Five houses, so close to each other in Rustic Canyon.
Whoever is just at the top of the hill of me, the flames swallowed whole.
Outside another, two doors of mine, bottles of spring water of five gallons in a wooden housing leaning against the wooden coating. When the two houses between us – a speakeasy of the era of prohibition – needed livid rage, the spring bottles exploded. A firefighter said the fire had saved the fire bottle house from the fire.
As for me, I have a roof above my head because of (a) Berkeley firefighters (“Berkeley ???”), (b) the director of the Charles Moore foundation, who stole in Austin, Texas, to protect a house designed by Moore to Santa Monica Canyon adjacent and, with other riots, to the team, “What What? (c) An impossible luck that was deserved. (Moore house has survived.)
When the view from the window of your kitchen is first of mutilated metal and ash, then a burnt terrain, you spend a lot of time rethinking luck, why it found you and snubbed your neighbors, how luck and cataclysm work side by side.
The fire here started with the house on the hill on January 8, day 2 of the Apocalypse. The rustic canyon, located just below the Pacific palisades, could have been so easily engulfed. But the densely wooded and very flammable enclave escaped – with the exception of three houses less than 30 feet from my refrigerator – due to western winds, or the micro -climate of the canyon, or the two guys who rushed from Venice (“huh ???”) and turned a brush fire over the driving of Mesa early. The dominant theory: pure stupid chance.
At 2 p.m. on January 8, a full day after my evacuation, someone who stayed behind sent me a photo of my house from my house by the old speakeasy, completely engulfed. That's it. Everything is lost.
At 7 p.m., someone else sent a video from rue de la Rue, my house still standing!
It took weeks before I went out enough to say: “These are the five worst hours of my life since the last time I attended the Emmys.”
After six weeks evacuated, there was a remedy at home, infused with hydroxyl, at home so that I could come back, a house that looked like a total unknown but which slowly coughs the path of the pre-January. 7 Los Angeles.
Unfortunately, I am late on the attitude of my own house. Desperately trying to focus on being grateful for my luck is futile. Inanimate objects in each room of the obsessive thoughts of the goose: “If the flames had a jump to 10 feet north, this supervised and sub-performing high school bulletin would have disappeared forever.”
By the way, did I mention that during the fire, a huge eucalyptus collapsed, just below the upright house that burned and inexplicably fell laterally instead of being directly on my den?
Chi, my friend (Vietnamese; dedicated Christian), calls: “Wow, this Jewish God really looked for you.”
As a dedicated address, I ask: “Do you think yes?”
“Not really. I just thought it was the thing.
At some point, my good luck overdose started to feel particularly shabby. Just at the right time, a woman walking with a kind of goodle scanned one of the ruined houses next to mine and then turned to me. “Boy, must be difficult to be so lucky when the life of so many people have been destroyed.”
After having transformed the guilt of my survivor into guilt of her survivor by proxy, I called a friend, David Kennerly, winner of the Pulitzer Prize war photographer. He told the future of machine gun shooting in eastern Pakistan when a soldier flowing next to him was killed to death. He looked down, thought: “Hell with the guilt of Survivor” and ran.
Well, it could be a useful attitude from the road but not now when Joni Mitchell continues to sing in my head: I saw hot and hot flames go down in smoke and ashes. “Not when the kind of questions I had always launched my eyes, continue to appear almost three months later: What did I do in a previous life to deserve this chance?“”
For the moment, there is only unsatisfactory and force -fed reality: There was no previous life. There is no deserving. It's lucky, and nothing lucky has made sense.
Peter Mehlman's The latest novel is “#Measwell”. He was a writer and producer of “Seinfeld”.
