Fairview

“Fire, water, and government know nothing of mercy.”

—Anonymous Proverb

Up at four this morning, not with the usual sense of doom but just mentally active, too active for that time of day with P breezily snoring in a purr next to me, all darkness and quiet except between my ears. There was the usual torrent of worries: work, drafts that need to find their way out the door today, cases I've tried to settle but failed because the ultimate decision is always left to the client, who's usually been rendered insane by the prolonged suffering of a lawsuit.

Then I grabbed my phone and scrolled to see how the Bills fared after we went to bed halfway through the second quarter. They crushed the Rams, 31-10. As we watched the game on the couch last night, Peg was disturbed when she thought she read "Choose Life" on the back of Josh Allen's helmet. Could our favorite quarterback really be one of them? I searched the internet in the darkness this morning. Nope, it said "Choose Love", a response to the horrific shooting in Buffalo a couple months back. The NFL has given players a choice of messages to affix to the backs of their headgear, all affirming and hopeful and, well, sort of liberal.

I'll always have mixed feelings about the NFL, knowing that those young men we're cheering on each weekend stand a pretty good chance of leaving their brains in jars of formaldehyde for future study. But it's a way out for a lot of kids from bad neighborhoods who seem more than anything to aspire to the big house in the suburbs and posse of nice kids that was once the American Dream. If this is the vehicle that propels them there, or at least gives them that chance, can it be all bad?

Then I got sucked into a photo essay on the life of Elizabeth II, beautifully assembled and curated by the NYT this morning. But, narcissist that I am, I started noting the age of this graying, wrinkled, increasingly stooped woman, and noted that the geriatric in a number of the shots was in fact younger than I am today. Old age has a way of creeping up on us, and it called me up short to realize the reason my brain and body have turned to flab isn't so much my lifestyle habits as the passage of time. I can keep eating arugula and working out at the gym, but it's a losing battle, the act of sweeping back the tide with a broom.

Then I happened on a startling photo of a group of firefighters battling the Fairview blaze yesterday.

The fire now threatens one of my many "hometowns", Hemet, California. Perched at the edge of the desert, cradled on three sides by brushy hills that ascend to the 10,800 foot summit of Mount San Jacinto, Hemet has always been vulnerable to brushfires, particularly during the season of the Santa Ana winds in the early fall.

I've been following the fire largely through the posts of my high school classmates who stayed in the valley or returned to the neighborhood years later. There are photos of billowing smoke a few miles from their patios, complaints of power failures and rumors of evacuation. The state plans to evacuate 22,000 of them today, as the first gusts from the remains of Hurricane Kay threaten to propel the fire at 60 miles an hour towards town.

I found a map in the NYT showing in detail where the fire is burning in relation to the neighborhoods around Hemet.

On the actual NYT page one can scroll in and view it by street. I found Rim Road in Valle Vista, where I first lived with my grandparents when I came to Hemet in 1980. The fire is only a few blocks away this morning, the reddish blob at the very top of the above illustration practically in what was once our front yard. Will that home on the hill, filled with so many memories, some of them good, still be there this weekend?

That first night in Hemet, forty-two years ago almost to the day, the hills to the south were on fire. I remember sitting on the patio by the pool, dark orange groves and then the twinkling grid of Hemet stretched below us, and watching the string of flames creep down the hills toward the Ramona Bowl, fascinated and transfixed as Grandma sipped a martini and Grandpa a Gewurztraminer, flames leaping into the air. Within a day or two the fire was under control; life went on. It's just a part of living in the California desert.

A couple years later, my mother would for the only time ever veto her son's summer vocational plans that would have brought me back into contact with the flames. Back then she was dating Bob Lynn, a chain-smoking, leathery captain with the California Department of Forestry. Picture the Marlboro Man dressed in Smokey the Bear's uniform. Bob was a nice guy, very quiet, solicitous of the pimply teenager who came with the pretty schoolteacher. One afternoon around the time I was graduating from high school, I rode out to Hemet Ryan Field in my 1973 avocado green Datsun pickup to crawl around the CDF's fleet of C-119s with Bob as my tour guide.

The C-119, dubbed the "Flying Boxcar", had been a cargo workhorse in the early days of the Vietnam War. As the Air Force moved to more able transports, it consigned the C-119s to surplus, where they were grabbed up by the CDF for use dumping fire retardant on the brushfires that always plagued California's parched hills.

They even jerry-rigged a little jet engine on top, to give it a little extra kick lifting all those tons of fire retardant off the runway. How cool is that?

Of course, their safety record wasn't the best. These planes were already tired, and the forces to which they were subjected as they dive-bombed patches of burning sagebrush and were walloped by updrafts from the flames caused them to sometimes, well, break up in the air. There are worse ways to go, I guess.

And besides, at seventeen I was immortal.

So when Bob intimated that they had a couple openings for aircrew members to ride around in the open cargo bays on their bombing runs, managing the dispersal of the Phos-Chek and cleaning up the mess left behind after landing, I couldn't wait to start the coolest summer job a new high school graduate could ever imagine. You can spend your summer wearing a paper hat and shoveling fries at Carl's Jr.; this cowboy is flying into fires!

Mom did not share my excitement, however, being all of thirty-seven at the time and keenly aware that creeping mortality could become leaping death if one did things like riding through firestorms in the open bay of a rickety, thirty-year old surplus transport. She let me know in no uncertain terms not only that she didn't like the idea, but that it was simply not an option. I think Bob found himself in the doghouse simply for bringing it up.

Soon Grandpa, her father, corralled me for the summer working in the much safer confines of the Hemet Unified School District, as a maintenance man. I spent most of those scorching months in the summer of 1982 crawling around in attics patching asbestos insulation around pipes while wearing jeans, a t-shirt and a low-grade surgical mask as my only protection. I'd emerge at the end of the day looking like a ghostly apparition, covered in plaster and asbestos dust.

The jury's still out on whether that exercise was every bit as fatal as flying into brushfires. So far, so good (knock on wood).

And eventually I'd get my chance to fly around among things that were burning and blowing up around me. It wasn't all it was cracked up to be.

But enough reverie this Friday morning. I have a writing schedule that's as long as my arm, and plan to sneak off and buy a couple steaks as a surprise for P when she gets home from work. Let's keep that little secret among us. Maybe I'll even splurge on a green vegetable, and a nice bottle of red.

Happy Friday, to all of us. And if you're so inclined, pray for all those folks who may lose their homes in the next day or so in my old hometown, if they haven't seen those sacred spaces burn up already.