Three Perspectives on Our Days and...

Night is the worst time in a brush fire.

Flames dance in the Santa Anas like ballerinas from hell, etching red trails along the face of the steep terrain, as bright as neon against the mountainsides.

You stand on your rooftop and watch them spin over the ridgeline under billows of smoke as high as heaven, while sirens wail into the darkness like things in pain.

There is only one reality in a night fire, and that’s the reality of flames coming at you with terrible power and beauty, fat from the timber of homes two canyons away and from chaparral spread like a feast for devils across the Santa Monicas.

Everything else is confusion and rumor, brought by neighbors and by an electronic media trying to define a calamity no one even understands. Is Fernwood burning? Is Red Rock gone? Is the whole world afire?

I live in Topanga, at this moment an island of miracles in a sea of flames.

Somehow we have been spared, at least till now. I can look out the window to a sky that is flawlessly blue, to oak trees as green as emeralds.

But I know the small, square view through the glass is a sham, because I can hear the helicopters and the fixed-wing aircraft as they plow through the smoky sky, and trucks that bring bulldozers to the park entrance at our back door.

I can smell the smoke of burning trees that drifts on the wind tides.

Make no mistake this deceptive Wednesday, there is still fire in the mountains, and a fear in our hearts.

My wife, Cinelli, and I have lived here for 22 years and we have survived other fires that have danced to our doorstep. But last night was a nightmare beyond measure.

I felt for the first time that our house of love and memories would be taken by a fire that had already consumed more than 200 homes from Calabasas to Malibu.

With fire on a ridgeline less than two miles away and the Santa Anas swirling through the oak trees, I said a silent goodby last night to images that flashed through my mind in fast-forward:

My son, still a baby, asleep in an upstairs bedroom; a daughter riding her horse, hair flying in the breeze, along a summer trail; grandchildren running like sun sprites across the gold-hued tile; the family at Christmas in a small, happy calamity of our own.

I tried to perceive with tears in my eyes how it would be to return to the ashes of these memories at some later day, after the fire had eaten its fill of our lives. I wondered if we would ever be the same again.

The son I held in my arms those years ago is a young man now, and was helping to save his own nearby home from flames that came to within 15 feet. My daughters live out of the canyon and were in no danger.

Cinelli was running a polling place when the fire broke out on the northern end of Old Topanga Canyon Road just 24 hours from this moment.

True to her high sense of duty, she stayed with it alone until the Highway Patrol ordered everyone out of the area, accommodating voters right up to the end. She came home with the ballots intact, and later turned them over to a sheriff’s deputy.

Together, we loaded those things we considered most valuable into a car and a pickup truck, anticipating evacuation. Pictures, of course, came first, because they are the physical remnants of things past; computer disks of a book in progress; files necessary to restore our lives when the flames are gone; relics of trips, small gifts our children and their children have given us over the years; silverware, a cup, a clock, a hat. Little things.

We asked each other questions neither could answer, as though simply by asking there would come a reply from . . . somewhere. There is, you see, a kind of spirituality to a fire, an awful cleansing to the earth, the way rain scrubs the sky.

Fire is at once terror and magic when it runs loose through what we build, and we view with mixed feelings of awe and fear the disaster it leaves in its wake.

In that mood, we prayed for morning that Tuesday night, because humans are not creatures of the dark. We need light to build our castles and light to fight our enemies, by whatever means they are presented.

Water-dropping helicopters fly only on a limited basis at night and fixed-wing aircraft don’t fly at all. We are left with hoses to hold back a demon, and they are, for the most part, toys against a war machine, except in those cases where, by wild caprice, we win a small battle.

Dawn came uneasily to Topanga.

The aircraft began their bombardment of water and chemicals again, an army of firemen took new places on the battle lines and we emerged into the morning intact.

We slept little through the night, and I find myself in a kind of half-daze--from lack of sleep and from the immensity of the disaster.

This column, if it can be called that, is a kind of chronology. Earlier, I wrote of salvation and blue sky, but at this very moment, at 12:35 p.m. on Wednesday, the sky has taken on a darker hue, the smoke is thicker and the roar of aircraft louder.

A friend has just called to say that Fernwood, just across Topanga Canyon Boulevard, is deeply involved in the flames that seem to be creeping relentlessly eastward. Hot spots flare up everywhere.

And now as I look out the window, the branches of the oak trees swirl in crazy patterns, terrifying evidence that the winds are creeping back into our lives, and the moment of serenity is gone. I guess, in the end, there are no miracles, only occurrences.

Our two vehicles remain loaded. I have ladders situated for easy access to the roof. Garbage cans filled with water are at the ready. Sprinklers on the roof can be easily turned on.

Is there anything else to do? We will take the old dog Hoover with us and the cats and the bird. The tropical fish are on their own. Cinelli is asleep upstairs, napping from the stress and from a bone-deep weariness. I’ll awaken her. We’ll stand by.

Wait. There’s a pounding at the door. A sheriff’s deputy stands there. “Evacuate,” he says with the subdued tension of a soldier. “The fire is coming. It’s a quarter-mile away.”

So we leave. The house stands empty. We wait in the Valley.

I don’t know if the flames will ultimately take our house, as they took so many others to the north and the west. I don’t know if this old house of wood and glass and love will survive. I can’t project. There is no tomorrow. There is only now.

Years ago I covered a brush fire that also burned many homes. I found a woman and her husband standing on a road watching them burn. She was crying. I asked whether they had lost their home and he said no. Then he added, “She’s just crying for everyone.”

I guess, in a way, I am too.