Thankfully, my family had sold the house and we had all moved on. All of my childhood neighbors lost their houses and everything they owned that day. Only an act of God and a last-minute change of wind direction saved one of the wealthiest parts of Santa Barbara from becoming like the present-day Pacific Palisades and Altadena.
A couple of people died trying to run away from that one.
For many people the idea that everything burns and/or floods in California every 30 to 40 years simply cannot be possible. Sadly, it is.
We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know
These facts are not new nor are these fires the result of climate change. Literally, I learned about this in kindergarten. Many if not most of the native plants in the Southern California chaparral brush depend on generational fires to thrive.
I tell people these stories and I know most folks think I made this stuff up. No matter what we want, stories, pictures, and even videos cannot and do not do real justice or provide the actual context of the lived experience.
However, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.
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