An Inventory of What We’ve Endured: After the Wildfires

The devil wind screeches past our hillside home, eager to egg-on flames that will destroy the not-too-distant coastal town of Pacific Palisades. In our pergola’s eaves, our air force of Balinese “demon chasers,” small hanging sculptures of gold-gilded dragons and brightly painted flying frogs, cows, dogs, elephants and sword- and hatchet-wielding fairies, have worked themselves into a clattering protective frenzy.

The power goes out. Evacuation preparations made, my wife Pam and I lie in bed, watching the orange glow on the horizon and wondering what the Milky Way will look like when the wind rips off our roof. Soon Altadena, another nearby neighborhood, ignites and the total of Southern California homes burned pushes past 10,000. Fate spares ours. This time.

The next morning, beneath an ugly gray sun, I attack drifts of ash, leaves and debris. A piece of singed paper has spiraled down from the heavens — a bit of irony, it’s a notice from someone’s insurance company to keep up payments.

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Good advice. As are reminders to take inventory of possessions before disaster visits. But it’s another inventory I find myself making as, masked up to filter the poison air, I sweep, sweep, sweep.

I’m 71. My generation, like all generations, has endured unfortunate events, and I doubt I’m alone in feeling grateful that the longer we live, the more gently past cataclysms loop back to dampen our sense of doom.

Remember the nuke-fried landscapes that our childhood imaginations cooked up during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis? Two years later we watched on TV as angry mobs set Watts on fire, turning the night sky over Los Angeles crimson and plum. In 1992, as a reporter covering the Rodney King uprising, I moved with awe through block after block of buildings spurting 40-foot flames.

In 1994, the Northridge earthquake slammed into LA like a runaway earthmover. Transformers exploded. Unchained electricity sparked twinkling fires across the blacked-out city, and Pam and I cradled our children on a stairway strewn with broken glass. As we dozed, a faint tinkling stirred fear. We grabbed each other’s hands. The sound was like nothing we’d heard. Because we’d never heard a liberated guinea pig inching its way through a minefield of glass shards.

Years later, in 2003, I snuck through police lines in the foothills of San Bernardino, Calif., as another conflagration tumbled from wildlands into a town. After several panicky retreats from wailing bursts of embers, I stood before the rubble that had been my childhood home.

As I sweep the debris of today's fire, hypnotized by my broom’s rhythmic swish, swish, swish, I can practically smell again a sweet counterpoint to the acrid smoke from that long ago fire — the aroma of a few orange blossoms that had hidden on the downwind side of one incinerated tree, and remained unscathed.

Another memory that wafts in from that distant night is a charred page I found in the smoldering heap that had been my dad’s beloved library. It’s framed now in my office, still intriguing me with the question of why certain prose fragments — “... a burning column of fire, spreading outwards….” — survived. It’s a final reverie, though, that dredges up my inventory’s lesson.

Arlyce and Bernard Fellbaum had moved from a Minnesota farm and raised a family across the street from ours. For months after the San Bernardino fire, I’d spot these retired postal workers sleeping in their car, exhausted by a day of pulling weeds, on hands and knees, from the lawn they had revitalized, even though their house was still gone.

Not even the overly poetic part of me really believes that our collection of winged warriors chased off the evil spirits that could well have destroyed our Los Angeles home. I’m certain though, that from bombed out Dresden to New York’s Twin Towers to Pacific Palisades, the pulling of weeds and rhythmic scrape, scrape, scrape of rakes, brooms and shovels is what drives away our demons of despair.

Note: This item first appeared in Kiplinger Retirement Report, our popular monthly periodical that covers key concerns of affluent older Americans who are retired or preparing for retirement. Subscribe for retirement advice that’s right on the money.

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