Measuring Out Life With Milestones of Disaster

My neighbor Barbara Cullison has lived near the junction of Sisar Creek and Highway 150 in Upper Ojai for more than 50 years. On the evening of Dec. 21, the winds kicked up and at about 7:30 she heard something fall over outside her house. She sent her daughter Mary out to investigate.

In the early darkness, Mary couldn’t see much. But as she turned around to go back inside, a car came down the road honking repeatedly.

Mary said she went into the house thinking, “That’s strange.” Barbara was sitting on the couch.

“Something’s happened,” said Barbara.

A quarter of a mile or less up Koenigstein Road, a fire had started in the sparse, prickly chaparral. This fire, inflated by a roaring wind, went on to threaten our house and dozens of others--destroying one. It caused the Ventura County Fire Department to evacuate hundreds of people, although no one was hurt or killed. More than $5 million was spent fighting the blaze.

Old-timers in our area mark their years by these most Californian of milestones: the flood of 1969, the Wheeler fire of ‘85, the long drought of the late ‘80s, the earthquake of ’91.

When my family and I moved to this area from the much-despised megalopolis to the south, I thought it a peculiar way to keep time--as if nothing mattered but natural disasters. Even more alarming was the apparent acceptance of the hand of fate: More than once I’ve heard it said, by Barbara Cullison and other neighbors, that if the wind hadn’t shifted in 1985, when the Wheeler fire was roaring up our canyon, the blaze would have leaped our street and likely consumed the house that is now our home and who knows how many others in Upper Ojai.

This casual fatalism is not what I hear from younger friends in the area, most of whom are refugees from Los Angeles and its countless suburbs. The question that comes up most often among these recently relocated urbanites is: How did the fire start?

The truth is that few brush fires in Ventura County are natural in origin. In general, fires are started by mistake (such as the welding accident that sparked the fire that swept eastward from Santa Paula toward Fillmore last year) or are deliberately set (such as the 1993 Steckel Park fire that swept over Sulphur Mountain).

Our focus on cause is understandable, but it betrays our greenhorn tendencies. In fact, these fires would be relatively easy to control were it not for the Santa Ana winds that blow from the desert to the sea at this time of year--clearing our air but fanning our flames.

Also striking--especially to a relative newcomer--is the calm of the old-timers in the face of disaster.

On Dec. 21, after my children had been evacuated and the house saved by a ground crew with chain saws and shovels, my wife and I went up our street to stand in the roaring wind, to watch the flare-ups of chamise and sage brush, to look up to flames coursing up the canyons, and to chat with neighbors about what was happening.

Many rumors, reflecting so many hopes and fears, were circulating. We heard from friends that a family that lives on a hilltop about a mile above us had been evacuated by helicopter. (Although helicopters circled the blaze all night, there was no truth to this. In fact, the family members were trapped in the house and couldn’t leave. Fortunately they had done an exemplary job of brush-clearing, and although they lost a hay barn, their house did not burn.)

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We heard, from a firefighter that many houses had burned and that entire neighborhoods were threatened. (Although neighborhoods were threatened, only one house burned. Perhaps the firefighter confused houses with structures--several barns and smaller outbuildings did burn--or perhaps he wanted to let us know the seriousness of the threat.)

We heard, again from friends, that the blaze had been started by an electrical fire. In fact, nearly a week later fire officials blamed the fire on illegal fireworks.

We heard that the Garland house had been destroyed. In fact Sam Garland, who has lived in this area for many years and has seen plenty of disasters and hard times, stood by his pickup not far from where we were speaking, perfectly calm and confident that his house would be saved, even though it was surrounded by flames at that moment.

“It’s part of living in the country,” he said.

Perhaps he is right. His house was indeed saved, and many of the rumors we heard were wrong. Something in us--especially, perhaps, in those of us newly transplanted from cities--seems to delight in imagining scenarios and confusing what we imagine with what has happened.

“The universe is not made of atoms, it is made of stories,” suggested the poet Muriel Rukeyser, and perhaps telling these stories is our way of getting on top of the rising tide of events. We speak with utter confidence about what has happened to others and thus reassure ourselves.

But I cannot help but think that for many of us newcomers to Ventura County, it bespeaks a lack of understanding of where we live: by streams in canyons largely shaped by floods; on hillsides covered with plants that depend on fire for germination and trees that survive by their ability to withstand it.

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We buy views of the Topa Topa mountains, which were lifted by eons of geological uprisings to their perch over the shaky canyons below--and then we’re shocked by earthquakes.

My family, which has lived in Upper Ojai since 1991, has no view. We live in a hollow. At about 8 on the night of the fire, our phone rang. It was our neighbor, Barbara Cullison.

‘Well, we’ve got a fire,” she rasped. “I’ve got the roof sprinklers on.”

That was about all she said, but you could tell she was excited. Perhaps that calm comes from knowing that the fire is moving the other way; perhaps it comes from surviving countless other disasters . . . and perhaps in another 20 years we will be as accepting, and even welcoming, of the nature of the land on which we live.