Whole Life Times: The Seduction of Destruction

January 2005 | BackWords

The Seduction of Destruction

The fiery hills of Angeles National Forest offer exhilarating lessons in nature’s rhythms

by Yvonne M. Ignacio

I thought to myself as the ashes fell, This is an artificial winter; these flakes are like drifts of snow. It was inevitable, certain as the phases of the moon, this season of fire and destruction. I looked to the hills, so recently ransacked by the trauma of flame, and saw beauty undone.

When I woke up that morning, I knew it would be a good day for a disaster. At 6:30 in the morning the message was already in the wind.

Fire enters you through a tactile feeling. Squeezed of moisture, the native vegetation crowds the nerves like too much stacked cordwood, the air currents carry demons of friction and flame. Panic, the last of these principles, quietly settles upon the landscape and upon the skin, pricking, pricking.

Many times smoke has turned the bend to my house and layered the air with the thickness of fog. But it was always someone else’s undoing.

On this day, I saw men on the hill pointing and motioning. The dense smoke was moving towards me fast. The sky was neatly divided in two: one part blue and white as a Scandinavian flag and the other burnished brown and roiling with black billows.

The flames came upon the crest of the hill in full, fiery battle gear, like a legion of barbarians ready to rampage. At first, they were as big as a man is tall, and then quickly they grew to become giants. The flames flickered through the network of smoke and ash, shining through a scrim the color of a señorita’s mantilla. In the air, planes and helicopters dropped an arsenal of water and flame retardant.

Fire — yearning, vibrant and violent — closed upon us; the heated air was thick with the scent of hundreds of dying stems and leaves and bursting with the soothing murmur of smoke and flame. The flames were orange like smashed pumpkins and red like stoplights and carnal tongues. The hills behind my house were no longer hills, but a mountain moving in height and speed, crackling loudly in its steady march downward. I could see the red fire in the crevasses like lava springing forth from a heated caldera.

The dogs already knew because inside the house it had become acrid. I packed their leashes and they jumped into the car, needing no prompting. Then I took what was already under my bed: the warehouse of my most precious items — film negatives, computer floppies and discs and the sentimental paper scraps of cards, letters and notes.

Where I live — Angeles National Forest — is my personal outback. Over the years more and more houses seep around these islands of native habitat like an unchecked sludge, their growth in tandem with the latent inferno that waits.

The cradle of life in these sage green hills is a burning crucible. Without fire, the undergrowth would be choked by higher brambles and blocked from the sun’s rays. The oil on the top layers of vegetation that serves to protect the leaves from the constant heat of the sun lays the groundwork for combustion.

Fire clears the way for more delicate growth. Immortally, like the phoenix from the funeral pyre, the scrub spreads its spores and breaks its seed in each municipality of flame. Wildflowers return in profusion after such catastrophe; oaks are glad for the adjacent tidying. The breakdown by fire returns to the soil elements strangled from their shallow depths too long. Like the geology itself, young and in constant upheaval, renewal and growth is primary to the character of this unctuous terrain.

And so my neighbors and I watched the tumultuous scene unfold. Collectively, we coached the fire to finish its trek quietly and not be urged by the wind that periodically whipped the flames up the still-standing cottonwood and eucalyptus. We all knew the death of the underbrush was inevitable, but we still had hope for the greater flora that shivered as the fire melted its outer bark and dangling leaves. And for our homes.

That night I was sleepless from air heavy with the afterburn of autumnal growth. Like a maniac, the fire crept back, stubbornly taunting, and I watched the lights of the fire trucks reflected on my windows. Finally the hills were showered into submission.

The next day, all was silvery, dark and sullen. The thick ground cover was shaggy with platinum chips of former wood and leaves. The bushes and trees that still stood had been shellacked with a pewter brush or scorched harsh black.

To live here is to be connected to the flex of life, to experience its metered construction and destruction. These grand exhibitions have shaped my worldview. But to love all that is wild and diathermic, no matter how cautious and prepared I am, is to admit that I am foolish and, perhaps, a little in love with death.

Yvonne M. Ignacio (yvonneignacio@yahoo.com) has written for television, DVD and the Internet. Author of the novel The Picture: A Work of Theory and Fiction, she is currently working on a screenplay about Peter the Great.

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