Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [64]
Last year, the city I live in caught fire three times. But despite the substantial loss of property, we don’t get much sympathy from the rest of Southern California, because we’re in the famously un-disadvantaged city of Malibu, fabled in story and song, beloved by movie starlets and other natural disasters. When bad things befall us, everyone seems to feel like we had it coming.
The fire that took place around Thanksgiving 2007 was a particular standout for a couple of reasons. For one, it was the first fire in which the newscasters seemed to have held a secret meeting and agreed to use the word “event” as often as humanly possible. Suddenly, the Santa Ana winds were a “wind event” and a “Santa Ana event.” The fire was, of course, a “fire event.” I don’t know what committee decided that the words “fire” and “wind” weren’t descriptive enough on their own and now needed the word “event” to give them more heft, but every time someone repeated that word, it made me wonder what I’d been charged for my tickets and where I needed to go to apply for a refund.
Standing at the window, looking at the sickly sky, I felt like I was in an encore performance of what was becoming an annual situation: wildfire season and its attendant adversities. In 1993, the first time a uniformed fireman came to my door to announce mandatory evacuation, I had already spent the entire night awake, watching aerial shots of iridescent hot spots in the dry grass while listening to the ravings of over-caffeinated, bedraggled reporters proving their mettle by standing on hillsides looking a little too proud of their charcoal-smudged faces and flapping ponchos as they analyzed every glowing ember like it was a plot point in a horror movie. Because I lived alone at the time, it never felt safe to go to sleep for even a second. I sat there exhausted and wired, hour after hour, watching the path of the advancing fire like it was an approaching enemy army or a news update about a maniac escaped from an asylum who was now running wild in my neighborhood. The broadcasts could show me his mug shot, tell me where he had been and who he had already hurt, but not where he was going to show up next.
About eleven o’clock the following morning, there came a knock at my door along with the unexpected sight of a uniformed fireman. “We are suggesting that everyone in your area evacuate at this time,” he said. So I put my four large dogs into my Honda Accord, surrounded by piles of cherished items I had hastily gathered, and drove north on Pacific Coast Highway to nowhere in particular, my fear but a footnote to the ecstasy the dogs were experiencing over the opportunity to ride in the car.
“No, no,” I remember saying as they leapt and bounced with glee, “it’s not a walk. It’s an evacuation.”
“Always so negative! Leave it to you to see the downside of everything,” they yelled back in cheery unison. “Stop nitpicking! We’re going for a ride!”
Only later did I learn that I had been the only resident of my block who had followed instructions and vacated, probably because I was the only woman who lived by herself. Every male head of every household elected to stay behind and pursue the long-cherished dream of protecting the homestead by standing on the roof with a garden hose. No clearer illustration can be found of the way that men have a very different relationship to fire than women, to say nothing of a very different relationship to hoses.
Now here I was again, in a rerun of a situation