I will never forget that day.
It was a Sunday 19 years ago today, and my friend Anna and I had a date to go wine tasting in the Napa Valley. I lived in one of those beautiful old Craftsman homes at 2439 Russell Street in Berkeley at the time, just a quarter mile west from the Claremont Hotel, which would ultimately be threatened then spared in the firestorm to come. Anna lived in Orinda, just over the hill, and was coming to pick me up.
As I stepped onto the porch to wait for her, I heard the dry autumn leaves rustling in the big old elm trees in the front and felt how unusually warm it already was for 10 a.m. "This is fire weather," I thought.
The coming fire would go on to kill 25 people and injure 150 others. 1,520 acres would burn, including 3,354 single-family dwellings and 437 apartment and condominium units. Some estimate the economic loss at $1.5 billion, and beautiful old homes with stucco character from the turn of the century would forever be gone, replaced by ugly McMansions. The Insurance Information Institute called it the most destructive urban conflagration in U.S. history.
Unbeknownst to me, as I stood waiting for Anna, the fire had already started the day before high above me in the Berkeley Hills near the Caldecott Tunnel. Firefighters thought they had brought the 5-acre blaze under control, but it was already re-igniting as a brush fire, thanks to what the media would later call Diablo Winds.
Even before Anna and I arrived in the Napa Valley around eleven, the fire had already spread and overwhelmed local and regional firefighting teams. By noon, still unbeknownst to us, the fire was up on the Hiller Highlands and sweeping down into some of the most beautiful old mansions and homes of the Berkeley Hills, destroying many of them yet picking and choosing here and there to leave a solitary home standing amongst charred rubble and lonely black chimneys. Frantic people were fleeing downhill on congested roads, some losing their lives along the way, and others trapped in their homes, unable to get out.
One of the weirdest things of all about that day is that we heard absolutely nothing about the firestorm during the hours we spent winetasting! There were no TVs in any of the wineries we visited, no one was tuned in to any radio news, and of course this was before the Internet, laptops, iPads and cell phone texting. And while we also visited a so-called psychic that afternoon for readings about our respective love lives, she did not mention anything about the firestorm.
Literally, we did not know about the fire until we were driving home and I spotted the enormous plume of smoke hanging over what looked like the Concord area, near Mt. Diablo. By this time, the fire had jumped across both Highways 24 (an eight-lane freeway) and 13 (a four-lane freeway) in Berkeley and was blazing across the Rockridge Oakland Hills area. But we still could not see it.
"That looks like a really bad fire near Concord," I said to Anna.
"No, that's fog," said Anna, who was an argumentative sort.
"I'm quite certain it's a fire," I insisted. It didn't look like fog at all.
"It's fog," she countered.
I knew she was wrong. But nothing could have prepared me for what we both saw when we rounded a curve on Interstate 80 which revealed to us for the first time the full-on urban blaze. From that perspective, it looked as if the entire city of Oakland and much of the Berkeley Hills was on fire, including my own neighborhood! I could see the majestic old Claremont Hotel, tiny and white in the distance, etched against a yellow-orange wall of fierce fire.
I, who never panic, felt immediate, helpless, racing panic. "Oh my God, the city is on fire!" I exclaimed. "Has my house burned? Oh my God, hurry!"
"Calm down," said Anna, always a stupid thing to say to someone who is upset.
But who could be calm in such circumstances? I was near tears. It was as if Anna had no feeling for what we were seeing, but I knew in an instant that it was a disaster of epic proportions unfolding before our very eyes. I was stunned that we'd gone through the whole day without hearing about it.
Helpless and frantic, I wished I could eject myself from Anna's car and the too-congested traffic and fly instantly to the scene. We couldn't go fast enough. Getting off the I-80 at Ashby, every light seemed to be a red one. I wanted to tell her to hurry, hurry, but I willed myself to be silent, since she was clearly so contemptuous of emotional expression.
My house had burned down, I thought. I was certain my house had burned down. It sure looked that way. How will it feel to lose everything, I wondered. Immediately I thought of my photos. This was before digital, of course, so my photos were neatly organized in boxes, along with framed childhood photos of me with my father - precious beyond replacement - and of my mother and sisters and others I love.
"Calm down," Anna repeated, driving serenely. Was she intentionally driving more slowly? I wondered if she was as infuriatingly insensitive as she seemed, or if she was just one of those people who remains eerily controlled in terribly frightening circumstances. She left the emotion for me to act out.
After what seemed like an eternity, we made it to Russell Street. I can't begin to explain my relief upon seeing that my house had not burned down. But we could see the wall of fire behind the Claremont Hotel just a quarter mile up the street, with giant eucalyptus trees etched behind the iconic 1915 structure outlined by the fire. Dozens of neighbors stood in the street staring, stunned, mesmerized. It seemed impossible that it hadn't actually burned down, given the inferno at its door.
"What happened?" I said rather stupidly to a neighbor as I emerged from Anna's car.
"This has been going on all day," he replied. "Where have you been?"
"Napa Valley," I said sheepishly. "We didn't hear anything about it. Is the Claremont going to burn?"
"The winds shifted, otherwise this all would have burned," he said, sweeping his arm to indicate the whole neighborhood.
And so we stood there, Anna and I, fascinated and numbed. The implications of the firestorm - which is a fire so intense it generates its own winds - seemed finally to have sunk in for my intransigent friend, especially when she called home and discovered the roads over the hills were all closed and she'd have to stay with me for the night. Together, we watched the news from my cozy suite of rented rooms, the air around us thick with smoke and hard to breathe. By 9 p.m. that night, the wind unexpectedly stopped and firefighters had a chance to begin to prevail.
In the morning, it was I who was calm, and Anna who began to cry about what we'd seen and what had happened before we parted ways. Somehow I got to work at Pettit & Martin in San Francisco that morning - whether by BART or carpool I can't recall - all around me on the way was the haunting smell of smoke, death and destruction which would linger for weeks. The familiar hills were a blackened mass of shocking ruin.
At work, colleagues who lived in the East Bay shared war stories. One attorney lost his home in the Hiller Highlands (a year later, in the 1992 lay-offs, he would lose his job). Another lost his neighborhood, with his own home freakishly spared amongst the devastation. "It would have been better if it burned," he commented wryly.
For my part, I could not imagine a more immense gratitude. The home where I lived had not burned to the ground, and my possessions endured. At the same time, I had that eerie, poignant feeling - as I'd had just two years before in the Loma Prieta Earthquake - how one can lose everything at any time, how precarious it all is, how illusory our sense of security, and yet how precious our lives.
I began unloading possessions after that - bit by bit, I stopped being a consumer and began simplifying my life to what I really only need. And sometimes, I often think if it came to it, I could make do with just my backpack and a good book.
