Braving Home

by Jake Halpern

  By all measures, Operation Recovery was a success. It strong-armed the insurance carriers, won over the local politicians, and helped victims get back on their feet. The Los Angeles Times heralded the group as a “political force” that overcame “what seemed an endless parade of insurmountable problems.”12 Except for a handful of elderly residents who didn’t have the wherewithal to start anew, almost every member managed to rebuild. York and his wife were now living in a new house. Overall he seemed quite pleased with how things worked out, though he made it clear that he had no desire to go through it again. “So why did you rebuild?” I asked. York offered several reasons, including his genuine devotion to the community, though ultimately his decision came down to simple economics: His land was worth a lot more money with a house on it. This was another of Malibu’s unspoken rules: After a fire you always rebuild, and because the city usually relaxes its building codes, you rebuild BIG. “You don’t rebuild a small house,” explained York. “It’s not economical to do it anymore. You don’t under-build on what the land is worth—the land is the major asset—so it almost forces you to maximize what you can build on it.” It came down to resale value, concluded York: “You’ve got to figure that somewhere down the line you’re probably going to sell, and you want to maximize the investment.”

  As our interview drew to a close, I told York about my stay with the Deckers. While he didn’t know the family personally, he said he was familiar with their firefighting motto: If you leave, you lose. This was conventional wisdom in Malibu, according to York, and while everyone knew it to be true, hardly anyone had the nerve to practice it: “When you’ve got a firestorm coming toward you, and the wind is howling and swirling and it starts turning dark, you got to weigh saving your house with spending nine months in a burn ward, and my feeling was, The hell with this, I’m out of here. I can rebuild my house; I can’t rebuild my skin. So maybe that’s not the courageous thing to do, but I sure wasn’t going to hang around to test the theory.”

  The County of Los Angeles Fire Department agreed. “We don’t recommend staying during a fire,” affirmed Captain Jim Jordan of the Fire Prevention Division. I visited Jordan later in the day, and he was very blunt with his reasoning. “We’d rather come back to a burned house than a dead person.” When I told him about the Deckers, he didn’t seem too surprised. “There are a very few who stay,” he conceded. Jordan also confirmed that the Deckers’ firefighting techniques were sound—particularly when it came to brush clearance, which was required by law—yet he stopped short of endorsing their cause. Instead, he stressed just how dangerous it was to confront a fire. “Most people have no idea that you can get flames that are a hundred and fifty feet high,” said Jordan. He then explained what to do when a wall of fire is barreling toward you: Go in the house, close all the windows, make sure to pull back the curtains so they won’t burn if the glass gets blown out, wait for an interminable five to ten minutes while the fire passes over you like a wave, and then go back outside and carry on with your firefighting. “When you decide to save your house,” he said finally, “my question to you is this: How brave are you?” Jordan gave me a long, hard look and then chuckled to himself, as if I were a fool for taking him seriously. “Truth is,” said Jordan, “there isn’t a home in the world worth dying for.”

  As I drove around Malibu for the remainder of the day, Jordan’s last line remained in my thoughts. The core of its logic struck me as wise: Wasn’t it better to be homeless than dead? This seemed especially relevant for someone like Arnold York. He knew very little about firefighting, and besides, his house was fully insured. But what about the Deckers? Clearly their house was more than a mere asset, just as the act of defending it was more than a desire to preserve material goods. Theirs was a different sort of home—one that encompassed an entire way of life, deeply rooted in a family history and a connectedness to the land. What’s more, the Deckers had proven themselves time and again to be skillful firefighters. Certainly there were risks involved, but these were risks that the Deckers had long since measured and accepted.

  Later that evening I met Bonnie Decker for a drink at the Dume Room. This was a bar situated on Point Dume, a narrow stretch of land that juts out into the Pacific and offers a handsome view of both Malibu and LA. From outside, the place didn’t look like much, just another suburban pub built into a strip mall, sandwiched between a dry cleaner and a pizzeria. Inside, however, the place had the look of an old-style Western saloon, with weathered wood paneling, swinging doors, and a large oak barrel clock. The crowd wasn’t made up of the usual Malibu beachgoers, more a mix of rodeo and truck stop patrons. The bartender was a small, tough-looking man named Blake who served me a Coors Light and gave me a brief history of the pub. “We used to have hitching posts outside in the late seventies and early eighties, and everybody would ride here on horseback,” he explained. “A few times we even had a horse in the bar.”

  As Blake continued reminiscing, Bonnie showed up. “Hey,” said Blake to Bonnie, “was it Gina’s horse that used to come into the bar?”

  “Yes,” replied Bonnie. “His name was Dar.”

  “That’s right,” said Blake. “That horse loved peppermint schnapps.”

  Bonnie ordered a beer for herself and then pointed out a framed black-and-white photograph beside the bar. It was one of many such photos, but this particular shot included a surly-looking woman holding a shotgun. “That’s my mother,” said Bonnie. I looked at it closely, and sure enough it was Millie.

  “Who are the people in the rest of these photos?” I asked.

  “Old-timers from the mountains,” said Bonnie. She then pointed to another set of photos on a nearby wall. It was a large display, containing roughly thirty shots of various wildfires that had ravaged Malibu. Most of them were taken directly from the Dume Room’s parking lot. According to Bonnie, these smoke-filled photos brought back memories for her and a core of the bar’s other longtime patrons. They were among the very few who still fought wildfires themselves. Like the Deckers, they tended to be canyon-dwellers who knew full well that the fire department wouldn’t necessarily save them. They operated like a band of vigilantes, and in a pinch they always helped one another out. The day before, Chip had described this to me as a “rotating volunteer system” in which you helped a neighbor and then he or she helped you. This was an old practice that went back to California’s ranching days, when even distant neighbors came to help battle a blaze. It was never anything official, just a loose network of people united by mutual self-interest and an underlying belief that fires could be fought. A number of the Deckers’ friends fell into this framework, including their eighty-nine-year-old neighbor Ralph Neubert, who owned the Dume Room. Annie Ellis, a famous Hollywood stuntwoman and a close friend of Bonnie’s, was another who sometimes pitched in. In the 1978 fire, one old friend of Millie’s named Larry Houston drove thirty miles back to Decker Canyon. He took the back roads, circumventing the roadblocks, and then helped Bonnie evacuate the horses through a fire tunnel. Houston was sixty-one years old at the time.

  “Blake has helped me evacuate the horses during a fire,” said Bonnie. Blake smiled modestly. “I can always call the Dume Room for help,” continued Bonnie. “And if the phone lines are working and the police blockade isn’t too tight, people come and help.”

  “During a fire this place is like a crisis center,” explained Blake. “Someone will call down here to say they need help, and ten or fifteen guys will get up and go.”

  As Blake poured us another round of beers, people along the bar began interjecting with their own fire stories. A sound engineer who’d worked for Britney Spears and Fleetwood Mac recounted the time that Fleetwood threw all his antique British silver into his swimming pool to save it from an oncoming fire. The bar’s ancient proprietor, Ralph Neubert, showed up with a woman a quarter of his age and proceeded to tell me that he had “built a positively fireproof home” with a brick exterior and a sunken roof that he could fill with water “jus
t like a lake.”

  “What’s the mood like in here after a fire?” I asked finally.

  “The drinks are definitely flowing,” said Bonnie. “The stress is just so built up that you just need a release. After a disaster we just come down and unite. It’s pretty much, Well, we’ve survived, and, yeah, I’d say we’re partying hardy, because we’ve got a lot of cleanup afterward.”

  In Malibu, the aftermath of a fire is sometimes worse than the fire itself. Almost as soon as fire season ends, the winter rains arrive, and with them come the mudslides. When the rain pummels down on Malibu’s burnt slopes, the rate of erosion typically increases anywhere from two to thirty-five times. The result is massive mudslides in which topsoil, ashes, charred tree stumps, and rolling boulders crash down on houses, wrecking property and sometimes smothering people in their sleep.13 Then come the burned animals—rats, rabbits, ground squirrels, and coyotes—often crawling under people’s houses and porches to die quietly in the shade. Bonnie remembered this quite vividly after the 1978 fire. “They were burned and infected and rotting and they smelled putrid,” she later recalled. “I just shot them to put them out of their misery.”

  “Have the fires ever made you think about moving?” I asked her.

  “No,” replied Bonnie, unblinking. “This is my home. I don’t rent. I didn’t move here just to get the Malibu address and the 90265 zip code. Of course, after the major fires you see more houses for sale, but not mine.”

  When I returned to the Decker Ranch late that evening, I found Millie in the parlor watching a John Wayne movie. “I thought I would ride my horse tomorrow,” she told me as I sat down beside her. Little did I realize that the preparation for this ride would take up much of the following day.

  The next morning we set to work. First we had to wash the horse, let it dry, and groom it. Then we had to polish Millie’s show saddle—an intricately engraved, custom-made leather seat with a sterling silver nameplate on back that read “Millie.” Next we selected and polished an accompanying set of bridle and reins. Finally came Millie’s personal preparations. I watched her try on roughly half a dozen outfits as she searched for the perfect combination of boots, pants, shirt, cowboy hat, and hairdo. When everything was ready, we walked down to the corral and Millie cantered around the ring on her horse, Skipper. “He’s a palomino,” yelled Millie as she whizzed past me. “Like the one that Roy Rogers rode!”

  As late afternoon eased into evening, Millie suggested that we visit the gravesite of Jimmy Decker, which was something she’d been meaning to do for some time. In keeping with Jimmy’s own requests, he was buried on a jagged cliff amid a den of rattlesnakes. Even in death, Jimmy Decker seemed capable of great bravado and bombast, yet few had the patience or nerve to visit his grave. “It isn’t the easiest place to find,” Millie told me, “but I think I could take you there.” I shot her an uneasy look. “Don’t worry, we’ll take Carl, and he’ll take his gun,” she told me.

  So just before twilight, Millie, Carl, and I set out in search of Jimmy Decker’s grave. Carl led the way, with a loaded pistol tucked under his arm. Millie followed closely behind, stumbling over rocks she could barely see, calling out a steady sequence of directions, many of which were contradictory: “Over this way—no, that way . . . Down that way, but up first . . . This looks good, at least I thought it did.” After a great deal of bushwhacking and a few rattlesnake scares, we emerged onto a narrow outcropping of rocks.

  “I think this is it!” said Millie, catching her breath.

  Carl and I exchanged skeptical looks. There were no markers of any kind. Unfazed, Millie paraded across the rocks until she came to a seemingly random spot. Here she stopped and bid me to dig up some dirt. Reluctantly, I agreed. I dug through a thin layer of topsoil until I came upon a dusty rock that was engraved with a crescent moon about two inches in diameter. I dusted it off some more and realized that this small carving was actually a perfect circle. “That’s it!” shouted Millie excitedly. Then she explained how this could be: Before Jimmy died, he asked a friend to drill a hole in this rock so that his cremated remains could be deposited within. This was actually quite a fitting end for a dynamiter, explained Millie, for the hole was made with a dynamite drill and the ashes were poured in like ammonium nitrate (i.e., dynamite powder). Afterward, the top of the hole was sealed off with a narrow plug of concrete. “I told you I could find it,” said Mille.

  Together Millie, Carl, and I sat beside Jimmy Decker’s elongated grave for about half an hour. “In the wintertime I come here to sit and pull a few weeds,” explained Millie. “It’s just nice and peaceful up here, don’t you think?”

  Later that evening, as Millie and I sat in the comfort of her parlor, she talked about her last days with Jimmy. “He died on the eighth of April,” she told me. “A bunch of us were gathered around his bed when he went. The next day Neptune came and picked him up—that’s the cremation people,” she explained. “Those Neptune people are constantly sending me advertisements,” she lamented. “It’s not that I mind that my time is coming—it’s just that I don’t like being pressured.”

  On one of our last days together Millie and I drove her powder blue 1969 pickup truck to the local pet store to buy feed for her chickens. Given Millie’s poor eyesight, I was a little nervous with her behind the wheel, but she drove surprisingly well. On the way home we were chatting pleasantly when we came across what appeared to be smoke clouds. “Damn!” said Millie. This was the worst language I’d ever heard from her. Together we peered through the truck’s grimy windshield, straining our eyes for any signs of fire. After a few tense minutes, we gave up. It was just a case of the jitters and a bit of LA smog. “I guess we’ve been talking too much fire,” said Millie.

  As we drove back through Decker Canyon, gingerly navigating the road’s many hairpin turns, I asked Millie what she would do when the next big fire came. “I’m sure if we had another fire Bonnie and Chip wouldn’t want me to be here,” she told me. “But every little bit helps. I might not be able to help on the hill because I don’t have the footing or the eyes. If nothing else, I could take drinking water to people. I could wet the sacks. There are any number of things that might save them a few steps. I know they wouldn’t want me around, but I know if I left it would make me feel worse.”

  Millie slowed the truck down to a crawl as we pulled into the Decker driveway. “The thing is,” she said, “I’ve never left the ranch during a fire.”

  After spending two weeks in Decker Canyon, I booked a standby ticket back to Boston, refilled my rental car with gas, and prepared for one last journey through the wormhole.

  On the morning of my departure, I hiked to the upper ranch to have one last look around. Several of the friendlier sheepdogs followed me, scurrying underfoot, yelping playfully, and then dashing ahead to lead the way. Eventually I found a perch just above Chip’s house, where I sat with the dogs and tossed pebbles down the slope. It was a cool, quiet morning. The sun hadn’t yet cleared the mountains and much of the canyon was still blanketed with shadows.

  The night before, Millie had asked me if I was ready to go home. Somehow this seemed like a loaded question. I was ready to go home, and yet I couldn’t help but feel what a pitifully tenuous word that was for me. Up until now this had never seemed to bother me. In fact, it was a point of pride. I had wanderlust! But as now, as I surveyed the Decker Ranch, I had to suppress a slight twinge of envy. Why didn’t my family have a home like this, with history and traditions and an almost organic sense of permanence? At what point had we opted for a life of transience—a life of following job opportunities, bigger yards, and better school districts? For months I had been assessing the costs of staying at home, but rarely had I considered the costs of moving, continually—twelve times in a lifetime and probably more—until home was nothing but a quaint thought smudged across a doormat. The simple truth of the matter was, I had never been connected to a place like this, and so of course the notion of braving home seemed both cur
ious and perverse.

  Later that morning, I cooked (though I should say burned) some french toast for Millie and me. “This is just great,” said Millie appreciatively. “You’ll have to cook it again on your next visit.” I nodded my head, rather embarrassedly, and kept chewing. “Maybe you’ll bring your riding boots and we can saddle up together,” continued Millie. I told her this sounded like fun, but that I didn’t own cowboy boots. Millie shot me a quizzical look, as if this were inconceivable.

  After breakfast I thanked Millie for taking me in, feeding me, and sharing her stories with me. “I’m going to miss you,” I told her finally.

  “You big prevaricator,” she replied. “Just give me a call once in a while. I can’t hear the phone ring, but the dog will bark when he hears it, and I’ll pick up eventually.”

  Hours later, as my plane cleared the runway at LAX, I looked out my window to take in one last glance at the Pacific Ocean and the Santa Monica Mountains in the distance. For a moment I thought I could make out Point Dume and the last stretch of the PCH that leads to Decker Canyon. Then we broke through the clouds and everything went white.