October 26, 2007

• The Great Fire Season of Aught Seven

  

  And so now the fiery evil has come again--making no distinctions, devouring almost everything in its path, reminding us of our mortality and of this elemental, powerful force of nature. Triggered by either the evil hand of a yet-to-be-identified arsonist or some accidental flame, the new fires linked up with the hot, dry Santa Ana winds and soon became a driving firestorm of fearsome destruction and fury. The infernos engulfed parts of Malibu and areas of Riverside, San Bernardino and San Diego counties.

  From a Los Angeles Times editorial printed in the year 1993, 14 years ago.

  

  "Beauteous Destruction"
  poetry by Michael F. Nyiri
  July 20, 2004 6:50 pm  

  Oh how beauteous destruction appears,
  From within, and on high
  Sizzling the crackling leaves
  Heatsore and hellish
  Clamoring, climbing,
  Astounding ferocity
  Blighting bright skies
  Engulfing ranges of mountainous majesty
  Swallowing green and brown with equal fury
  A cloud of calamity, bowing to no master
  Beauteous appears destruction, oh how
  as she billows in glory, as if
  Heavenly clouds of angels sing
  The mystic spark of kindling bring
  And the flightless
  and flighted take wing
  Amazing wondrous cloud
  Ringed in black as night
  Amazing wondrous sight
  Washed against brilliant blue
  Smokey
  Smiling at such peacefulness around her
  As she catches fire
  Again
  Beauteous destruction blows south
  With a vengeance unfelt in the valley
  But sensed,
  As beauteous destruction walks on

  

  I took the photograph above in July of 2004, when I wrote the poem as well. The "cloud" is a cloud of smoke from a forest fire in the San Gabriel Mountains. I took this nearly 50 miles away from the fire on the top of the Palos Verdes hills looking north. It was a sunny summer day, fully three months before Fire Season usually starts. Normally on a bright day you would be able to see the mountainous terrain, hidden here by "beauteous destruction."

   

  
  Fire warms and comforts us
  And energy is consumed and exhumed
  by it's fickle embers
  Fire, captured and kindled
  unleashes great burning desires
  and causes our cold winters
  to become more bearable
  Fire tamed and tortured
  helps mold our very cities and
  give us unparalleled growth
  as people
  Sometimes fire burns out of control
  and no amount of water can
  end it's marching fury
  Carried on the wind and
  settling on the land
  it burns everything in it's path
  The very warmth
  that comforts
  causes burning
  calamity
  and
  death

  From the poem "It's Elemental" by Michael F. Nyiri 11/25/05

  

  "Blood on the Moon" A "red moon" photographed with no filters nor tweaked with any special effects. For three nights this past week, the emerging full moon shone through a red haze, caused by the smoke, ash, and soot blown about by the 17 major fires burning throughout Southern California.

  

  These photos of the moon were taken early on Thursday morning, at about 5:30 am. By Friday, the "normal" marine layer had returned, and the air was moist and not hot and dry, as it has been all week.

  

  I live in Lomita, south of Los Angeles, close to the beach. We are at least 40 miles from any of the fires which raged last week. I work in Long Beach, 15 miles east, a town which always seems to get cloaked in soot and ash every fire season. During a particularly fiery week, like last week, the entire southland seems ablaze. Where I live and work we don't see the actual flames. At no time was I in danger. The fires were raging in the brush filled hills and mountains on the other side of the San Gabriel Valley and farther to the north, in Malibu and  to the south, in the city of  Irvine in Orange County, and worst of all in San Diego County, where the Witch fire caused over 500,000 San Diegans to be evacuated from it's fury (sometimes two or three times, as the winds changed and the fires changed course.)

  

  I must admit that as an amateur photographer, I would have liked to be able to present some stunning shots of "beauteous destruction". However, I stay away from the areas where fire has become a playful demon. For one thing, it's very dangerous. And another, I don't want to be one to get in the way of the firefighters, brave souls who do not sleep, barely eat, and risk life and limb to battle the beast. It's best that the rest of us stay away and don't bother them.

  

  I refuse to watch the television news, but I have seen the destruction in video on the web and in each and every edition of the L.A. Times since Monday. Each cover story includes a fiery photo splashed across the front of the newspaper. The images above were taken, along with video, of a fire in Baker, California, I stumbled across while driving back from Vegas in the early aughts. These are NOT photos of  last week's fires.

  

  I am not close to anyone who lived in the firey areas. My boss, Jack, has a vacation home in Lake Arrowhead, which he still doesn't know about it's fate, even four days after we first heard about the Arrowhead fires. His "cabin" narrowly escaped being burned in the Firestorm of Aught Three. But the fires were on the other side of the lake. This time, the fire burned the streets around his house, but nobody knows for sure if his house was spared or not. His daughter called the cabin from Florida, and got the answering machine. We joked that either the house is okay, or else it burned down and the answering machine is all right and still taking messages. Some times you have to have a sense of humor during times like this. Above is a composite photo combining the "red moon" with the fire in Baker.

  I offer a prayer to the victims and the survivors.

  On the Friday before the current firestorms began, culminating in 17 separate fires in total, a movie opened in Los Angeles called "Things We Lost in the Fire"

  A lot of the area in Malibu which burned this past week, in the first major fire, was the same area which burned in 2003. The area had completely been rebuilt, and will probably be rebuilt again.

  Some facts and figures:  As of Friday afternoon, the wildfires killed at least 12 people, had blackened some 800 square miles of Southern California and destroyed 2,000 homes and other structures. At one time last week, Qualcomm stadium in San Diego, home of the Chargers football team, housed 10,000 displaced San Diegans. (I refuse to call them "refugees" as in the media.) Last word is that the Chargers will play their scheduled game against the Houston Texans at Qualcomm on Sunday.

  One of my workmates has a daughter who attends college in San Diego. She lives in an apartment, and she was evacuated on Monday. Her college terminated classes and as soon as she got to the hotel to which she was evacuated first, in another area of San Diego, she was immediately evacuated to another area in Oceanside. Thankfully, by Wednesday, she was back home with her mother in Orange County. (looking over her shoulder)

  Tonight where I live there was an unsteady calm, and the sky was rimmed with cirrus clouds. The smoke had almost cleared, and the evening sky was a dark blue instead of a hazy red. Maybe the weather will give everyone a break. The Santa Ana Winds, the condition of hot dry winds sometimes topping 50 mph, which spreads the fires, are not finished blowing, although they seem to have quit for now. More of them appear sporadically all the way into December some seasons.

  We all pray for rain, but as soon as the rains come, if they come, the areas which have been burned in the fires become muddy, and then Mudslide Season begins.

  And you know, in other disaster news, we've been hearing about the "big one", the monster earthquake which is supposed to cause parts of SoCal to fall into the sea, since the early 70s.

  But these rare and destructive times are offset by the beautiful weather and lovely landscape which covers the area 7/8 of the year. 

  ---

  EDIT: 10/26. 9:20am pdt. I just added the "Fire" section of my 2005 poem "It's Elemental" to this post.

  • 10:10 pm
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