Joan had evacuated as flames marched over the ridge line of the hill across the street, coming as fast as a person walks. She had stuffed her Volvo with financial documents, vital but small items like safety deposit keys, passports and telephone directories, plus our photo albums, the oldest of our Japanese woodblock prints, jewelry, and cherished oddments of our accumulated history.
She had been putting the pets in the car when a guy walked up and asked if she needed help loading things in the car. She suspected he was in fact interested in getting into the house, so said no thanks. He ambled away. Just as she was ready to slam the trunk closed, our postman pulled up, looking rather anxious. She took the day's mail, jumped into the car, and headed downhill. People were barreling down at high speed. The postman followed her out, stopping to deliver to homes which were soon to burn, flames approaching behind him. At the time, she said, it did not occur to her to laugh. Later, she did.
A police chaplain came by and we talked about losing the house. I couldn't seem to get my mind around the concept. We were leaving the center to go back to the friends when a neighbor called to us. He had lost his house, his classic car collection included. But he had seen our house standing at nine PM, he was pretty sure. It was hard to tell in the darkness, though, without street lights. This heartened us greatly but I had severe doubts that anything could have survived the furnace I had seen.
We reached friends, an Episcopal minister and wife, at midnight. We slept solidly until six PM. Up, talk, news on TV -- which I found oddly uninteresting, and distrusted. Breakfast out. I always eat a lot in the morning, having grown up in farm country, and this time ordered double. The restaurant seemed eerie in its calm. Pancakes and omelettes, the fire only a rank smell from distant hills.
Back to the center, where we wore away the day vainly seeking news. Nobody released any information on homes burned. News programs dwelt infuriatingly on the spectacular wasteland at the top of our hill, never letting the helicopter camera angle descend to take in lower Skyline Drive. Reports continued that everything had burned on Skyline. I was inclined to believe them, though I kept saying encouraging things to all I talked to, including our daughter Alyson, by cellular phones supplied free. I distracted myself by searching for clothes in the immense piles donated by charitable groups. I was still wearing the shorts and short-sleeved shirt I had been lecturing in, what seemed a year ago.
At four PM word came that since all fires were out we could go back into town. We left, I picked up my car, and we edged our way into Laguna. Behind me, out of my sight, Joan's Volvo overheated, stranding her for nearly two hours on Coast Highway.
Dusk fell as I reached the high school again, only to be blocked by police. Nobody allowed on the hill. Nope, not even residents. They were trying to prevent looting. Grim warnings.
I simply could not turn back. This was my neighborhood and I knew the short cuts. I slipped around the police lines, over ash-covered tennis courts, along a path and up through several burned homes, on to Skyline. Several news teams were arrayed among the ruins with portable gear, shooting interviews under their bright lights. Media okay, but homeowners keep out.
Melted cars and ashy gray debris littered Skyline. Cables down, charred palm trees. A heavy acrid stench made me cough. I walked uphill and around a curve. Amid the black ruins our house stood untouched. I approached in a daze. The battle to save it was visible only in fire hoses left in the street, boot prints in the yard and minor damage to plants.
Two doors were unlocked, one ajar. Inside, the smoky stink could not blanket my immediate reaction: home. Safe. Numbly I collected some floppy disk backups from my study. Pointless, but automatic. Our fireproof safe stood with both drawers yawning open. I took it all in but wasn't thinking much.
I departed in the gathering gloom. The street outside was covered with ash and burnt scraps. Somehow I didn't want to leave the hill, even in the gloom. I could not comprehend the enormity of others' loss, and of our luck. A German TV crew interviewed me when they found I could speak German. Crisis surrealism; a foreign tongue that recalled war zone damage.
Still dazed, I wondered where Joan was. Turned out she had been exhausted by the overheated car and traffic, and stopped at a friend's. She was quite wrung out. We finally linked up again and spent the night at a nearby friend's house. The next day, Friday, we even got into our house. About eighty percent of the neighborhood was gone, 199 homes, probably $200 million lost. In the whole town over 350 burned, with losses around $500 million.
The water had run out again and again through the long fight. Fire-men had been forced to abandon whole blocks to the swift flames. Around our group of a dozen homes they had drawn a perimeter and defended, using the hydrant across the street from us, which had high pressure. They worked around the houses, trampled vegetation, got the job done. The flames had come down our hill and the firefighters had stopped them at the curb across the street from our house.
Then the fire worked south, burning all the homes downhill from us, and leaped Skyline. It burned a dozen more homes below and then crawled up our canyon to within thirty meters of our house. The fire-men hit the flames with a 500 gallon-per-minute, precision high-velocity cannon. After several hours that did it. Our canyon was a black pit.
Apparently the initial small fire far inland was set by someone, the media said. I didn't care much for these larger views; my focus had narrowed to the local, intense present. Time to clean up. Our unlocked doors apparently were the firemen's work, checking for people unable to get out. Joan had left our safe closed, but not locked. A looter had come through and checked it, finding only financial papers. He took nothing. That must have been while the police cordon kept out homeowners, but not entrepreneurs ready for the quick take.
Wildlife had suffered enormously. Dead birds littered the canyon. In the hills beyond a walk through the black slopes came to a twisted wire fence. Against it was a line of white bones, the lizards and rabbits and snakes and rats and deer that had run in blind panic into it and turned to face the onrushing wall of heat.
I trapped a two-pound rat in our tool shed, and saw rats the size of cats jumping between palm trees. From our deck we watched hawks diving at mice as they scampered for shelter on the bare hillsides. We put out seed and water and birds flocked -- gnatcatchers, hummingbirds, red-tailed hawks, crows, brilliantly hued mountain bluebirds.
Two Dalmatians were found roaming, having somehow escaped their burning house. Boaters three miles offshore saw an exhausted mule deer doe swimming out to sea, away from the blighted canyons where she usually foraged. They hauled her in and brought her back for care. On the canyons, gray tree frogs turned spontaneously black, closely matching the charred ground. Somewhere in their genes lies the memory of many other fires, and a honed response to give them protection from predators, somehow triggered by the sight or smell of the flames.
All this seemed very distant, in the immense relief at being among the survivors. Our house was not particularly expensive, but what really matters, I came to feel, was how much of yourself you had put into your home. Neighbors recently moved in walked away from their ruins with apparently some aplomb. Oldtimers were more devastated.
We both slept poorly for several nights, chased by phantom flames in repeating dream dramas. Those who had lost everything were forlorn, adrift. When the Santa Ana winds picked up again, one woman who had been evacuated in the fire began automatically loading her car with cherished photographs. Some elderly couples developed the habit of taking their dearest possessions with them everywhere they went.
Counselors at the Community Clinic spoke of "post traumatic stress disorder" and of conducting "critical incident stress debriefings" but the phenomena they tried to capture with such jargon was real. I kept going over how close it had been, with the unsettled mind of one who has been shot at and barely missed.
As a scientist I habitually saw cause and effect, but the random nature of the world had asserted itself here. Much of our culture
devotes itself obsessively to the comfy human world, our gossip and relationships and destinies. Now we had all been reminded that the world itself neither likes nor dislikes us; worse, in a way, it is indifferent. The fire had no point, no target in itself-- though whoever started it probably did. However much I believed as a scientist in an objective, unconcerned universe out there, which we study to understand, my emotions veered away from that.
The calamity had missed us by a hair. We had fireproofed the roof with concrete tile five years before, recoated with thick fire-resistant paint in 1992, and the morning of the fire had a garden crew clearing out the volatile underbrush. They had fled only when the flames danced above the ridgeline, just behind Joan. We had been prepared, sure, but we were hugely lucky, too.
We had already been through the slide and burning in our little canyon in January 1993, which took out the three homes immediately below us. The immensely larger ferocity of this catastrophe was numbing. A week later, a sudden rain flooded out the five surviving homes across the street. Sandbags in our driveway deflected the ash-laden streams from us. The big storms of winter were worse.
I missed no classes and got back to research soon. But my thinking was unsettled and in reading Plato I found a curious dislocation.
An unbroken tradition stretches from Pythagoras and his theorems to Copernicus and his planetary circles. But for most of the 1300 years between them, astrology dominated civilization's attitude toward the heavens. Astrology takes a more warm, comfy view of the sky, makes it human-centered.
Greek geometry and deductive thought were unique inventions, never duplicated by other cultures. The very notion that the cosmos is ultimately open to reason comes naturally only to minds who see how general deductive reasoning is. Greek patterns of thinking barely escaped the turmoil of intervening millennia, and if lost would probably never have been reinvented.
Did Euclidean certainties come in part from an unconscious association with the clarity of air and sea and crisp, dry land? I had noted the similar feel to California and Greece, and to the Egyptian city of Alexandria, where Euclid wrote his Elements. Did they see sharp visions of cause and effect because they lived in air of razor clarity? Did it hint of a realm beyond the clutter of detail, accident, emotion? In a pristine world it is easier to imagine a province of the eternal which obeyed finer, more lofty and graceful laws.
The fire impressed me with the sheer raw power of nature. It disoriented my thinking and made difficult a return to the calculations I was doing in turbulence theory. Some part of me could not settle down to the neat, clean equations, precise markings for exact quantities; the world outside was too rife with emotion, friction, brutal forces, malicious intent. The universe seemed to be threatening, not standing at an abstract distance.
If science was such an unlikely event, one time only, perhaps we should be more mindful that its habits of mind persist in our own time. We cannot rely on clear air to insure our trust in abstract reasoning.
Further, think of the assumptions behind the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Will intelligent life develop deductive reasoning? And then build radios? If it was a singular event for us, how might the raw edge of alien environments blot out those analytical habits which have led us up from darkness? Unsettling thoughts.
There is great relief in this aftermath, of course. Still, sometimes it felt as if the world would keep trying until it got us. I suppose in a way it will.
A Conversation with Gregory Benford
Interview with Stephen Davis
I read a brief bio of you that mentioned you were involved in trying to bring the WorldCon to Dallas in the late fifties. You would have been, what, seventeen or eighteen at the time?
Yeah. Seventeen or eighteen, exactly.
Do you remember why Dallas lost the bid?
Well, it lost a few years later because, I think, Chicago had a better bid, and also because the Dallas Futurian Society fell apart. I went off to university, and other people went off, and we were kind of the people holding it together and the rest of the people just dissolved. Our big peak was the Southwestern Con, which was held in July of 1958, two months before the WorldCon. That was the first Con ever put on in Texas. I have the weird distinction of having been the instigator of the first Con in Texas and the first Con in Germany.
Oh!
The German convention was in fact in '56.
Were you a fan of science fiction before you knew you wanted to make a career in science?
Yes. I started reading SF when I was probably nine or eight.
Who were the authors you were reading then? I'm assuming Asimov, Bradbury...
Well, actually my first discovery was Heinlein, and then later Bradbury and Clarke, and then Asimov.
So, you were attracted to the guys who were writing -- well, I want to say in the "hard sf" mode, but I imagine that wasn't as popular as it became later.
Oh, yeah. That's certainly the case. But remember, hard SF -- there was something like it then, but there wasn't nearly the feeling of specialization. I mean, the field was not nearly so self-aware then.
I guess it was a little more pulp-driven in the fifties.
Definitely. But hard SF emerged as an ideology only in the very late fifties, early sixties, to some extent in response to the New Wave. I mean it was the kind of thing people had been doing, but not naming.
Do you think your interest in science fiction is what drove you toward a career in science?
Oh, sure. That's true of a very large number of scientists. I've checked, and I'd say fifty percent of those I've asked read it vociferously.
Now that you've managed to have success both as a physicist and a novelist, if you had to make a choice, would you rather have the world remember you as a physicist or as a science fiction writer?
I think as a writer, because scientists generally have little of themselves carried forward in their work. Most people don't, when they talk about DNA, think about Watson and Crick anymore. And it's because of the application of science to the larger world that it does not contain the stolistic idiosyncrasy of the arts, generally. So, scientific immortality is of a different kind.
So it doesn't even do you any good if you have a process named after you? Will we be talking about Dyson spheres long after we've forgotten who Dyson is?
Quite possibly so. Look at say, Hobson's Choice. Who was Hobson? He was a guy who ran a stable in Cambridge. His choice was that he had one horse, and he'd tell you that you could have any horse you want... just choose one.
[Laughter] Sounds like Ford's Choice: you can have any color car you want, as long as it's black.
That's right, but people have forgotten who Hobson was, though we still have Hobson's Choice.
Is there one particular award or achievement in science or science fiction that you're especially proud of?
I'm proud of receiving two Nebulas, and in the sciences, winning the Lord Foundation.
I wanted to ask you about that. What is involved in that prize?
Well, the Lord Foundation gives a set of awards, I think every three years. I got the one for contributions to science, generally. It's very nice. They bring you to Pittsburgh. They have this huge, formal dinner out in the middle of the Carnegie Museum. They give you a painting of yourself. There's a wonderful reception and some cash, and they take such good care of you. They fly you out first class and give you a limousine and driver for as long as you want. We stayed for five days. I mean we went out and saw the Robert Frost home, Falling Waters, and it was just a great time. I had never been to Pittsburgh.
OK, now this is kind of a naïve question, I'm sure, but keep in mind that I had to go through all the sciences as a college freshman before I found one I could pass courses in: Has physics reached the point where, even if we don't know all the answers, we at least know all the questions?
No. We don't even know the right questions, I think, for many of the major issues. I don't think our way of seeing the universe is the la
st way. The fact is there are some questions that are so hard to solve, especially concerning origins of the universe. Looking at the problem of the origin of life, for example, suggests that we're asking the question the wrong way.
Do you see an area of physics that offers the most potential for a break-through or discovery that would alter the way we live or think about the universe?
Uhm... wow. [Laughter] I would say that the physics of information. Everything such as... where does information go when it falls into a black hole? We really just don't have a clue. We don't know what happens to all the physically conserved things that fall into a black hole and don't come out. What law of conservation is obeyed in all this we don't know.
Let me move on to your latest book, Cosm. Through some strange quirk the book I read immediately before Cosm was a non-fiction work by someone whose name I can't remember at the moment. I think it was called The Last Three Minutes.
Oh. Paul Davies.
The author mentions false and true vacuums and as I understood it, the idea was that we might be living in a bubble of false vacuum, and that if a particle from our bubble bridges across to the true vacuum, everything in our universe comes to an end. Now, you've put a little bit of a different twist on this in Cosm, and I wondered if you could explain your use of the theory.
Well, basically, instead of our living in a false vacuum, I say that this experiment at Brookhaven, upcoming in seven more years, has a small possibility of creating essentially a whole new universe in its own separated out space-time and leaving behind just a narrow bridge. None of this is my idea. These are calculations that a number of physicists have published in the literature, and it caught my attention in the early '90s. And I simply take this and say, if it's true, what would follow: What are the huge philosophical issues? What is your moral posture if you have created a universe? Are you responsible for all the good and evil that occurs in it? What does good and evil mean? How can you tell? You can't even see individual people in this universe, if they exist.
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