The fire season’s just about over here; rains are predicted for tomorrow and the next day, so we can more or less relax here at Pluton with a View. This fall, the end of a very mild fire season in our neck of the woods, marks an interesting anniversary, one filled with both gratitude and the ghost of horror past. I think the most potent visual memory of the rampant and ferocious fires from the summer of ‘08—apart from watching the wind-whipped Motion Fire gobbling up the terrain that lay between it and our home—is when we awoke in the middle of the night to find our bedroom filled with orange light. Running to the window, we saw that the nearest ridgeline, one that fills the horizon from our vantage point, had towering, billowing flames writhing along its entire crest. That’s not a mental picture that will fade for some time. It was beautiful, mesmerizing, awe-inspiring, and terrifying.

 

When I drive home from town these days, I see the three mountains that were on fire behind us last summer, their flanks blackened and bare, and when I turn onto our road, I can still envision the checkpoints that existed last year, a constant reminder of the capricious danger that churned behind our hill for weeks that stretched into months. I feel relieved all over again that we still have a home. And I feel awful for everyone who lost theirs.

 

 

So when I met the new and very gracious landowner, who told me to take anything I wanted off his parcel, I felt like the proverbial kid in a candy store when I saw how many cool pieces lay on the ground for the taking. I hauled over my boxes and began delightedly sorting through the piles; and as I did so, it dawned on me what I was sifting through: the burned remains of the previous owners’ workshop. Here was the area where the husband kept his tools; there was the area where he worked on his cars. Here was the place where the wife had her sewing station; there was where she had stored her collection of china. Burned and rusted hand tools, bobbins, belt buckles, and headlights lay in neat segregation; broken shards of china flocked the ground in one spot like patches of snow.

 

Remembering how anxious I felt the eight days that Richard and I were evacuated, and how I had almost collapsed, literally, when I saw the fire racing toward the home that we had spent the last twenty-nine years building and finishing, I could imagine how this couple must have felt when they returned to the smoldering ruin of their home. Only the chimney to the house remained, the new owner told me. It was the beginning of the end, he added.

 

For a moment, I felt like a grave robber. I felt guilty for profiting from these strangers’ misfortune. I thought that perhaps I shouldn’t take anything after all.

 

But I knew that everything that I didn’t take was slated to go to the nearest landfill, where it would be unceremoniously dumped with a bunch of other trash and garbage. I finally decided that what I planned to do with the objects I took home was one of the kindest fates that could befall them. To have these abandoned items worked into pieces of art that are meant to bring lasting pleasure to the viewer seemed like a loving tribute to this couple’s loss, a way of ensuring that their private loss was not a total one, a way of honoring the lives that they had built before fire came to erase their footprints.

 

And while sifting through the ashes that hadn’t been washed away by the rains, I found one perfect cup that hadn’t a mark on it. I left it for the new owner. That, and an oddly poignant and symbolic piece: He was delighted to find that in my foraging, I had discovered a frozen puddle of melted aluminum that was shaped almost exactly like Long Island, his faraway boyhood home.