In Lookin’-Good Weather, Malibu Residents Warily Watch the Hills : Fire: What we glumly contemplate, this time of year, is tinder-dry chaparral and Santa Ana winds howling down the coastal canyons.

The television weatherman carols: “Another bee-yoo-tiful day in the Southland! Get right down to the beach!” On the Weather Channel, a lass chirrups that Southern California is “lookin’ good.” (In what they call “Wakin’ Up Time,” they like to drop their Gs. Real folksy, the Weather Channel.)

But it’s not lookin’ good to longtime Malibu residents like me and my wife, nor to B-shift Capt. John Dishaw and his men at the county’s Fire Station 88 on Malibu Road. What we glumly contemplate, this time of year, is tinder-dry chaparral on the hillsides and Santa Ana winds howling down the coastal canyons, days and nights described by the TV weatherpersons with the friendly word “breezy.”

Not that we who are privileged to live here on the coast crave sympathy for our plight. Like all the many peoples of Asia and the Americas who inhabit the Pacific’s lovely but perilous Rim of Fire, we must pay the price exacted by a fair-minded Mother Nature: the constant threat of earthquake, volcanic eruption, flood, tsunami and, when the Santa Anas blow, the ravenous monster called brush fire.

None of us, most of all Dishaw and his crew, can count on getting much sleep when a dome of high pressure over the Great Basin floods us with desert air, heating by compression as it sinks. We just wish that the cheery weather broadcasters would come to realize that hot and dry is not always good, nor cold and wet necessarily bad. It was Shakespeare who linked the quality of mercy to the gentle rain from heaven.

We had a taste of mercy a couple of weeks ago, when a minor rainstorm hit the coast, enough to lay the dust, temporarily, and perhaps save a few of our dying trees. But in the last four years we have averaged a mere 8.7 inches of rain per year in Malibu.

The rest of California hasn’t done much better, and this means poor years for the Sierra snowpack, on which much of the state’s economy depends. There can be political consequences. As farms, orchards, lawns and gardens shrivel in the San Joaquin Valley, Santa Barbara and Malibu, Gov.-elect Pete Wilson’s mandate could dry up in Sacramento. He, like the rest of us, should be praying for rain.

An old Arab saying has it that every dog believes his own fleas are gazelles, and it is only natural that we residents of Malibu should be mostly concerned with local problems, such as the threat of fire. Malibu is expanding into a city physically as well as politically, and Dishaw and his colleagues are well aware of the fact that the county’s firefighting potential in this rapidly developing area could be stretched to its limit in the event of another major brush fire like those of 1954, 1970, 1978, 1982 and 1985.

He emphasizes that while the firefighters can and will save most structures, in some cases homeowners will be forced to protect their own property.

When a windblown brush-fire approaches, one can have mental as well as physical problems. My wife and I tend to think of the fire in terms that imply motivation: It is trying actively and malevolently to get us. Others have confessed to similar feelings. What provokes such an anthropomorphic view of a natural phenomenon is the wind--the relentless, implacable wind. The wind is the fire and the fire is the wind. Air may be described as a perfectly elastic fluid, but not when it comes in 70-, 80- or even 100-knot gusts. Rarely--but still too often--the fire is so hot in a confined space, such as a narrow canyon, that the oxygen in the wind itself ignites, in the phenomenon called a firestorm. This happened once within a few hundred feet of our home.

As the fire roars down the mountainside, I have seen burning tumbleweeds lifted high in the air and dropped half a mile ahead of the wall of fire, with the entire area traversed by the blazing weeds exploding into flame. Then there is the smoke, seeded with sparks and flying embers. Surgical masks and tight-fitting goggles become a necessity.

Most brush fires hereabouts begin north of the mountains and sweep south until checked by the sea. (The Malibu coast runs not north and south, but due east and west.) Houses on the beach are just as vulnerable as those on the brushy hillsides. In 1970, at dusk after the fire had done its worst and the wind at last had relented, we were treated to the spectral sight of a row of smoldering ruins along the beach, each with a serene blue flame atop its still standing gas pipe.

Every fire is different, too--quirky, totally dependent on the wind. One fire my wife and I remember as the Horse Fire. We wound up with 16 stray horses in the pasture above our house. In recent years, trusting to brush clearance and experience, we have made no effort to load our cars with valuables and memorabilia. Where do you start? Where do you stop? We packed for earlier fires, when our three daughters were little, and wound up with cars stuffed with favorite dolls and other toys. Now we load only our two desert tortoises, who have lived with us for more than 30 years, and our Airedale. The wild animals are not so lucky, for their habitat is being destroyed. Yes, there is still wild life in the Malibu mountains. In fact, there are a few mountain lions in the hills above the new city.

During the 1985 fire, as the mosaic of flame in the canyon beside our house made the light as bright as day, we watched the true natives of the area come through the smoke across the highway and up from the canyon floor: bobcats, deer, coyotes, raccoons, possums, skunks, a tiny yellow flash that could only have been weasel.

Three black-crowned Night Herons, driven from their lacustrine world, circled overhead, etching a Japanese print against a crimson sky, followed by two Great Horned Owls, master killers fleeing for their lives. We couldn’t count the brush rabbits, ground squirrels, field mice, wood rats and shrews.

Some ran into unexpected perils. At the height of the fire’s assault, we were aware of swift movement between us and the wall of flame. A rabbit raced past, and after him in hot pursuit came William of Orange, an ancient cat belonging to one of our daughters.

That night, if not for Capt. Dishaw and for us, the ill wind lived up to the old adage. For William, if for no one else, things were lookin’ good.