Questions that keep smoldering

JOSEPH N. BELL

We held a double-header birthday party last Saturday and Sunday for

my wife’s Arizona sister and several other family members, but part

of the family couldn’t come. My brother-in-law, Dan, and his wife,

Cindy, and their three children -- from 13 to 20 in age -- spent

Saturday hosing down the roof of their home in the Alta Loma section

of Rancho Cucamonga as they watched a raging line of fire bearing

down on them.

They stayed at it until they were asked to evacuate. Then they had

to decide very quickly what to take with them. That problem was

complicated by the fact that they were in the process of moving, and

most of their belongings had been packed away in boxes. But there was

little disagreement about priorities. Home videos and family pictures

came first and then vital papers. Because Dan is a film writer and

producer, work that was on master tapes came next. And even though it

would have survived the fire, Dan couldn’t abandon the Emmy Award he

won several weeks ago.

The kids’ decisions were easy. They were concerned mainly with

saving pictures. The biggest problem was that all these items had

been packed away willy-nilly since there was no expectation the

contents of the boxes would be unpacked prematurely. So in what might

have been their last hour in their home for the past decade, family

members were grubbing frantically through piles of cartons in search

of artifacts to carry over into a new life. The only missing treasure

was the last picture of Cindy’s father, who died four years ago.

Dan had booked hotel rooms early in the crisis, and family members

went there to await the fate of their home. They were sleeping

fitfully when Dan got a call at 6 a.m. Sunday on his cell phone from

his next door neighbor who hadn’t yet evacuated.

The message was grim: “The fire is nearing the edge of our

houses.”

Dan gathered up his 13-year-old son, Matthew, and headed home,

stopping on the way to pick up a close friend. The corner below his

house had been set up as a staging area, and there were a half-dozen

sheriff’s cars there. They let Dan through, and he pulled up in front

of his home.

“It was all very surreal,” he remembered. “The field next door was

blazing, winds were gusting, and flames were rising behind what I

assumed was the house, which I couldn’t see because it was entirely

obliterated by smoke. The situation seemed hopeless. My friend

started to jump out of the car to look for a hose, but I stopped him

and told him to forget it.

“You don’t think great thoughts at a time like that,” he said. “I

had a sense of numbness that made it possible to calm others. And the

lady who lived below us needed calming. She had just moved in two

weeks ago, and had been aroused by a sheriff pounding on her door.

While I was trying to help quiet her, the wind suddenly changed,”

he said. “One moment, my house wasn’t there, and the next moment, the

smoke lifted and there it was. The fire was blowing away, and the

only things left burning were a pile of unread newspapers in my

driveway and a bush in the lot beside us. I didn’t consider the irony

of that burning bush until much later.”

They were all able to re-enter the house in mid-morning and spend

the rest of the day in a residue of acrid smoke cleaning it. When his

wife and two daughters collapsed, exhausted, at the hotel, Dan

brought Matthew to what was left of the birthday party, where we all

heard his story.

When I asked what these frightening two days had told him about

himself and his family, Dan thought it over, then said: “I guess the

best thing is knowing that in a crisis, my family would stick

together and support one another. We had a great sense of community

when we went back into a dangerous situation to try and save our

home. There was also great satisfaction in having my son fighting

beside me on that last day, and -- even better -- telling me when we

knew we were safe that we needed to go help some of the people who

weren’t.”

I couldn’t get these pictures out of my head when I went to bed

that night. When I hear about people in crisis, I always wonder how

well I would have performed in the same set of circumstances. The two

questions that kept recurring to me are what would I try to save

under the urgent stress of time and how would I respond if my home

was destroyed -- questions I’m sure a lot of us are asking ourselves

as we watch these fires on television.

Thinking about those two questions as I write this in my home

office makes me acutely aware of the importance we give to things

that we collect over the years -- things that become life markers to

us. I am surrounded in this place by the stuff of a lifetime. A

bookcase that fills an entire wall holds hundreds of magazines, some

50 years old, all containing pieces I have written. The wall is

cluttered with documents attesting that I have graduated from

college, served in the military, crossed the international dateline,

planted a brick at Edison Field and various other milestones in my

life. The shelves hold the only baseball I ever retrieved from 60

years of going to Major League games, along with an array of small

and significant gifts given to me by people I love.

There is no way I could choose among these things to save, but

that leads to another question. Is this how my life, finally, must be

defined? Or if I were to lose all of them in a disaster, would I

discover that I had been diminishing the possibilities of today and

tomorrow by leaning too frequently on yesterday? Where is the balance

between using the past to cast light on the present or to obscure its

possibilities?

I don’t know. Nor do I know what I would do if we were to lose our

home in a disaster like the fires still raging about us. Would I

stand in the charred remains and resolve to rebuild and restore as

fully as possible what I had lost? Or would I take this as a sign it

was time to move on to a new life in which I was free to create a

whole new set of life markers from a different vantage point?

Clearly, there can be no answers to these questions until we have

to face them directly. Dan and his family were the fortunate ones,

delivered by a sudden shift of wind from losing their home. I ache

for those less fortunate.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.