Lightning strobes the gray sky and thunder booms like artillery
over parts of North Carolina as I write this, but my gratitude for
the rare morning storm is tempered by the thought that friends in
Southern California need straight-down rain as much as those of us
in the Southeast do.
You will have heard of the wind-whipped wildfires in the Golden
State, and the apparent futility of betting on firefighting resources
that have to contend annually with low humidity and fierce desert
winds named, like a handful of other topographical features in
California, for a nineteenth-century Mexican dictator. One of many
ironies in those Santa Ana winds is that they build in the Great
Basin flanked by the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada, rather
than in Mexico, Texas, or any part of the region where people since
1836 have had reason to curse Santa Ana and the horse he rode in
on.
Once unleashed, Santa Ana winds howl toward the coast in a kind
of autumnal fit. They always seem to calm themselves enough to
permit the Blue Angels to put on a stunning show of precision
flying over Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in October. But when
the Blue Angels leave town and the California Department of
Forestry lays off its seasonal help, the winds pick up
where they left off. In good years, they scrub the sky into a
crystalline purity that lets you see fifty miles. In bad years,
they raise hell. A downed power line, an errant lawnmower spark, or
a careless (often illegal) camper in the wrong place can then
trigger fires of epic proportions, leaving the national news media
flummoxed.
When Mel Gibson flees Malibu or members of the San Diego
Chargers football team evacuate their suburban homes, you hear
about it. When palm trees explode behind begrimed fire engines, you
see it. But when the town of 36,000 where I lived until early this
year is evacuated, you get only one more sentence in a wildfire
story, because driving there from Lindbergh Field or Los Angeles is
a chore, and the only Starbucks coffee you can find if you do make
it up the hill is in the corner of a grocery store. Want free Wi-Fi
for browsing the Internet on your laptop computer?
Fuhgedaboutit.
Well, Ramona rates better than that. I still have friends there,
which is why I wanted to tell you that when an MSNBC news report
headlined “We Can’t Stop It” has a San Diego dateline but quotes a
fire captain from Rocklin, then that is big deal. Rocklin is a
Sacramento suburb, two-thirds and five hundred miles of the way up
a long state from where that captain and his team are working now.
Los Angeles-based stringers for national news organizations will
not be the ones to tell them or you that anyone trying to enter or
exit Ramona must do so on winding two-lane highways. Nor will they
mention that the intersection of San Vicente Road and Highway 67 is
backed up every weekday morning, fire or no fire. I once read a
chapter in Louis L’Amour’s The Sackett Brand while waiting
in a string of cars at that light on a beautiful Fall day.
Local news outlets like the Ramona
Sentinel have done a yeoman job of keeping people informed
of Witch Fire developments, but the overworked staff there does not
have the time to note that Wayne at the misnamed City Barbershop
has a snapshot on his wall of gray smoke from the Cedar Fire (2003)
looming over Main Street in what looks eerily like the face of
Satan. Wayne owns his shop and charges only five dollars for a
haircut, but were he inclined to sell that Halloweenish photo
tacked to his wall, the Weekly World News might have paid
a him a tidy sum, back in the day.
Ramona to me means Kim, mucking out horse stalls in tee shirts
with slogans like “so not a princess,” and Steve, who tutored me on
the finer points of kipping pullups. I think too of Cyndi,
recovering from shoulder surgery and recently grateful that she was
bench pressing more than twenty-five pounds again. Cyndi had
written a newsletter article on coping with childhood asthma, which
in retrospect seems not all that different from the challenge now
posed by smoke inhalation.
Ramona also means Carl and Mary. He runs the chemistry
department at a university down the hill, and she homeschools their
youngest daughter. They live off a dirt road and make do with
dial-up Internet access because the cable company has not seen fit
to run high speed lines out to where they are. I remember the
Wednesday night faith sharing meetings for which they were hosts,
every meeting enlivened by good conversation and casseroles that
even Food Network chefs might envy.
Not that those casseroles had a lot of competition. Apart from a
steak house, an Italian place, several franchise outlets, and a
defiantly inland sushi bar frequented by leather-clad women who
ride motorcycles, the Ramona restaurant scene is almost laughably
moribund. Nevertheless, you can find banana shakes in at least one
Mexican restaurant there.
The town has three feed stores and a bankrupt movie theater. Its
crown jewel, I think, is a gym run by a husband and wife committed
to building a better world, one workout at a time. Jeff and Mikki
are laconic, observant, and deeply compassionate, except when
scrawling take-no-prisoners CrossFit workouts on the White Board of
Dread that hangs near an American flag on one wall of their
gym.
They were forced to flee town, together with everyone else
mentioned here, and 36,000 of their neighbors in Ramona alone. The
Witch Fire has burned more than 196,000 acres throughout San Diego
County at this writing, and suspended water service in Ramona for
hours at a time.
My hope is that by the time you read this, the wind and flames
will have died down, and these folks and others will have had a
chance to start in on cleanup. I am not the one driving down
Highway 67 in front of flames 100 feet high, with my wife,
children, and pets wedged in a car around a box of bills, a
sleeping bag, and a photo album or two. From a continent away, all
I have to offer by way of help are prayers and stories. Prayer
trumps, but perhaps storytelling can add to it.
