Little Shade: One Year After the Santiago Fire

Posted on November 25, 2008 in Conservation Santiago Fire

I finally let my feet take me into Whiting Ranch Wilderness Park, one year and one month to the day after the Santiago Fire ripped through. A few steps past the rusted steel obelisk, the trail descends the height of a man and all is green. Talking about the conflagration seems an idle joke until you go through a tube of foilage and see blackened skeletons sweeping up from the creekside.

From this point, the matter of the district’s history is ambiguous. Not everything has been scorched. Instead of blackened ground, what you notice (if you have gone this way before) is that the shade is missing for many strides. The slopes beneath the houses are scalped and covered with net. The grass is low except in the wet spots. Great old oaks have been reduced to mouldering rounds of lumber. Where the burn did not kill the roots and left a little green, the trees thrive or at least support one green branch. The thick leaf litter where skunks used to seek their insect dinners has been reduced to ash and blown away.

You feel exposed, in a steeply sloped vacant lot between housing developments, until you reach the end of the houses and then you just feel strange. A reddish yellow fuzz crowns the hills. A water-resistant soot covers the slopes where the chamise and the scrub oak grew. Any sense that is to be made of what was burnt and what was saved requires painstaking study. All I can say for certain is that the chapparal disintegrated along with the grass, but only the latter is coming back.

This haunts me: the buckwheat is gone. I miss its red cauliflower tops.