November 15, 2008
Water for fire
…listen
…about the musicElegy.
I’m posting watery photos from my life in Malibu and Santa Barbara, to psychically douse the flames that are currently ravaging southern California. The first photo is from my old place at the beach in the Paradise Cove mobile home park, as condolence to the hundreds of people who lost their mobile homes in Sylmar this morning.
Douse the flames.
The second photo was taken from the stern of my sailboat in Santa Barbara a couple of years ago, looking directly into the hills of Montecito, where two of my friends are still waiting to hear whether the home they extensively remodeled with their own hands, sweat and love is still standing among the couple of hundred that are not.
Douse the flames.
And the third photo is an offering of hope. A rainbow over the sea: something in the distance that can’t quite be grasped, yet signifies beauty and calm. Like joy in the midst of grief, we can’t touch it, but we try to remember that it’s there, waiting for us.
Douse the flames. Drench the psyche with hope.
Paul H. Muller said,
November 15, 2008 @ 8:29 pm
Lotta brownish sunshine and smoke in the air here in Ventura County today. Everything to the west was brown last night from the Montecito fire. Really hot too – over 90 deg.
I thought we had burned everything up over the past few years. My daughter in San Diego came within a few minutes of being evacuated last year. But the news is full of fires today and a lot of homes have been lost.
Lisa Hirsch said,
November 16, 2008 @ 11:03 am
I am afraid I have tagged you in the meme of seven.
Glenn Buttkus said,
November 17, 2008 @ 9:45 am
Wow, over 800 homes destroyed as per last night. It seems that California has its Santa Ana winds yearly, and its fires. News said the winds were 90mph and very hot, making it triply difficult to fight the fires. You talked last year of coming close to danger when you lived in Malibu, and then last year your old house burned. Did fires ever threaten you in Paradise Cove? In 1981, in Glendale and Burbank, we had the fires come down off the Verdugo Hills and burn a couple hundred homes; used to sit out in the yard at night watching the huge flames draw closer, a real nightmare. Your prayer, your elegy, is lovely, and as always heart-felt.
Glenn
Alex Shapiro said,
November 17, 2008 @ 9:44 pm
There were a couple of close calls during the five years that I called Paradise Cove my home, but I never had to evacuate– as I did during a harrowing fire in the mid 90’s when I was living a couple of miles down the road.
There was one memorable day when a huge fire was tearing through Simi Valley, considerably over the hills and to the north. Enormous plumes of dark grey smoke wafted straight out to the Pacific. That afternoon, Charles and I went down to the beach restaurant for a beer. As we sat with our toes in the sand, we watched the dark sky above us while viewing the placid and gorgeous ocean at our feet, wishing our L.A. neighbors well. Surreal enough, I’d say, but it got more so.
The impressive water-dropping airplanes were coming in more and more frequently, skimming the sea and scooping up water directly in front of us. It was fascinating to watch. I commented that it was interesting that they’d fly all this way to get water, when I though there was a dam or maybe even Castaic Lake closer by. We watched for a while, and then for no reason at all I got up and walked out to the edge of the water to look behind me toward Simi Valley. Instead, what I saw from that vantage point was more alarming: the canyon just down from ours was on fire! We had no idea; it had just started and amazingly, the planes were right there on top of it. That’s what they were getting the water for!
To make things a tad weirder in La-La land, within minutes of course all the news helicopters began hovering and doing live feeds of the newest wildfire. Malibu is famous for its disaster-cam, new-hungry media swarms, I suppose because of all the celebrities living there. It’s sort of a running joke among the locals, because the media just pounces on anything, large or small that happens there. Well, Charles and I knew that if the wind picked up or shifted to the north, we would need to pack up the house within 30 minutes if not sooner; this fire was CLOSE. And so, we did the surreal: rather than keep an eye on it from the beach where we had a full, clear view of it in “real” life, we opted to walk back to our house and watch the live coverage… on TV!! We realized that we’d get better information on wind direction and fire-fighting progress from the media than we would by simply staring at the thing with our own eyes. Bizarre, but true. What a day.