“You don’t like it.”
“No. It’s nostalgia, denial, pretentiousness, I’m not sure which. Live in a bubble and pretend it’s 1960!”
“I think you’d better board the Ganesh and get away from these irritating things.”
He growled.
* * *
Further north the sky was filled with kites and tethered hot air balloons, straining seaward in the freshening Santa Ana wind. “Here’s the antidote,” Tom said, cheering up. “El Toro is a village of tree lovers. When the Santa Ana blows their kites fly right over Irvine.”
They pedaled into a grove of immense genetically engineered sycamores. Tom stopped under one of these overarching trees and stared up through branches at the catwalks and small wooden rooms perched among them. “Hey, Hyung! Are you home?”
For answer a basket elevator controlled by big black iron counterweights descended. They climbed in and were lifted sixty feet into the air, to a landing where Hyung Nguyen greeted them. Hyung was around Nadezhda’s age, and it turned out that they had once met at a conference in Ho Chi Minh City, some thirty-five years before. “Small world,” Tom said happily. “I swear it’s getting so everyone’s met everyone.”
Hyung nodded. “They say you know everyone alive through a linkage of five people or less.”
They sat in the open air on Hyung’s terrace, swaying ever so slightly with the massive branch supporting them, drinking green tea and talking. Hyung was El Toro’s mayor, and had been instrumental in its city planning, and he loved to describe it: several thousand people, living in sycamores like squirrels and running a thriving gene tech complex. Nadezhda laughed to see it. “But it’s Disneyland again, yes? The Swiss Family treehouse.”
“Sure,” Hyung said easily. “I grew up in Little Saigon, over in Garden Grove, and when we went to Disneyland it was the best day of the year for me. It really was the magic kingdom when I was a child. And the treehouse was always my favorite.” He sang the simple accordion ditty that had been played over and over again in the park’s concrete and plastic banyan tree, and Tom joined in. “I always wanted to hide one night when they closed the park, and spend the night in the treehouse.”
“Me too!” Tom cried.
“And now I sleep in it every night. And all my neighbors too.” Hyung grinned.
Nadezhda asked how it had come about, and Hyung explained the evolution: orange groves, Marine air base, government botanical research site, genetic engineering station—finally deeded over to El Toro, with part of the grove already in place. A group of people led by Hyung convinced the town to let them build in the trees, and this quickly became the town’s mark. “The trees are our philosophy, our mode of being.” Now there were imitations all over the country, even a worldwide association of tree towns.
“If you can do that here,” Nadezhda said, “surely you can save one small hill in El Modena.”
They explained the situation to Hyung, and he agreed: “Oh, hell yes, hell yes. It’s not a matter of legal battles, it’s simply a matter of winning the opinion of the town.”
“I know,” Tom said, “but there’s the rub. Our mayor is proposing this thing, and he’s popular. It might be he can get the majority in favor of it.”
Hyung shrugged. “Then you’re out of luck. But that’s where the crux will lie. Not in the council or in the courts, but in the homes.” He grinned. “Democracy is great when you’re in the majority, eh?”
“But there are laws protecting the rights of the minority, there have to be. The minority, the land, animals—”
“Sure. But will they apply to an issue like this?”
Tom sucked air through his teeth, uncertain.
“You ought to start a big publicity campaign. Make the debate as public as possible, I think that always works best.”
“Hmm.”
Another grin. “Unless it backfires on you.”
A phone rang and Hyung stepped down free-standing stairs to the window-filled room straddling the big branch below. Tom and Nadezhda looked around, feeling the breeze rock them. High above the ground, light scattering through green leaves, big trees filling the view in every direction, some in groves, others freestanding—wide open spaces for gardens and paths: a sensory delight. A childlike appeal, Nadezhda said. Surface ingenuity, structural clarity, intricate beauty.
“It’s our genes,” Tom replied. “For millions of years trees were our home, our refuge on savannahs filled with danger. So this love has been hardwired into our thinking by the growth of our brains themselves, it’s in our deep structure and we can never lose it, never forget, no matter these eyeblinks in the city’s grimy boxes. Maybe it’s here we should move.”
“Maybe.”
Hyung hurried upstairs, looking worried. “Fire in the hills, Tom—east of here, moving fast. From the description it sounded near your place.”
And in fact they could see white smoke, off over the hills, blown toward them in the Santa Ana wind.
Tom leaped to his feet. “We’d better go.”
“I know. Here, take a car and come back for your bikes later. I called and they’ll have one for you at the station.” He punched a button on the elevator control panel, and great black weights swung into the sky.
* * *
A summer brushfire in the California foothills is a frightening sight. It is not just that all the hillside vegetation is tinder dry, but that so much of it is even more actively flammable than that, as the plants are filled with oils and resins to help enable them to survive the long dry seasons. When fire strikes, mesquite, manzanita, scrub oak, sage, and many other plants do not so much catch fire as explode. This is especially true when the wind is blowing; wind fans the flames with a rich dose of oxygen, and then throws the fire into new brush, which is often heated nearly to the point of combustion, and needs only a spark to burst violently into flame. In a strong wind it looks as if the hillsides have been drenched with gasoline.
Nadezhda and Tom rounded the last turn in the trail to Tom’s place, following several people and a three-wheeled all-terrain vehicle piled with equipment. They caught sight of the fire. “Ach,” Nadezhda said. The ravine-scored hillside east of Tom’s cottage was black, and lightly smoking, and the irregular line that separated this new black from the ordinary olive gray hillside was an oily orange flickering, ranging from solid red to a transparent shimmering. White smoke poured up from this line of fire, obscuring the sun and filling the air downwind, filtering the light in an odd, ominous way. Occasionally fire leaped out of the burn line and jumped up the hill toward Tom’s place, licks of flame rolling like tumbleweed, trees and shrubs going off suddenly, bang, bang, bang, like hundreds of individual cases of spontaneous combustion. It was loud, the noise an insistent, crackling roar.
Tom stood rigidly on the trail before Nadezhda, staring through the strange muted light, assessing the danger. “Damn,” he said. Then: “The bees.”
Hank ran by with some others. “Come on,” he said, “can’t fight a fire from a distance.”
Kevin appeared shovel in hand, his face and arms streaked with black ash and brown dirt. “We got the beehives onto a cart and out of here. I don’t know how many were smoked inside. Got the chickens out too. We’ve been watering your roof and they’re cutting a break down this ridge, but I don’t know if we’re going to be able to save it or not, this wind is so fucked. You’d better get what you want out—” and he was off. Tom jogged up the trail to the cabin, and Nadezhda followed. The air was hot, thick with smoke and ash. It smelled of oils and burnt sage. Unburnt twigs and even branches blew by overhead. Just east of the cabin a big crowd of people worked with picks, shovels, axes, and wheelbarrows, widening an ancient overgrown firebreak. The cabin stood in a wide spot in this old break, and so theoretically it was well-placed, but the ridge was narrow, the terrain on both sides steep and rough, and Nadezhda saw immediately that the workers were having a hard time of it. A higher ridge immediately to the west offered a better chance, and in f
act there were people up there too, and pick-up trucks.
Overhead a chopping sound blanketed the insistent whoosh and crackle of the fire, and four helicopters swept over the skyline onto them. Gabriela was shouting into a walkie-talkie, apparently directing the pilots. They clattered by in slow, low runs, dropping great trailing quantities of a white powder. One dropped water. Billows of smoke coursed up and out, were shredded in the wind. The helicopters hovered, turned, made another run. They disappeared over the skyline and the roar of the fire filled their ears again. In the ravine below them the fire appeared subdued, but on their side of the ravine shrubs and trees were still exploding, whooshing torchlike into flame as if part of a magician’s act, adding deep booms to the roar.
On the break line almost everyone Nadezhda had met in El Modena was hacking away at the brush, dragging it down the ridge to the west. Axe blades flashed in the eerie light, looking dangerous. Two women aimed hoses, but there was little water pressure, and they couldn’t spray far. They cast white fans of water over everything within reach, firefighters, the new dirt of the break, the brush being pulled away. Down below the house Kevin was at work with a pick, hacking at the base of a sage bush with great chopping swings, working right next to Alfredo, who was doing the same; they fell into a rhythm as if they had been a team for years, and struck as if burying the picks in each other’s hearts. The sage bush rolled away, they ran to another one and began again.
Nadezhda shook herself, followed Tom to the cabin. Ramona was inside with all the other Sanchezes, her arms filled with clothing. “Tom, hey, get what you want right now!” It was stifling, and out the kitchen window Nadezhda saw a burning ember float by. Solar panels beyond the emptied beehives were buckling and drooping.
“Forget the clothes!” Tom said, and then shouted: “Photo albums!” He ran into a small room beside the bedroom.
“Get out of there!” someone outside the house shouted, voice amplified. “Time’s up!” The megaphone made it a voice out of a dream, metallic and slow. “Everyone get out of the house and off the break! NOW!”
They had to pull Tom from the house, and he was yelling at them. A huge airy rumble filled the air, punctuated by innumerable small explosions. The whole hillside between ravine and ridge was catching fire. Hills in the distance appeared to float and then drop, tumbling in the superheated air. People streamed down the firebreak they had just made, and those who had been in the house joined them. Tom stumbled along looking at the ground, a photo album clutched to his chest. Alfredo and Kevin argued over a map, Kevin stabbing at it with a bloody finger, “That’s a real firebreak right up there,” pointing to the west. “It’s the only thing this side of Peter’s Canyon that’ll do! Let’s get everyone there and widen it, clear the backside, get the choppers to drop in front. We should be able to make a stand!”
“Maybe,” Alfredo said, and shrugged. “Okay, let’s do it.” He shouted instructions as they hurried down the trail, and Gabriela stopped to talk into her walkie-talkie. White smoke diffused through the air made it hard to breathe, and the light was dim, colors filtered and grayish.
At the gouged trail’s first drop-off there was a crush of people. They looked back, saw Tom’s cabin sitting among flames, looking untouched and impervious; but the solar panels beyond had melted like syrup, and were oozing dense black smoke. All the weeds in the yard were aflame, and the grandfather clocks burned like men at the stake. As they watched the shingles on one corner of the roof caught fire, all at once as if a magician had snapped his fingers. Poof! One whole wall gone up like newspaper in the fireplace. Nadezhda held Tom by the arm, but he shrugged her off, staring back at the sight, clutching the album still. His wrinkled face was smeared with ash, his eyes red-rimmed with the smoke, his fringe of hair flying wildly, singed to curls in one spot by a passing ember. His mouth was in a tight disdainful knot. “It’s only things,” he said to Nadezhda hoarsely, angrily. “Only things.” But then they passed a small knot of smoked bees lying on the dirt, and he hissed, looking anguished.
He insisted on helping at the firebreak to the west, and Nadezhda went along, packed into the back of a pick-up truck with a crowd of smoky, sweaty Modeños. She got the feeling they would have been joking and cursing with great vitality if it weren’t for Tom among them. At the firebreak they leaped out and joined a big crowd already working there. This firebreak was on a long, level, broad ridge, and it had been recently cleared. They worked like madmen widening it, and all the while the line of rising smoke with the terrible orange base approached. The black behind the line seemed to extend all the way to the horizon, as if all the world had been burnt. Voices were cracked, hoarse, furious. Hills, ravines, canyons, all disappeared in the smoke. No colors but gray and brown and black left, except for that line of whitish orange.
Helicopters poured overhead in a regular parade, first civilian craft, then immense Marine and Coast Guard machines. When these arrived everyone cheered. Popping over the horizon like dragons out of a nightmare, fast as jets and only meters off the treetops, they bombed the fire relentlessly, great sheets of white powder trailing behind them. The powder must be heavy, Nadezhda thought at one point, not to be lofted like the ash and embers. She had a burn on her cheek, she didn’t know where it had come from. She ran a wheelbarrow from workers to pick-up trucks, feeling a strange, stark happiness, pushing herself till she choked on the gritty air. Once she was drenched by the spray from a helicopter’s water drop. Little bulldozers arrived, looking like Moscow snowplows. They widened the firebreak quickly, until it was an angry reddish strip nearly thirty meters wide, extending along the ridge for a few kilometers. It looked good, but with the wind gusting it was hard to tell if it would hold the fire or not. Everything depended on the wind. If it slacked they would be okay. If it grew stronger, Peter’s Canyon was in trouble. If it stayed constant … they couldn’t be sure. They could only work harder. An hour or two passed as they tore frantically at the vegetation, and watched the fire’s inexorable final approach, and cheered or at least nodded in approval at every pass of the helicopters.
At one point Kevin stopped beside Nadezhda. “I think the choppers might do it,” he said. “You should get some gloves on.”
Nadezhda looked down the line of the break. Gabriela was driving a dozer, shouting happily at a patch of mesquite she was demolishing. Ramona and Hank were hosing down the newly cleared section of firebreak, following a water truck. Alfredo was hacking away at a scrub oak with an axe. Stacey and Jody were running brush to a pick-up, as Nadezhda had been until just a moment before. Many others she had not met were among them performing similar tasks; there must have been a hundred people up there working at this break, maybe two. Several had been injured and were being tended at an ambulance truck. She walked over to look for Tom. “Is this your volunteer fire department?” she asked a medic there.
“Our what? Oh. Well, no. This is our town. Whoever heard about it, you know.”
She nodded.
The firebreak held.
* * *
Hank walked up to Tom and held his arm. “House burns, save the nails.”
* * *
Just before sunset Hank and Kevin joined Alice Abresh, head of El Modena’s little volunteer fire department, and they drove one of the pick-up trucks back around Black Star Canyon Road, to search for the origins of the fire. In a wind like theirs such a search was relatively simple; find the burnt ground farthest east, and have a look around.
This point turned out to be near the top of a small knoll, in the broken canyony terrain east of Tom’s place. From this hilltop scorched black trees extended in a fan shape to the west, off to the distant firebreak. They could see the whole extent of the burn. “Some plants actually need that fire as part of their cycle,” Hank said.
“In the Sierra,” Alice replied absently, looking around at the ground. She picked up some dirt, crumbled it between her fingers, smelled it. Put some in plastic bags. “Here they mostly just survive it. But they do that r
eal well.”
“Must be several hundred acres at least,” Kevin said.
“You think so?”
“Smell this,” Alice said to them. They smelled the clod of dirt. “This is right where the thing had to start, and it smells to me like kerosene.”
They stared at each other.
“Maybe someone’s campfire got away from them,” Kevin said.
“Certainly a bad luck place for a fire as far as Tom’s concerned,” Hank said. “Right upwind of him.”
Kevin shook his head. “I can’t believe anyone would … do that.”
“Probably not.”
Alice shook her head. “Maybe it was an accident. We’ll have to tell the cops about this, though.”
* * *
That night Tom stayed at the house under Rattlesnake Hill, using a guest room just down from Nadezhda’s. When they had seen that the second firebreak would hold, they had led him down to the house, but after a meal and a shower he had taken off again, and was gone all evening, no one knew where. People came by the house with food and clothes, but he wasn’t there. The house residents thanked them.
Nadezhda glanced through the photo album he had saved. Many of the big pages were empty. Others had pictures of kids, Tom looking much younger, his wife. Not very many pictures had been left in the album.
Much later he returned, looking tired. He sat in a chair by the atrium pool. Nadezhda finished washing dishes and went out to sit by him.
The photo album was on the deck beside him. He gestured at it. “I took a lot out and tacked them to the walls, a long time ago. Never put them back in.” He stared at it.
Nadezhda said, “I lost four shoeboxes of pictures once, I don’t even know how or when. One time I went looking for them and they weren’t there.”
She got up and got a bottle of Scotch and two glasses from the kitchen. “Have a drink.”
“Thanks, I will.” He sighed. “What a day.”
“It all happened so fast. I mean, this morning we were biking around and everything was normal.”
Pacific Edge: Three Californias (Wild Shore Triptych) Page 24