I was dead asleep when the phone rang at 6:30am on Thursday, November 11th, 1993.
Rick, it’s Karen. I sat up in bed.
You’re up early, what’s up? I was now fully awake.
Your mountain is on fire, she said, and I hung up without saying goodbye.
Before I smelled it, before I saw it, I heard it: eighty-mile-per-hour winds driving a wall of flames over the ridge a few hundred yards away, the sound of tanks in a battalion roaring toward our new home. I woke the family with my panicked shout: There’s a fire! A fire. We got to get out of here. NOW!
Barely dressed, we grabbed our wallets, arms full of photo albums, and our Old English Sheep dog and stuffed ourselves in the car as the flames slid down the ridge toward us. I’d left the moon roof open, so hot cinders rained on us as we drove into our smoke-filled cul de sac and headed down the hill, the dog howling mad with fear not unlike what pounded in each of our chests.
We wouldn't know it until the end of the day, but our home survived the inferno. The closest the flames got was to burn across the grass in our back yard to the edge of the brick patio. Half of the homes in our mountain neighborhood were ashes by that evening. We were among the fortunate.
I don’t think of that November morning very often, but on January 7th, when I first heard about the Altadena fire, an ember of memory buried under thirty-two years of ash ignited again and I felt the heat and heard the roar and saw the flames of that long-ago fire. I felt the fear: that pounding in the heart when the world goes off its axis and reels out of control.
Again, we have been among the most fortunate. Our son evacuated his east Pasadena home early Tuesday evening and stayed with his sister away from the mountains. Minutes after he called to tell us he was leaving, friends called from Altadena's hillsides, the dead center of the worst of the fires. We’re in the car. Can we come to your place?
They stayed Tuesday and Wednesday nights, finding out only in the late afternoon on Wednesday that all but three of the homes on their block were cinders; one of those spared was theirs. Our son went home on Wednesday to find his house unscathed. Thousands have lost their homes; two dozen or more have lost their lives.
No one is allowed into the neighborhoods where the fires levelled eight thousand structures – homes, markets and hardware stores and restaurants, several churches and Pasadena’s primary synagogue – so we have only the same videos that are seen worldwide of the Fire Monster, and the plunder and heartbreak in its wake.
We live in a town house on Orange Grove Boulevard in Pasadena where the Rose Parade officially begins. A week before the fire broke out, at 8am on a sunny Wednesday, January 1st, a bat-like B-2 stealth bomber flew the length of Colorado Boulevard to announce the beginning of the parade. Across the street, the first band started marching half a mile up Orange Grove where bands and floats and horses make a right turn on to Colorado Boulevard. They march five miles in front of hundreds of thousands of spectators, our city’s signature celebration of the new year.
One week later, on the morning of a very different Wednesday the 8th, the fire had been raging for twenty-four hours. I drove to work along that same Rose Parade route up Orange Grove weaving around fallen magnolia trees. There were no other cars. I made the same right turn onto Colorado Boulevard where my office is. It was eerily vacant: no traffic, no pedestrians, not a single store open (as my friend commented, when there’s no Starbucks you know it’s a weird moment), just a dense bank of gray smoke that limited my sight to several blocks. In one week, from the Rose Parade to the Dark Side of the Moon.
Next winter we are scheduled to sell our town house and move to a new retirement community in Altadena that was, until Tuesday and Wednesday, nestled in a neighborhood of homes, churches, and small businesses. Our future home was spared but as a friend who is also moving there said recently, there’s not much of a neighborhood left to be part of. Like so many of those who would have been my future neighbors, I don't know what that will look like.
Midway through Tuesday evening, not many hours after the fire started, I heard a TV anchor use the word apocalypse to describe the massive destruction. I hear the word often in descriptions of the devastation in Gaza, or in other places where war or natural disasters have laid waste to the land.
But there is another (and to me more interesting) meaning of the word apocalypse. Beginning in Jewish literature after Israel’s return from captivity in Babylon nearly six hundred years before the birth of Jesus, the Greek word was used to mean disclosure or, more powerfully, revelation.
In its original context, the sages were suggesting that in reflecting on their recent captivity, Israel might discover something significant about what it means to be God’s children and members of the community. Some deeply spiritual truth might be revealed in the ashes of a catastrophe. This understanding of apocalypse was carried over into Christianity and, later, into Islam.
Right now, we’re in survival mode: there are embers and hot spots, and the winds have returned. People need medical and psychological care, electricity and uncontaminated water. Thousands of people need housing. In the midst of these immediate needs, conversations are already beginning about what the future will look like. It will be a long road to find out what will be revealed by this apocalypse.
Though it’s painful to admit, we do not stay focused on the victims of these disasters for long before our attention is diverted by the next event that threatens our own security. Our compassion for this fall and winter’s hurricane victims in Florida and flood victims in North Carolina are overwhelmed by the scale and rapidity of crisis after crisis. Short-term attention does not match the pace of recovery, which takes years to complete: efforts in Puerto Rico to rebuild after Hurricane Maria struck on September 20, 2017 are ongoing.
Perhaps the revelation will include an acceptance of the environmental disasters amplified by an indifference to the natural world, first signaled in Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring in 1962. Wind, rain, fire: these destructive ingredients are all fueled by a failure to take science seriously.
It doesn’t help that many among our leadership consider the climate crises a hoax (or find it politically expedient to claim that they do) and are champions of Drill, baby, drill! even when it leads to Burn, baby, burn. Industries like petroleum, auto manufacturing, and coal chase profits without accountability for their destructive consequences. They resist the regulations that would blunt the fierce weather patterns that recur now so often that we barely have time to grieve the destruction of one before another wreaks havoc elsewhere.
To further complicate the politics of apocalypse, it takes public money – money raised from taxes – to fund any significant response to these cataclysmic events. No town or city or county or state, nor all of them combined, can pay for Florida’s recovery from hurricanes or North Carolina’s from floods or Los Angeles’ from conflagration. Only federal funds are sufficient, the funds raised by taxes on individuals and corporations. Guess who employs armies of accountants to find loopholes and exceptions for any proposed regulations or tax increases that might be used for the safety and well-being of all of us?
What has been revealed only a week into this current crisis is something we see so often at the heart of apocalyptic moments: the web of human kindness that binds communities together, neighbors helping one another, strangers reaching out with care and concern. It seems sad and inevitable that such kindness will be insufficient to match the scale of this crisis, and that this apocalypse, like so many before and those that will come after, will reveal the deep inadequacy of our current systems. Out of the fear and destruction of this moment, we have the opportunity to create a different vision for the future. We could imagine a world where we prioritize the well-being of the many rather than the few, where I matter and so do you. What a revelation that would be.
Dear Rick. I remember clearly the events of the 1993 fire. I was walking the dogs in the early morning in South Pasadena when I looked up and saw the flames near your house and rushed home to call you. I also remember helping to admit patients from a retirement community
in Altadena to Huntington Hospital where I was working at the time
So glad you and yours are okay. I’ve been thinking of you often
All is well here ❤️
We are grateful for your families safety!!! As always, thanks for your 'thinking's'. We are with you in every 'sentence'. --Gordy