It was the morning after Election Day, and the distraction I had hoped to find after the turmoil of the previous night found me first. A brother-in-law sent a text message: There was a fire near our mother-in-law's house.
That's fine, but over the years many fires have strayed from homes in Somis, a rural community in Ventura County between Moorpark and Camarillo. He Thomas Fire in December 2017. He Maria fire in October 2019. Both disasters for other people's property, but not hers.
He November 2024 Mountain Fire It would be different. The Santa Ana blew hard that morning and my mother-in-law's land was dangerously downwind, maybe a half mile from where the fire started.
First thought: this is the big one.
Second thought: making sure Kit, my children's beloved grandmother and matriarch of my wife's family, had fled. I called. I was in a Starbucks in Camarillo (which, a few hours later, would be evacuated due to the alarming spread of the fire). His long-time partner, Ian, was on the way.
They were safe: mission accomplished. So were his two desert tortoises, which now live as evacuees in the backyard of my Alhambra.
But the fate of his home and that of his neighbors seemed extremely bleak. Later that day, the fire map posted on the Watch Duty smartphone app (a must-download for anyone living in a fire-prone location) showed that much of the community, including their property, was completely engulfed.
I'm used to looking at wildfire maps of local mountains and getting an idea of which trails have burned and which hikes are off-limits as the land takes time to recover. It is an unfortunately common occurrence in Southern California.
But now I know how incomparable it is to see the sinister pink spot shading the part of the map where his life happens: the 25 acres or so of raw, chaparral-laden hills that my wife's parents bought decades ago and converted into an idyllic California ranch with lemon orchards and horse stables.
The home where my wife grew up, where she posed for prom photos, where she took care of the pets that to this day are exalted as legends.
The place where, 18 years ago, my wife and I were married at the tree that marks the burial site of her father's ashes. Where now my children run free with their cousins after Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners.
Miraculously, the small house on the property is still standing, so my mother-in-law and her partner have shelter (other neighbors lost much more). But much of what made that place home no longer exists.
From what I could see after visiting the property on Tuesday, this fire was wildly erratic. It came within a few meters of the house, so close and so hot that it deformed the window frames. Don't ask me why metal melted and double pane windows shattered but a log house didn't catch fire.
What remains of the nearby structures is only ghostly evidence of their existence: piles of toxic ash, concrete foundations, and metal furniture frames that, believe me, were once part of a relaxing and meditative outdoor environment. Many of the lemon trees remain, as if intact; others were completely annihilated and the hills where they stood blackened and dry. In a separate office, Ian had stored photographs of the damage to his former home that burned in the Santa Barbara wildfire of 1990. That office (and those photos) are gone.
Still, in the midst of the cataclysm, my mother-in-law and her neighbors tell stories of a community that came together: of lost pets evacuated as the flames raged, of people verifying that others had fled before them, of homes saved. by firefighters and other people who had to stay behind.
“Everyone was looking out for everyone,” said Trevor Huddleston, a race car driver whose family owns the neighboring property (and also manages the historic Irwindale Speedway). On Tuesday, he showed me the damage to his land: Although his family's house still stands, the fire burned many of the avocado trees (“green gold,” in Huddleston's words) that had produced a record amount of fruit that year. former. In a rare stroke of luck, firefighters were able to access the well on their property only because they had just finished the new concrete road.
Don't get me wrong: a lot of people I lost everything in this fire.certainly more than my mother-in-law. But where she lost her sense of security, she and her neighbors reinforced their sense of solidarity through simple but heroic acts of care. In a tense time when powerful forces are trying to pit people against each other, that's a good thing to hold on to.
