Sunday, August 25, 2019

fire season begins


From our living room, this afternoon - a fire over in Eagle Rock/Glendale, just by the 134/2 interchange (and pity the people trying to use those freeways this evening - reports of people heading down the up ramps, and so on ...).  It's been hot today - 90-ish (and yes, I know it's just as bad in London: we skyped with my father earlier) - and with a small, but not fierce wind: my heart sinks at the thought of the couple of months ahead.

I don't do well with fire - or rather, with things like the 3 a.m. fear of fire.  My mother always put this down to living in a castle that had a devastating fire in 1844.


Indeed, that was a little before our tenancy of a tower in the late 1950s - but people still talked about What If?  Or so she said - I don't remember that, but I do remember that almost all my early nightmares - before I was eight or nine - the kind of nightmare where you wake yourself up screaming - were about fire.  I will neurotically smell (imaginary) smoke under almost any circumstances.  

So why, you might ask, do we live in a house on the very rim of Griffith Park, one of the bits of Los Angeles most likely to go up in flames?  (Indeed, in a photo and lit course that I was teaching at Rutgers back in the late 2000s, I showed an image from Shannon Road with the 2008 fire raging behind - little knowing that ...).  Maybe it's like getting on a horse straightway after falling off it?  Staring one's fears straight down the barrel?  Whatever - I'm delighted to read, just now, the LAFD update that says that all forward movement on this fire has been halted.

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