I know I promised you the top secret, never-been-done-before-here-at-FO post today, but technology is still sucking and other things have taken precedence.
Whenever I’m asked where I’m from, I automatically answer “San Diego.” Doesn’t matter that I haven’t lived there for almost twelve years now – San Diego is where I’m from and it still feels like home.
And now my home is, once again, on fire. Over three hundred thousand acres burned, nearly one million people forced from their homes, over 1,500 homes destroyed and property damage estimates upwards of one billion dollars.
Fires are a part of life in Southern California, much in the same way that I’d guess that hurricanes, tornadoes and flooding are part of life in other areas of the country. I think most people not familiar with San Diego think of it as this idyllic community situated near the ocean that basks in 75 degree weather year round. But a very small percentage of the city sits along the coast line. The majority of San Diego is built eastward from the ocean, much of it in and on long series’ of canyons. The areas to the east of the county are heavily forested and when those hot Santa Ana winds blow in from the east, you pretty much know fire is on it’s way – it’s just a matter of how big it’ll be and how far west it will get. For the past few days, it’s been bigger and pushed further west then ever before, ripping through heavily populated areas that until Monday, assumed they were safe from the annual brush fires.
In the last three years, I’ve been out to San Diego roughly fifteen times for things related to my books. Signings, speaking engagements, fundraisers, meetings with bookstore owners. Every time I go, I stay at the same place – the home of the guy I’ve been best friends with for the last 23 years. Since Monday morning, he and his wife, their three boys, their dog and their cat have been holed up in a hotel room in Anaheim, about 75 miles away (the closest hotel room they could find), waiting to hear if their home has been spared. Always obstinate and forever stubborn, he waited as long as he could, thinking they were pretty safe. When he saw a car on fire about half a mile away, he knew it was time to get the hell out of there.
For much of Tuesday and Wednesday, we were on the phone as I tried to dig up information for him. Most of the other members of his family had been evacuated also, the wireless connection at his hotel sucked, the phone lines were jammed and we figured I had a better chance of finding information then he did. From what we can tell, we think his house is safe. It appears that the fired burned right to the road across the street and that’s where firefighters made their stand. He won’t know for sure until the end of the week when they let him return home, but it looks like they will have a house to go home to.
We have dozens of other friends who’ve been displaced this week who still don’t know about the status of their homes. The odds are such that at least one of them is going to go home to bad news.
As we were searching the list of addresses that had been positively identified as destroyed by the fire, we ran across the address for one of the homes he grew up in. It was a magnificent home that they built from the ground up, with a tennis court and a swimming pool and views of the avocado orchards from every window. I recognized the address immediately because it was like my second home and it’s one of those ridiculous minute details that gets locked in your head forever, like an old phone number or an old zip code. His family sold the house about ten years ago and at the time it was tough to let it go. We talked for a few minutes about all the stupid things we did in that house over the years – jumping off the roof into the pool, hitting tennis balls at one another when we got pissed off at each other, taking girls out into the avocado groves. And we wondered who had been living there until the fire made it disappear this week and if they ever jumped off the roof into the pool and what they would do now.
If you’d like to help the victims of the fires in San Diego and throughout Southern California, you can go here.
Jeff
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