Canyon dwellers watch while Nature roars

BRUSH fires create awesome vistas, turning far horizons into maelstroms of billowing smoke spliced by fingers of glowing red flames.

From a distance, they seem almost painted against an otherwise clear blue sky as a lowering sun adds new tones to the chromatic blend, enhancing the illusion of a watercolor canvas.

The Chatsworth fire, burning through 25,000 acres at the moment, filled my senses as I was driving to the top of Topanga Canyon overlooking the San Fernando Valley.

I hadn’t been listening to the news Wednesday afternoon, and the presence of so awesome a scene against the northern ridgeline would be a shock to anyone, but it was especially so to those of us with homes in L.A.’s canyons.

Autumn is the season of the Santa Anas, the dry, blast-furnace winds that sweep down from the northeast and suck the moisture from the already wilting brush and from the air itself.

Like a mad dancer at a satanic ball, it whips itself into a frenzy, causing the branches of trees to spin in shifting tempos, leaves to fly wildly through the air and the humidity to plunge as though the bottom has dropped out of the sky.

Thus it was in the hills of Chatsworth, a community embraced by flames, and thus it was in the hills of Burbank and San Bernardino.

Parts of the San Fernando Valley became a traffic nightmare, as long lines of cars sought other routes to their homes as firefighters shut down the Simi Valley Freeway in the face of the relentlessly advancing fire.

Reminded of the epic traffic backup engendered by the evacuation of Houston in the face of Hurricane Rita, one can only imagine the nightmare that would be created if ever the citizens of Los Angeles were ordered to get out.

We have lived through many fires in our canyon home, with flames so close you could feel the heat. Our son, who is helping to fight the Chatsworth blaze, which, oddly, they are calling the Topanga fire, once stood on ground in a real Topanga fire that was hot enough to melt the soles of his shoes.

We watched the Chatsworth hillsides burn on TV, where the immediacy of cameras pointed toward the tears and the chaos caught their drama in full fury, like a movie of the week with astounding effects.

We saw not only the flames and smoke but heard the panicked words of those directly in their path, and the sobbing surrender of a man, watching his house burn to the ground, his voice choked: “I’m 60 and I’m homeless.”

Fire anywhere in Southern California is a warning to canyon dwellers, and we tend to spend our time alternately scanning the horizon, smelling the air for smoke and seeking a form of diversion from the whisper of the Santa Anas, still blowing as Wednesday night fell over the northern edge of the valley.

One of our diversions is to watch television’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” and I was drawn in to a scene between Larry David, playing himself, and the legendary comic/actor Shelley Berman, as his father. It was so good that I telephoned Berman, a friend since the 1950s when he was starring at San Francisco’s old hungry i and I was writing for the Oakland Tribune.

After a moment of discussing the show, he said, “Guess what I’m doing?” I said, “What?” expecting the kind of punch line that only a comic genius like Berman can deliver. He said, “Evacuating.”

There’s nothing funny about being forced to leave one’s home in the face of flames so terrifying that a garden hose assumes the equivalent of a popgun against a battalion of tanks. We stand on rooftops with hoses in our hands, feeling like fools to presume upon desperation that we can stop a firestorm.

It creates its own weather, heating the air before it, matching the whirling winds of the Santa Anas with self-generated gales, howling above the roar, involving every human sense as it surges down from the hillsides and across the tindered canyons.

At the moment, as daylight illuminates the battleground, helicopters dart like wasps over the flames, damping new outbreaks of fire that explode in the chaparral. At least one lumbering fixed-wing aircraft has arrived, spraying retardant on batches of flames too large for the choppers. It is a war of elemental forces, us against nature, a battle in which we can only hope for temporary victory.

As it has demonstrated along the Gulf Coast, nature is too often no mother of refinement but a witch out of hell, who can smash and burn without regard to the fragile structures that we place on the planet, and often bomb into kindling ourselves.

I asked a fire department captain once what else I could do to prepare for a fire after clearing the land and installing roof sprinklers. He said, “Move.” But here there is flood danger, and there earthquake danger, and there hurricane danger, and there tornado danger. Peril abounds on the sunniest of days.

Life is a trade-off, so I will take my chances with nature’s fury in an area of starry nights and cricket sounds but will always be aware of the hushed warnings of the devil winds that say, “We’re coming.”

Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at al.martinez @latimes.com.