Global Soul Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home

The Burning House Suddenly, the flames were curling seventy feet above my living room, whipped on by seventy-mile-per-hour winds that sent them ripping across the dry brush like maddened horses. I tried to call the fire department, but the phone was dead. I tried to turn the lights on, but the electricity was gone. I went upstairs again, to see that the flames, which minutes before had been a distant knife of orange cutting through a hillside, were now all around me, the view through the picture windows a wall of flames. I picked up my mother's cat and ran out of the house, with two friends who had just arrived to try to be of help (my mother and father were out of town). But there was nowhere for us to go. At our feet, a precipitous slope that fell towards the road. On every other side, fires that were rising to a crest. We jumped into a car and drove down the orange-licked driveway to the narrow mountain road, and saw that we couldn't go up, we couldn't go down. Bushes were bundles of orange, and flames were leaping over the slope beside us like dogs jumping at a fence. The way down led to a blaze of burning; the way up led into the conflagration. Beside us on the road was one other vehicle -- a water truck driven up by a Good Samaritan who found himself now as trapped as we were, and stood alone in the road, in his shorts, extending a forlorn hose towards the fire. Already the smoke was so thick, we could not even see the helicopters above as we sat in an angry orange haze listening to their blades. One friend, and our new companion, stood in the road and pointed the water at every new roar of fire that flamed over the ridge. I had never known that fire moves so fast, so purposefully. We could see it cutting through the slope across from us as if with a letter opener, and scrambling up my driveway as if summoned to an execution. We sat in the car, the cat coughing in my lap, and for two hours saw and felt nothing but flames and more flames. After night fell, at last a fire truck came up, and led us back to a safer spot a little down the mountain, from which, as an opera played on the radio, I saw the fire up above lick at my room, reduce the second floor to a skeleton, charge down towards the city below. Along the road, a horse was running madly. A man caked in soot appeared, not knowing where he was going. Below, we could see cars burning placidly along the side of the road. At last, after another hour, the fire having already shot into the suburbs below and leaping the eight lanes of the freeway, which leads all the way to Canada, we were free to drive down, through a wasted world of steaming cars and ravaged houses, the black hills all around wearing necklaces of orange. I got taken to a friend's house, went across to an all-night supermarket to buy a toothbrush, and started my life anew. The next day, in the early morning, I returned to the road along which I'd been driving for all my adult life and found it blocked off, exhausted firemen sitting on the pavement at the foot of the mountain, bowing their heads or gulping from bottles of water. I was allowed to climb it, as a resident -- the fire having retreated back into the hills -- and so, for the first time in twenty-five years, I walked all the way up the road, past houses reduced to chimneys or just outlines of themselves, past occasional houses, just as randomly, entirely intact. Here and there wisps of smoke still trickled up through the asphalt, and beside the hulks of cars along the road, the aluminum from their hubcaps had made little pools of silver. When I arrived at my house, high up on a ridge, two-thirds of the way up the mountain, it was to find a smoking ash gray sea. Bronze statues had been reduced to nothing; filing cabinets were husks. All the props of my parents' sixty years, all the notes and prospects I'd been collecting for fifteen years, all the photograIyer, Pico is the author of 'Global Soul Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home' with ISBN 9780679454335 and ISBN 0679454330.