Memories of Smoke and Fire

It all comes back to me

The Bel Air Fire, 1961. Corralled on the playground at Kenter Canyon Elementary School with all the other children, waiting for our mothers to come pick us up while ashes drifted over the chickenwire fence.

My brother was already at Paul Revere Junior High and so I waited all alone in my seven-year-old unknowing self, pondering the word our beloved principal Miss Itkin had used in her announcement on the school’s PA system: evacuation.

My mother, brother and I had left more than once before, packing our pajamas and our toothbrushes and some clothing for a few days, or maybe just a night at my aunt and uncle’s house in the Valley, until my father showed up at their door, his face drawn. Looking away from my mother’s bruised eye or swollen lip. Begging her to come back home with us again.

But this was happening to all the children in my school, not just me.

Furious smoke billowed above the ridge and we heard the unaccustomed sound of a helicopter and the wailing of fire-engines.

***

My mother brought car-coats for all of us: mine was a tartan red plaid. She left all my father’s artwork and photographic supplies. Left the guitars and the boxes of beautiful black-and-white prints he developed in his make-shift darkroom. Left his small collection of sculptures and paintings. Took two empty seltzer bottles that needed returning.

Did she take our dog? I can’t remember. I don’t remember the dog being in the car with us. Which dog did we have then? Was it Pete the Dalmatian? Or by then was it Linky the ill-tempered dachshund?

I think we must have gone to the duplex in Beverly Hills Nana and Papa shared with our Great Aunt Bertha and Uncle George, Papa’s sister and Nana’s brother, at whose apartment they met when Nana first emigrated from Russia in the early part of the century. My mother could show up at her parents’ house, in this instance, without shame.

The only aftermath I can remember is my father’s inditement of my mother’s stupidity in what she’d left behind.

Watching a documentary about the fire, made in 1962 with all the histrionic narrative trappings of that time, I can see that what my father forever after condemned as my mother’s failure was perfectly normal panic-stricken behavior. Shame-faced people throughout the video describe their irrational decisions about what to take and what to leave as they fled their homes. I watched, wondering if I’d see anyone I recognized from my long-ago past.

We were lucky: the fire spared our little house on Rochedale Way. Throughout the year that followed, my mom got calls from other mothers in Crestwood Hills, asking her to look through our photos and see whether there were any of their children from the birthday parties she and my father staged for us beneath the white alder tree they always hung with lolly-pops, just like the lolly-pop tree Burl Ives sang about on his album of children’s songs.

***

Twelve years later, when I was a much-too-young bride living in the mountains above UC Santa Cruz, the cabin next-door to ours burst into flames. The young professor who owned both the cabins wasn’t at home. As my husband backed our VW bug out of the driveway, to get it out of harm’s way, I was seized by a sense of panic that he was leaving me behind.

It was the smell of the smoke, I think.

Jim was very kind about comforting me, as we stood together at a safe distance, waiting for the fire engines to arrive.

The professor lost the only copy of his novel-in-progress. He’d left the heating-pad on. I was the one who ended up leaving, later that year.

***

In October 1991, a year before the birth of my son, I stood on the roof of a duplex on Ocean View Drive (which didn’t have an ocean view or any view at all). The amiable nurse-midwife next-door, who’d been helping me cope with the sorrows of a fourth-month miscarriage, stood on the roof with us, along with her husband and the children they still had living at home. The firestorm in the Oakland Hills lit up the night-time sky, a ravenous fire that melted cars and devoured thousands of houses, incinerating 25 people.

The ashes drifted down on us as we watched and worried that it was getting closer.

***

Twenty-six years later, also in October, another set of fires raged, this time in Sonoma County, where I was living on a little farm and vineyard across the lane from where we’d installed my fourth and last mother-in-law in a cute little red-painted house whose remodel I’d overseen, picking out all the tiles and making sure all the sinks and counters would be just right for someone so petite.

Melina, the young caregiver I’d found with the help of my friend Lucila, called Wayne in the middle of the night to ask if she and her father could come over to spend the night with Becky, as the flames of the Coffey Park Fire were getting dangerously close to the house where her family lived in Santa Rosa. Wayne and I went outside and saw the distant flames glowing in the darkness.

All of us ended up leaving, in two separate cars, as the daytime air filled with black smoke. It wasn’t a mandatory evacuation. We were just being cautious.

I wrapped the boxes of family photos and the illustrated pen-and-ink letters my father wrote to my mother when he was in the army, encased in a small cedar box along with the thick, chestnut-colored braid of Nana’s hair that she chopped off in the 1920s (reputedly causing Papa to cry). I wrapped these and the notebooks containing the drafts of my novels and poems, and my day-to-day complaints and observations, in two extra-large fire blankets.

We stayed away until the smoke died down, in an Air BnB on the beach in Aptos, with my mother-in-law, her dog that later became our dog, and Melina.

***

We work so hard and take such pains to preserve the stuff of our lives. But who’s going to care, really, about all the stuff I wrapped in fire blankets? Much of it is distributed in various rooms around this still-disorganized house in Connecticut.

My beloved child, 32 now, is distinctly unsentimental, at least when it comes to things belonging to people he never met.

Last time my brother and I spoke, we disagreed about who ended up with that cedar box containing my father’s love letters (which were just for show, anyway, as he and my mom married each other on the rebound, after their hearts were broken by someone else). After their divorce, when I was 14, they pretty much only spoke of one another with loathing. Because I look so much like my father, I was the unlucky recipient of a lot of my mother’s bitterness about the ways in which she’d been mistreated by him.

***

I’ve been obsessed with this latest conflagration in L.A, refreshing fire maps. Checking on people I know who still live there. Looking with disbelief at the hellscape left behind by the flames.

My body remembers the trauma of fleeing and the threat of smoke and fire. Does it remember further back than the start of this life, or my parents’ lives, to those relatives, unknown to me, who were incinerated in Nazi death-camps?

I’m so much more afraid of Donald Trump and his people than people who don’t have that ancestral memory.

This is one of the commonalities I have with my best friend here, a self-exiled Israeli. And with my sister-friend Dot, who worries every day about the safety of her three grandsons in the run-up to greater license being given to the police to harass people with black skin.

It’s an ancestral memory of being hunted down and killed—of all the guardrails disappearing. It’s a fear, for me, not only of losing everything but also realizing that I’ve never felt safe.

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