Peril is the price of peace for those in the hills above Malibu

They watched their home burn on a television news show, broadcast in Santa Monica’s Broadway Deli, recognizing it through openings in the dark smoke that boiled skyward in the hills above Malibu.

The glass and stone dream house owned for 10 years by Bernard James and his wife was reduced in minutes last week to a stone fireplace and a couple of walls, standing like sentinels over a dark landscape of ashes and ruin.

Nearby, the Malibu Presbyterian Church was also reduced to the detritus of the firestorms that swept through Southern California, from Santa Barbara to San Diego, at a horrendous cost to lives and property.

James, a professor of constitutional law at Pepperdine University, and his wife, Connie, chair of the school’s business division, had followed police orders to evacuate that morning. They knew by the intensity of the smoke that rolled through the small neighborhood of homes overlooking Malibu that the situation was grim.

Four times before in the 24 years they had lived in the small, community, they had been forced to leave their homes in the face of firestorms that roared over the Santa Monica Mountains toward the ocean.

“The fifth time,” James said, “was this time.”

Other houses around his home remained untouched by the flames, benefactors of the caprice that is an almost mystical characteristic of the Santa Ana winds. They skip through neighborhoods like a child at play, touching down in random fashion with devastating effect.

“When there was no doubt that it was our house that was burning,” James said, “all we could do was be glad our family came out of it OK. We knew we could count on the love and grace of the community to get us through the rest. We aren’t alone.” Their adult daughter lives elsewhere, and their son was away for the weekend.

His tone was matter-of-fact, rarely dipping to an emotional level. Like so many others in Malibu, he’s a veteran handler of the grief that fire and landslides have brought over the years, and faces adversity with a reserve born of experience.

“We didn’t make it this time,” he said simply.

I had stopped by what remained of his home to watch workers pick through the debris in compliance with a state mandate requiring separation of recyclable items from what James called “the garbage.”

An expanse of bright green lawn that surrounded it was in sharp contrast to the blackened remains that had been their family home. The work of picking out recyclable material was under the direction of contractor Ed Bell. It was the second time that a home on that plot had burned to the ground in wildfires.

This was one of many stops in my tour of our neighboring town, just down the hill, more or less, from our home in Topanga Canyon. We share a common danger, those of us who live in the dry hills, but we also share the kinship of living in an environment that is rare in a city of steel. Life here is a trade-off: peace for peril.

A clean, cool fog had rolled over Pacific Coast Highway during the night, as though a soothing touch was affirming the notion that life will go on in those places where fire has darkened the landscape.

I saw a burned-out home in Carbon Canyon and charred palm trees that had burned like tiki torches around Malibu City Hall during the long night of the devil’s work.

I saw hillsides of chaparral torched by flames that were miraculously stopped by firefighters and airborne water drops at the back doors of homes and businesses along PCH.

I saw small armies of utility workers and road crews reconnecting Malibu’s damaged linkage.

Later I stood on the concrete steps of what had been the Presbyterian Church, now the rubble of a place that used to be. Among the few parishioners who wandered sadly through the ruins was Jennifer Bennett. She had worked and worshiped here for the past four years. Her son attended nursery school at the church.

As she helped her two children into her car, Bennett showed me a charred piece of paper that was part of a pamphlet she had found among the ruins. It bore the printed words, “Legacy Campaign.”

“That was to be a building fund drive for our church,” she said, staring at it. She shook her head without saying another word, as though nothing needed to be said now in the irony of the occurrence. Then she drove away.

James manifested none of the anger or sadness that one might expect in his circumstance. Home is a special place, embracing so much of the sweetness that life has to offer. More than a structure, it is an emotional haven, a sum of the whole that identifies us. I felt its importance in dread when we faced evacuation at the height of the Malibu fire. I felt it in relief when the fire was extinguished.

With almost stoic acceptance, James shoulders forward through the dark moment, accepting the help and friendship of neighbors, promising to build again on the same stretch of horizon that looks across to the ocean.

Sunset that Saturday glowed with crimson streaks along the Pacific skyline, reddened by debris from other fires still burning elsewhere. A full moon was tinted a deep amber, sailing bravely above the smoke. The beauty, like the fog, was nature’s gift. The fire was nature’s warning.

Almtz13@aol.com