Braving Home

by Jake Halpern

  “Boston,” I told her.

  “And you came all this way to see me?” Millie shot me a girlish smile, but before I could reply, she slid into the chicken coop and began talking to her hens. “There’s no eggs under you, so you shouldn’t be so mean,” she told one of them in a scolding voice. Slowly she made her way around the coop, chatting as she went. I had to admit, the hens did have a bit of a green sheen, but none of them appeared to be laying any eggs. Eventually, Millie emerged empty-handed but none too worried. Gently she closed the door to the coop. “How about a glass of water?” she asked me. “Would you like one?”

  Millie led me back past my car and up an old stone walkway that cut through an overgrown garden adorned with a broken fountain, a few old wagon wheels, and two rusting metal elephants. We emerged onto a stone patio with a nice view of the apricot and plum orchard down below. Millie proceeded directly into her parlor, which was decorated with some forty mounted deer heads. It wasn’t a big room, and the heads were packed in so tight I could barely see a trace of wood paneling. What struck me most were the eyes—dozens of them, watching my every move—lifeless but eerily alert. If these heads still had bodies, I realized, I’d be standing thick in a herd of deer.

  “The deer were my husband Jimmy’s,” said a voice from the kitchen. Millie emerged with a tall glass of ice water and continued: “You either loved Jimmy or you hated him, and he was enemy number one of the hunters around here.”

  “Why’s that?” I asked.

  “You’re only allowed to shoot two deer a year and sometimes Jimmy shot a hundred,” said Millie.

  When Jimmy Decker wasn’t hunting he was usually blowing things up, explained Millie. By trade, he was a dynamiter. Many people knew him simply as “Dynamite Jimmy.” There was an art to dynamiting, and Jimmy was often called on to do the most difficult jobs in Malibu—blasting a hole for a pool without breaking a giant picture window, or splitting a massive boulder that was on the verge of crushing a mansion. According to Millie, Jimmy was an imposing figure—more than two hundred pounds and “solid as a rock.” In his youth he ran a gym and trained with Johnny Weissmuller, the muscleman who starred in the original Tarzan movies. Jimmy’s strength was legendary. Sometimes, said Millie, he would hold up the back end of a car when a tire needed changing. When people gathered to play “donkey softball”—a raucous game in which players rode donkeys around the bases—Jimmy was famous for opting to carry the donkey instead, running full speed about the field with the bewildered beast in his arms. Over time, Jimmy became something of a folk hero in Malibu. Both Millie and Bonnie told me about the movie stars who came to visit: Rock Hudson, Cary Grant, Clark Gable, Orson Welles, and many more. They came to hunt, and camp, and be one of the boys, but most of all to spend time with Jimmy. Rough as he was, Jimmy was the real thing, and in a town dominated by the movies, inhabited by pretend heroes and would-be gunslingers, there was something very alluring about Jimmy’s real-life virility.

  “Of course, I knew plenty of stars when I was a girl,” boasted Millie as she made her way across the parlor to the couch where I was sitting. She handed me my drink and then plopped down on the cushion next to me. A sudden explosion of dust and lint burst upward, then glittered in a thick shaft of light that was angled down to the floor. Even more noticeable than the dust were the cobwebs, which seemed to connect every single antler in the room, forming a veritable superhighway for the local spider population.

  “A lot of the Western stars used to come to my daddy’s horse shows,” said Millie. Many of those early Westerns were shot in the Santa Monica Mountains not far from Decker Canyon, she explained. Over the years Millie and her father, Perc, came to know Buck Jones, Leo Carrillo, Roy Rogers, Dale Evans, and John Wayne. Bill Boyd, the actor who played Hopalong Cassidy, lived just across the canyon from them and became a good family friend.

  It struck me as odd that mountain people like Perc, Millie, and Jimmy got tossed into the Hollywood coterie—but during the 1930s and 1940s Malibu itself was at a strange crossroads. The movie colony had not yet fully taken hold, nor had all of the old homesteaders yet moved away. It’s hard to imagine many other communities in American history shared by such radically different contingents, yet still linked. Here was a last pocket of wildest America neighboring a colony of wealthy actors who often played their part on the big screen. These were dimly mirrored worlds, both in love with a vanishing way of life and linked by a mutual curiosity of how the other lived it. And it wasn’t just the movie stars who crossed over. Millie worked with horses in a number of movies, including Reds and Bounty Hunter, and Jimmy even did a few explosions for television, including an entire jumbo jet for the show Emergency. It seems fitting, however, that Jimmy’s and Millie’s involvement was limited to those tasks that were too challenging or downright dangerous for an imposter to pull off. I think a disappointing truth of Hollywood has always been that so many of its heroes lack the nerve and the know-how that they so gracefully seem to exude on the screen. After all, they are actors, not fighters, and in Malibu nothing makes this plainer to see than the fires that chase them away.

  “So I guess you want to talk about fires,” said Millie finally as she settled back onto the dusty pillows of her couch.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I understand you’ve seen quite a few.”

  “Certainly have,” replied Millie. She paused to stroke her favorite sheepdog, Concho, who was still chomping on a handful of garlic vitamin pills that Millie had just tossed him. “My first fire was in 1928,” she began. Millie was just eight years old at the time, but she claimed to remember the scene well: standing with her two sisters in the blazing heat, watching her mother and father beat the ground furiously with wet gunnysacks in an attempt to smother the flames. “I was scared and I’m pretty sure I was crying as the fire circled the ranch,” recalled Millie. “I was too young to help, but my older sister was wetting the gunnysacks and taking them to Mom and Dad.”

  This was just the first of Millie’s many fire memories. Years later she was ushered into the principal’s office at her high school to receive some dreadful news: Another wildfire had swept through the canyon where she lived, and both of her parents were dead. Grief-stricken, Millie and her sister left the school and began sobbing by the side of the road. Then, quite miraculously, her two parents drove around the bend in their automobile, alive and well. The reports had been wrong. Somehow the Meeks had managed to survive.

  The key to fighting wildfires was preparation, insisted Millie. This was something she had learned from a very early age, as she watched her parents clear all the flammable plant life from around their house. As a girl, Millie had her own firefighting chores, like keeping all of the ranch’s water barrels full. They were big vats, up to one hundred gallons in capacity, and there were roughly twenty of them set around her parents’ property. Filling them was no easy task, and Millie was constantly making trips to a nearby creek or spring. She was also charged with checking on the gunnysacks, making sure they were all carefully stowed away. If and when a fire came, everyone on the ranch would grab their gunnysacks, dip them into the barrels of water, and start beating the ground furiously in order to smother the flames.

  Improvised as this “sack and barrel” technique may sound, I later learned that it was once widely used on the Great Plains. Millie’s father probably learned it in Iowa, Oklahoma, or Missouri—the places where he grew up. In that part of the world, they used gunnysacks to fight prairie fires. In fact, Laura Ingalls Wilder describes such a scene in Little Home on the Prairie. She writes of a wildfire that races toward her farm “faster than a horse can run.” Immediately her father takes charge: “‘Prairie fire!’ shouted Pa. ‘Get the tub full of water! Put sacks in it!”’ The true originators of this technique in North America were likely the Plains Indians. Their use of wet blankets was documented by a number of American travelers, including the painter Alfred Jacob Miller. His 1836 painting Prairie on Fire depicts a scene in which an Indian village con
fronts an approaching wildfire with a frenzy of blanket beating. This was just one of the many techniques that the Plains Indians may have handed down to American settlers.* The Plains Indians also cleared vegetation as a form of fire prevention. Additionally, they set “backfires”—another technique also used by the Deckers—in which a smaller, controlled fire is used to burn off a designated area and cut off the path of an advancing wildfire. The Plains Indians had a rich firefighting tradition, and to some extent the Malibu homesteaders were likely the beneficiaries of this knowledge.10

  “We never had much water up here in the canyons,” continued Millie. “Even now, we don’t have metered water like the people on the coast. We rely on spring water. And we still fight fires with the gunnysacks and barrels.” Apparently, this technique had served the Deckers well. According to Millie, the house we were now sitting in had been through half a dozen or so major blazes since it was built in the early 1940s, and not once had it burned. “To tell you the truth,” said Millie, “I’ve been very fortunate—no house of mine has ever burned down.”

  As Millie and I continued to chat in the parlor, I heard the sound of another car crunching up the steep gravel driveway. A minute or so later, Bonnie Decker appeared. She was a sturdy woman: busty, frizzy haired, and youthful-looking. She wore an oversize Hawaiian shirt, blue jeans, and a pair of black leather moccasins. “I’ve never been into fancy clothing,” she later told me. For this and other reasons her classmates at Malibu Junior High often called her a “hillbilly.” This was actually a point of pride, claimed Bonnie, in part because her cousin (Donna Douglas) played the role of Elly May Clampett on the TV show The Beverly Hillbillies. Still, there were awkward moments, like the time a truckload of hunters, toting rifles and a few bloody deer, swung by school and whisked her away. A concerned parent called the police to say that Bonnie had been abducted, but it was just Jimmy picking her up from school.

  “Hey,” said Bonnie, as she paused to catch her breath. “Is Mom telling you everything you need to know about the fires?”

  “He didn’t know what a gunnysack was,” interjected Millie.

  “It’s true,” I admitted.

  “Well, we wouldn’t trade you,” Millie told me consolingly.

  Bonnie, perhaps sensing the crowdedness of the room, with its now forty-plus heads, ushered us out onto the back patio where we took seats and gazed down the sloping orchard that led to the road below. We sat there for a long while, chatting, flipping through old photographs, and sipping ice water. “Are you hungry?” asked Millie finally. “I can fix a good sandwich. No, wait, how about a barbecue? I’ll fix us some steaks.”

  As preparations for dinner began, Bonnie gave me a tour of the lower ranch. She led the way down through the orchard, stopping here and there to pick wild plums and tell stories. Almost every structure on the ranch seemed to have an accompanying anecdote. “That barn over there was built by a one-armed cowboy by the name of Tex,” explained Bonnie. “And he was probably eighty when he built it.”

  Bonnie soon returned to the topic of firefighting, emphasizing the same prairie-tested techniques that her mother had. “Brush clearance is your best protection against wildfires,” she explained. Each spring the ranch assembled a small workforce to clear vast amounts of brush so that every structure was surrounded by at least two hundred feet of cleared or carefully trimmed ground. This created a natural shield, so when a wildfire swept through, it would simply burn around a house. Then, if any flames breached the shield, they could be beaten out with the gunnysacks. “We have to be very careful around here because the plant life is extremely flammable,” explained Bonnie. “Especially the chaparrals.”

  As I would later learn, the region’s many species of chaparral plants (including sugar bush, chemise, scrub oak, and California lilac) survive the heat by growing stiff, oily leaves. The oil on the leaves works as a kind of seal. Just as the ancient Egyptians used perfumed oils to keep their skin supple in the dry heat of the desert, these plants coat their leaves in oil to retain what little moisture they can. The downside is the fire hazard. These leaves are highly flammable and their plant stems are exceedingly dry. Together these elements create a deadly fuel for wildfires—which, once ignited, must be fought boldly and strategically.11

  According to Bonnie, the Deckers’ firefighting strategy hinged on water. “You need a reliable delivery system,” she explained. The ranch’s system began with a small pump house on the first tier. Here water was drawn from a natural spring and pumped upward to the very top of the ranch, where it was stored in two giant 12,500-gallon tanks. These twin reservoirs ensured a steady and reliable supply of water. From here, the water could flow downward via gravity to any of the various tiers. (When a fire came, the power lines usually burned, so it was crucial that the water could flow without the use of an electric pump). All across the ranch, a network of water pipes spread out to some fifty hose faucets. This way, no matter where fire threatened, water was sure to be nearby and could then be sprayed onto a house or put into barrels for gunnysack dipping. “Sometimes you’re fighting the fire with the hose and watering yourself down at the same time,” added Bonnie. “You’ll get yourself soaking wet and within three minutes you’ll be bone dry—that’s how hot it gets.”

  “Hey,” said Bonnie rather suddenly, “did Mom show you the magazines where Jimmy kept his dynamite?”

  “No,” I replied.

  “Well, that’ll be fun!” she said. So Bonnie led me back up the orchard and out along the second tier. Just before the chicken coop, she guided me around a large pile of rusting junk, until we found ourselves standing flush against the canyon wall. I glanced around for a moment, and then I saw it: a small cave burrowed into the cliff face. Bonnie scampered about the mouth of the cave for a moment, making enough noise to alert any lurking rattlesnakes. There was no reply, no rattling or even a rustle. Gingerly we crept into the darkness, inching our way toward the back of the cave. Here a lone ray of light gave color to a rusting red door and shape to three small words: EXPLOSIVES A—DANGEROUS. This was Jimmy’s magazine. It was the same type of sturdy steel container that the military used to store ammunition. It was the ultimate fireproof box. No matter how bad things got, even if the whole ranch burned to the ground, this small space would be safe.

  Impressive as all of this was, I still had to wonder why anyone would want to store large quantities of dynamite in the heart of a fire corridor. Apparently, however, Jimmy had complete confidence not only in his dynamite cave, but in his dynamite truck as well. He had a pickup that was specially outfitted with two magazines in back. During wildfires, he was known to run roadblocks in this truck. As Bonnie and I made our way out of the cave, she recalled one such story from the 1978 fire: “The police were blocking people from getting into the canyons, and Jimmy just looked at them and said: You either let me through or I’m running the block.’” Apparently the police were concerned, not only because Jimmy was in a dynamite truck, but because in that particular fire the flames were leaping over the top of the road, creating what the locals call a “fire tunnel.” By most accounts this looks like a passageway straight through hell, but Jimmy was dead-set on driving through it. “Well, the police didn’t want him hanging around the roadblock,” continued Bonnie. “They said, ‘If you want to drive through a fire with a bunch of dynamite, that’s up to you!’”

  Jimmy, like all of the Deckers, felt that the Malibu Fire Department could not be counted on. They could barely save the mansions on the coast, let alone smaller houses in remote canyons like Decker. Consequently, the Deckers always stayed to fight the flames and protect their horses. They had an old family saying—If you leave, you lose—and they had no intentions of losing. At some point their toilsome and preventative strategy clearly gave way to something far less controlled, and Bonnie spoke of this as we stood by the mouth of the cave. “Your adrenaline is running so fast during a fire,” she explained. “You don’t feel the temperature, you don’t feel anything. Only wh
en it’s over, and your adrenaline has calmed down a bit, do you start getting your wits about you. Then you start feeling the burns that you’ve got, and checking out the damage that’s been done.”

  Bonnie laughed again. It was a tough, humorless laugh that seemed to say, You can’t possibly know what I am talking about. Then she guided us back around the pile of junk. “Come on,” she said sweetly. “Let’s see about dinner.”

  As we waited for the steaks to finish cooking, I sat by myself for a few minutes at the edge of the orchard, looking out over the expanse of the canyon and thinking some more about the Deckers. In many ways they seemed out of place in Malibu, and yet it was becoming increasingly clear to me that they were probably among the few who actually belonged. For them Malibu was more than just a posh address—more than just a scenic vista on which a mansion could be placed—it was a demanding physical reality to which they had adapted. Contrary to what the U.S. Census Bureau reports, the Deckers would not move twelve times over the course of their lives. They were deeply connected to the land, and like the Plains Indians they knew almost by birthright the tricks to surviving the dangers of home. For them, wildfires were a natural part of life, something to be expected, something to be lived with, and in this way the Deckers would always belong in this canyon.

  That evening we ate on the back patio, watching twilight repaint the landscape a hundred different times. The dim light of dusk coaxed out an astounding number of colors. Earlier in the day everything had seemed washed out, like an overexposed photograph. But now the land looked lush—the leafy orchard, the blush red dirt, and the sapphire sky.

  As we ate, Millie and Bonnie conjured one memory after another. My favorite involved Miner and Kitty, the ranch’s two pet mountain lions. They were big animals, 125 pounds each, and Millie used to keep them in a double-gated cage. “The male I didn’t trust,” said Millie, “but the female used to sit on my lap and suck my thumb.” During one of the ranch’s many fires, the Deckers were forced to evacuate the two cats by walking them out on lead ropes. At some point, a nervous neighbor spotted the lions and called the authorities. Not long after, Miner and Kitty were confiscated. This upset Millie greatly. “We should’ve had proper permits for those lions,” she lamented. Bonnie just shook her head. There was nothing they could have done, she insisted. Malibu was just changing.