Magnificent Desolation_ The Long Journey Home From the Moon - Buzz Aldrin [117]
As the fires crept closer, Emerald Bay’s volunteer fire department issued an evacuation order. Lois’s secretary left immediately. Lois needed to evacuate, as well. The sky was dark, and Lois knew that fires were raging in Laguna Canyon; yet, she wasn’t too concerned or afraid. She assumed the danger was still a good distance away. But when she opened the front door that faced up the hill, she saw huge waves of flames widely surging over the top of the ridge, heading straight toward our home. The fire was only about six streets up from where Lois stood, dangerously close to the highest tier of hillside homes, moving fast, and consuming everything in its path.
Lois grabbed a large box of memorabilia that we had recently filled with some of my more precious items, including some of the envelopes that we had taken to the moon, signed by Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and me, and some stamped envelopes that we had arranged to have canceled on the day of our lunar landing. Originally, my fellow astronauts and I had signed these “first day cover” envelopes as a sort of “insurance policy” for our families. When we went to the moon in 1969, NASA had no extra insurance built into its program to cover our families should anything catastrophic happen to us, so, as morbid as it might sound, we signed some of the envelopes and left them behind. Others we actually took with us to the moon. Upon our safe return, we split up all the envelopes between us and signed each other’s while in quarantine. For some reason, rather than keeping the valuable treasures in a safe deposit box in a bank vault, Lois and I had simply put them in a box in the closet “for safekeeping.”
When it came time to escape the fires, Lois didn’t look for money, jewelry, or clothing. She left with only the clothes she was wearing and the one box containing the precious items that had flown all the way to the moon and back. She drove to the Balboa Bay Club where she was a member and could stay in one of the Bay Club rooms for the night.
More than fourteen fires raged around Los Angeles and Orange County Not one had yet been brought under control, despite firefighters using helicopters to dump huge loads of water and planes to drop chemical fire retardant. The flames burned all around our home, too, gutting expensive houses only a few yards away.
The following day, Lois awakened not knowing whether our home had survived. Logic told her to expect the worst, but she continued to hope for the best. That afternoon, Lois received a call from Stone Philips, a reporter from NBC’s Dateline. Stone asked if he could pick her up the next morning and take her to Laguna to tour the region and do an interview for Dateline in some of the burned-out areas. Lois wasn’t thrilled about being on nationwide TV without makeup and in the same casual clothes she had been wearing the day before, but it was an opportunity to check on our home, so she agreed. No vehicles were allowed on the Pacific Coast Highway except those of firefighters and reporters. Once they entered Emerald Bay, to her great relief Lois saw that our home was still standing, with only a bit of roof damage. The two houses next to ours were burned down completely, but our home, with the rest of my Apollo 11 moon paraphernalia inside, was intact.
I arrived back in California the following evening, and met Stone Philips and Lois at our home. He wanted to film me being greeted by Lois with the good news that the house was okay. Our home had been saved, we learned,