This is how my relationship with the Bridge Fire began on September 9, 2024. A week later, it remains the largest fire in California, with over 2000 firefighters devoted to saving further destruction of the forests of Los Angeles and San Bernardino Counties. Yes, the Bridge Fire continues to burn, just no longer in my neighborhood, so I can write about it in a way I couldn’t when I was checking the horizon, participating in neighborhood group chats, receiving alerts from the Watch Duty app, packing my bags, packing a to-go bag for Massimo the Maltese, organizing two weeks of meds, figuring out what, if any equipment I should take with, hoping everything I needed was in some cloud I believed in but knew was flawed, deciding whether to take one car or two, no at our age, it was better to stay together, leaving a note on the doorbell telling people it is out of order and pleading with anyone and everyone to please don’t let me burn up without at least hatcheting down my door, Connie promised me she would move heaven and earth to get me out, remembering my friend Anne’s harrowing escape from the 2003 Grand Prix Fire when she and Frank didn’t hear their doorbell, and were the last to escape, led out by fire personnel as flames licked at their only way down the neighboring hill and canyon to the east. Other than that, it was a relaxing three days of being on the edge.
This was the view from my back patio as the sun began to set; the blue dot is my home, and the red triangle tells the folks at the top of my hill that they should leave.
The air was thick, hard to breathe, our only consolation, an exquisite sunset. I double-dipped on my inhaler and made sure I had a mask handy.
The temperature had flirted with the high 90s for ten days, and we were all dry and brittle, haggard from the heat, isolating as if the air itself were poison, wondering if we would ever again feel cool.
In my post-PTSD post from the last fire that nearly got us twenty years ago, I tell a story that sentenced me to twenty years of the ugly fear of leaving home, fear that whatever I had on my back and in my hands was what I would have to start life over again.
Just like the fire 20 years ago, I happened to be packed to leave for a vacation, and it was relatively easy just to put the suitcases in the car and wait, hoping for the best.
This morning I am leaving home for an iconic trip that surely I will share, a trip oozing with nostalgia, a trip to search for the house in Richmond (Surrey) where Larry’s father was born, the house on Holland Park where Larry lived when he was 13 and his father was on sabbatical in London, the double bedsit in Earls Court where I lived a wonderful Bohemian year in my early twenties, working for the School for International Training, and earning five pounds sterling a concert to sing with the London Symphony Orchestra Chorus where I would gladly have paid for the privilege,but for now, I’m just grateful to be safe.
And as they say in Zulu, hamba kahle; sala kahle. Go well; stay well.
Hello world, here I come.