Personal Stories Drawn From the Fire Lines : THE SOUTHLAND FIRESTORM: THE BATTLE GOES ON : Big Rock Canyon: ‘These Are the Things That Memories Are Made of’

There are stories that you report as a journalist and then there are stories that you tell--to family, friends, maybe to your grandchildren one day.

Covering and living through disaster leaves its mark. What follows are some of the stories that Times reporters, photographers and editors usually reserve for the spoken word. They are personal. They reveal some of the fear, the close calls, the human connections that do not usually make it into print.

As I kept watch on the thick black smoke mushrooming overhead, Ken and Kristina Peterson scrambled to save some memories from their house on Little Rock Way.

We had all met on the beach about an hour earlier, sliding down a steep embankment to evade a police barricade. After hiking a mile to their 1950s ranch-style home with a panoramic view of the Pacific, they were rifling through cardboard boxes, looking for photographs, important documents, jewelry, college diplomas.

I tried to stay out of their way, but offered to lug their heavy suitcases to a beat-up station wagon loaned to us by a neighbor.

“God, this is weird,” Kristina said. “Should I take my violin?”

Ken--a 44-year-old senior vice president for Wells Fargo bank--seemed the most at ease. After we loaded up the car, he invited me to join him on the roof, where he was waving a garden hose and surveying the disaster.

“Aren’t you going to take a picture?” he shouted to his wife below. “The husband defending his fortress.”

Kristina--a 29-year-old executive secretary for Paramount Pictures--was too frantic to joke. “Jesus,” she said, “you think this is so funny, don’t you?”

“These are the things that memories are made of, dear,” Ken insisted.

“This is not one I want to live over and over too many times,” Kristina said. “I think we should go now, Ken. Please. For me.”

I was beginning to feel the same way. A sudden shift in the wind and the flames would have been on us in a minute.

“My wife would kill me if she knew I was here right now,” I told them. Then I showed off a wallet-sized photo of Raynelda with our 7-month-old son, Max.

“You should have told us you had a baby,” said Ken, who hopes to have children with Kristina, his wife of just six months. “We better get you out of here.”

Kristina, relieved, waved to a yellow and white ceramic duck in her patio: “Bye, ducky.” But on the way down the hill, she told Ken to stop.

“Wait, wait,” she said, focusing a camera out the car window, as the blaze shrouded their home above them. “This might be the last shot.”