Job in San Bernardino

Posted on October 27, 2003 in Old Fire Reflections

Late yesterday, we walked past police lines into the neighborhood along Harrison Avenue where the fire did its worst. At first glance, all we saw were unburned houses. There was evidence of fire in the Wash that flows down from the Arrowhead Springs Hotel (and even water), in a corner lot, and in the hedges between many houses but not for a half a mile did we see a burned out house.

The first had been a pocket mansion that I sometimes mocked as I passed it on 40th Street in my youth. The owner had turned on all the sprinklers: the grass was still green and the olive trees in the front yard unscorched. The house itself was nothing but tan brick and stone, chimnies and retaining walls. I noted that the tops of the eucalyptuses and the pines around it were burned: the bottom branches were often still green.

We rounded a corner and found three houses which had been overrun by the flames. Brick walls stood: the rest looked like a pile of torn up papers and rusty wire coat hangers. Families picked at the refuse of two of the houses, scavenging for objects. I did not doubt that they would remain there all night, guarding the grounds from looters.

While we gaped at these horrors, a man in a yellow shirt and a golf hat came up to us. He was in tears. He introduced himself to us as “Ruben” and he pointed, saying, “That’s my house”. We kept looking at the ruin in front of us, nodding. It was clear that we didn’t understand. Ruben pointed at a yellow house surrounded by burnt bushes. Not an inch of paint was bubbled with the heat. “That’s my house,” he said. The fire had come as a whirlwind, roaring and massive, reaching over his head. The night before, he’d run for his life like he’d never run before. His neighbors, who included a 93 year old woman and a woman who was 83 — original owners of the lots (people in San Bernardino tend to hang on to property) — lost the houses on lots that were adjacent to his. I suppose he was asking himself why he’d been spared and Nature had so cruelly punished these neighbors of his. Perhaps he harbored sins that he felt merited punishment and wondered why God had left him with only the hedges to replace. Guilt and confusion both could explain his emotion. He seemed a good man, a kind man who could not fathom what the whirlwind had done. He was the opposite of Job in his fortune, but every bit as tormented about the losses around him.

We talked a bit with one of the families. The 93 year old woman was surrounded by children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren. She pointed out a wheelchair that had been in the garage. I don’t doubt that it had been shining but the heat and the cinder fog had turned it into a bent thing that looked as if it had been just brought out of an attic. Her son-in-law, it turned out, had graduated from my high school the same year as me. We didn’t remember each other. Maybe he did what I did and looked me up in the yearbook.

I could not help but think of Job over and over again as I walked back. Who could question the cyclone which knew where the chamise bloomed, where the gray foxes had their dens, where the eagles nest, where the ringtails find food and water. A sign next to one untouched house said “thank you fire fighters”. Down the street, a family nailed up a new wood fence from Home Depot, to replace the one the conflagration had taken down. I didn’t ask why they didn’t lose more. I just kept walking, past a two legged telephone pole standing on only one of its legs. I didn’t ask why it kept doing its duty without bringing the power lines down. I just took a picture as the sun set prematurely behind the new flying continent of smoke.

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Lynn wrote her own account. Raven is also fighting the spiritual costs of chaparral fire.

None of us attempts to explain why this happened where it did or why we were spared or hurt. I think true people of Faith and agnostics share the realization that there are no answers, no begging explanation from a Higher Power. They happen and we live with it.