It was very strange to fly into San Diego at night just weeks after those fires. We had clear skies the whole way from JFK until just before San Diego, and it was hard not to see the clouds of the marine layer as clouds of smoke, and the areas of inky black between areas of grids of light as the burnt-out places where the brush fires raged...
Even stranger to come home past Crest Canyon - my old childhood friend, where I found and explored Middle Earth - but at night just deepest black, the void. Had the Santa Ana winds blown the fires all the way to the sea that first day of the infernos, that canyon would have gone up like a tinderbox. Waves of flame would have come rolling over its edge and down the hill all the way to the edge of the Pacific, burning all in its path - Del Mar was ordered to evacuate because it couldn't have been stopped - including our house.
Our house, my parents' house, the house where I grew up - still standing of course, spared by the change in winds - feels like a gift, a miracle. From three thousand miles away, I had in some vague way tried on for size the possibility that I might never see it again, never sit in those so familiar chairs on that beloved deck, where so much has happened, so many happy meals with close and visiting family and friends, going back to my sister's and my birthday parties as children. All the things on the walls, every book on a shelf, every dish in the kitchen. I can't claim anything like St. Francis' vision of Assisi suspended upside down from the sky but a smidgen of an inkling of that sense that everything that seems solid is not, that its persistence is in some profound sense gratuitous.
I'm writing this down before heading off to the AAR because I don't know how long this sense of gratuity will last. I don't know if one can or should hold on to it.
