Commentary: When the Mountain fire hit close to home, this community banded together

It was the morning after election day, and the distraction I had hoped to find from the previous night’s upheaval found me first. A brother-in-law texted: There was a fire near our mother-in-law’s home.

OK, but a lot of fires over the years have veered away from homes in Somis, a rural community in Ventura County between Moorpark and Camarillo. The Thomas fire in December 2017. The Maria fire in October 2019. Both disasters for other people’s properties, just not hers.

The Mountain fire of November 2024 would be different. The Santa Anas blew hard that morning, and my mother-in-law’s land sat perilously downwind, maybe half a mile from where the fire started.

First thought: This is the big one.

Second thought: Make sure Kit, beloved grandmother to my children and matriarch of my wife’s family, had fled. I called. She was at a Starbucks in Camarillo (which, a few hours later, would be evacuated because of the fire’s alarming spread). Her long-term partner, Ian, was on his way.

They were safe — mission accomplished. So were their two desert tortoises, now living as evacuees in my Alhambra backyard.

But the fate of their home and those of their neighbors looked exceedingly bleak. Later that day, the fire map posted on the Watch Duty smartphone app (a must-download for anyone living in a place prone to burning) showed much of the community, including her property, fully engulfed.

I’m used to looking at wildfire maps of local mountains and getting a sense of which trails have burned and which hikes are off-limits as the land takes time to recover. It’s a sadly common occurrence in Southern California.

But now I know how incomparable that is to seeing the ominous pink blob shade the part of the map where your life happens — the 25 acres or so of raw, chaparral-laden hills that my wife’s parents bought decades ago and turned into an idyllic California ranch with lemon orchards and horse stables.

The home where my wife grew up, where she posed for prom photos, where she cared for the pets who to this day are exalted as legends.

The place where, 18 years ago, my wife and I married at the tree marking the burial site of her father’s ashes. Where my children now run free with cousins after Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners.

Miraculously, the small house on the property still stands, so my mother-in-law and her partner have shelter (other neighbors lost a lot more). But so much of what made that place home is gone.

From what I could tell after visiting the property on Tuesday, this fire was wildly erratic. It came within feet of the house — so close and so hot that it warped window frames. Don’t ask me why metal melted and double-paned windows shattered but a house made of wood didn’t ignite.

What’s left of nearby structures is just ghostly evidence of their existence — piles of toxic ash, concrete footings and metal furniture framing that, take my word for it, were once part of a relaxing, meditative outdoor environment. Many of the lemon trees remain, as if untouched; others were wiped out completely, the hills where they stood blackened and desiccated. In a detached office, Ian had stored photos of the damage to his old house that burned in the 1990 Santa Barbara wildfire. That office — and those photos — are gone.

Still, amid the cataclysm, my mother-in-law and her neighbors tell stories of a community coming together — of lost pets evacuated as the flames were bearing down, of people checking to see that others had fled before they did, of homes saved by firefighters and others who had to stay behind.

“Everybody was watching out for everybody,” said Trevor Huddleston, a race-car driver whose family owns the neighboring property (and happens to manage the historic Irwindale Speedway). On Tuesday, he showed me the damage to his land: Though his family’s house remains standing, the fire burned many of the avocado trees (“green gold,” in Huddleston’s words) that had produced a record amount of fruit the previous year. In a bizarre stroke of luck, firefighters could access the well on his property only because the new concrete driveway had just been finished.

Don’t get me wrong: Plenty of people lost everything in this fire, certainly more than my mother-in-law did. But where she lost her sense of safety, she and her neighbors reinforced their sense of solidarity through simple yet heroic acts of caring. At a fraught time when powerful forces are trying to set people against each other, that’s something good to hold onto.