As I drive along the Pacific Coast Highway, places from the postcards of my childhood fly by.

Malibu Feed Box – Our family’s country store sells wildflower honey made from the dozens of beehives we tend in our backyard.

The Reel Inn – We sat at the picnic table devouring discounted seafood where my dad once asked a guy in line about an acting job.

Something's Fishy - This is the sushi restaurant where my brother used to work as a waiter, and the sake here warms the soul after a day in the cold Pacific.

Now it's all gone, reduced to ashes, like so many other landmarks of my youth.

So I drove on to PCH, my eyes flooded with grim new images and my heart filled with memory, nostalgia, and regret. I came to see how the town where I grew up had changed.

But I also hope to discover that our home of more than half a century has once again escaped the capricious gods of wildfire. I will also gain some level of understanding, thanks to my late father, and another wise old Malibu original who is still alive.

This is more than just a love letter from home. I’ve always been so ambivalent about my identity as being from Malibu that when asked where I grew up, I was always vague. I'd say "West Los Angeles" or "I went to Santa Monica High School." Both are correct, but not complete answers.

In my opinion, the modern Malibu carries too much baggage. upstart. Show off cars and spending. Homes two and three times their size line the perimeter of Carbon Beach, once ad nauseam (but somewhat accurately) dubbed "Billionaire's Beach."

Much of Malibu has a scary, TMZ-esque charm to it. I grew up here in the 1970s, a time that felt (cue the fiddle, or maybe a little Carter Stevens) simpler.

When we moved to Carbon Canyon in 1969, there was only one supermarket, a few gas stations, and a lumberyard in downtown Malibu. No liposuction influencers or overly groomed pets. There is no city hall. In fact, there were no cities before its founding in 1991.

A relaxed, bohemian charm prevails. I remember young women riding horses, without saddles, to market baskets to buy snacks. Surfers roam the grocery store aisles barefoot and sometimes even topless. PCH feels like Main Street rather than the driving death trap it will become.

When our big yellow school bus passed a favorite surf spot, the brothers would yell, "The bay is cooking!" which always seemed to be answered with, "Yeah. This swell is going to be sick."

We always had two or three dogs, but no pedigrees. Beautiful bastard. The first, and wildest, is Zara, a Hungarian shepherd (sort of) who leads her pack into the mountains on what we call "deer hunting." A few days later, they would come back covered in ticks. A satisfied smile appeared on his face.

Our ranch house has tall windows that open to Sagebrush Mountain and a little ocean view. My parents, Sheila and Ford Rainey, bought the house and an acre of land for just under $70,000.

The beach has its own fun. We could walk a quarter mile, duck into the low PCH underpass, and spend a long time body surfing doing nothing. Later, I would surf for bass and kingfish, and occasionally spot a leopard shark.

Even under smoky orange skies, the waves roll gently into our favorite beach. The snipe burrowed in search of sand crabs, just as they had done the week before.

As a child, I didn’t understand the privileges we had. At first, the main thing I remember is that we left a perfect neighborhood in Pacific Palisades.

In our new home in Malibu, we have only one immediate neighbor, an older couple with no children. This means I have a closer connection with my brother Robert and my sister Kathy. But I remember feeling lonely and missing my friends who were always calling from a distance.

A lot of the kids in Malibu make me uneasy. They look cooler, blonder, and prettier. I was a goofy guy who played basketball during school lunches and was once elected president of the Malibu Little Optimist Stamp Club. I didn’t find my main man until Santa Monica High School, where I joined the newspaper and met friends who are still my brothers to this day.

Malibu had more of a frontier feel at a time before most local traffic lights existed. Landslides often cause PCH to close, and in fact, last week, destruction of ground cover caused rocks to fall on parts of PCH. In the past, landslides would have cut us off from “the town” (read: Santa Monica) and the luxuries it had to offer. Such as clothing stores, movie theaters and laundromats.

Yes, laundromats. Mom would drive to Santa Monica and wash and fold mountains of towels, socks and underwear at the coin-operated laundromat on Montana Avenue. (Unthinkable today Tres - Chic Montana. ) It wasn’t until the 1980s that my brother insisted that my parents buy a washer and dryer.

Our Carbon Canyon house is built out of wood and is light, airy and just perfect. The wind was howling and we were freezing to our bones, but Dad decided that radiant electric heaters were too expensive. We never opened it.

Instead, we built fires in two fireplaces and a wood-burning stove. When the wind gets particularly strong, as it did last week, smoke billows down the chimney and fills the living room.

Then, as now, you couldn't live in Malibu without running into actors and other celebrities. But before videos were everywhere and everyone was on public display, the big shots were hanging out in supermarkets or post offices. They were just regular people who, despite having a glimmer of success for us, lived in a family where their next acting job was never certain.

My father had a long career as an actor, transcending a fairly bleak working-class upbringing in the Pacific Northwest and moving into repertory theater and then countless roles on television and in movies.

My dad knew and worked with some of the guys who lived in the bigger, grander houses on the beach—Ryan O’Neal, Lloyd Bridges, Yul Brynner. But he was a bit of a loner and never became a Hollywood figure. When he's not on set or stage, he's most likely holed up at home tinkering with his beehive or homemade solar heater.

When Mom isn't attending Mass at Our Lady of Malibu or chatting with the cashier at Ralphs, she spends most of her time alone. She spent many hours making woodcut prints, paintings and occasional sculptures, and sold her work at local exhibitions. Disco diva Donna Summer bought one of her woodcuts. It made her smile.

A mainstay in Malibu, then and now, was Bill Stange. He surfed. He fished with a spear. He caught huge numbers of halibut and abalone from La Costa Beach. The Stankey family patriarch bought their house in Rambla Vista, with its sweeping ocean views, mostly paying for it with his salary as a Los Angeles County lifeguard.

"Malibu was a community. They were firefighters, aerospace engineers and just regular people," Stange recalled last week, along with the Hollywood crew. "Everyone knew everyone. And there was an innocence." Stange calls that world and its surviving remnants "Old World Malibu" — more hip than hip.

Then, as now, wildfires were as frequent as the perennial debate over whether to build sewer systems. (That never happened, at least citywide.) I remember several times loading my bags into the station wagon and escaping to our Aunt Faith's house.

By far the most serious fire threat came in 1993, when firestorms swept through Southern California. After many fires over the years, my parents didn't evacuate until the winds shifted and a fire broke out inside the chain-link fence behind their one-acre property. The 85-year-old dad stayed on the roof with a garden hose until the very end.

When they evacuated to our home in Venice with their two large German shepherds, they said, "The house is gone." But the next morning, I got the most exciting thing of my young newspaper career. One: My press pass allowed me to pass through the police roadblock on the PCH. I discovered that Carbon Canyon had turned black, but "Raney Manor" (as I cleverly named it) was miraculously intact.

I rushed to the nearest pay phone and told Mom and Dad the news: They were coming home.

More than 30 years later, I find myself back at PCH performing the same assignment, wearing a press pass and yellow fire jacket and carrying a notepad.

After several days in other fire zones, I was exhausted and filled with doubts, but I always believed that this old house might have another life. At Fire Station 70, I turned right onto Carbon Canyon Road. The hillside, which a week ago had been covered with sumac, sage and buckwheat, now looked like the inside of a very old barbecue pit. As I turned the first corner, I caught my first sight of the house.

It's just that it's not a house anymore. This is an ash-like void. The electric gate was broken, and I jumped up the wall to see that the swimming pool we had enjoyed so unbridledly as children was now a watery charcoal pit. Two chimneys still stand. But now they have become a pair of tombstones.

It's too early to know what will happen next. My father died in 2005, just before his 97th birthday. My mother died last May at the age of 91, within these walls.

We were the lucky ones: The house had been cleared of valuables—family photos and most of my mom’s art—in preparation for sale.

On Thursday morning, as I left my old house, I finally cried. Not for that tired old place that had seen better days. But mostly for my parents, who worked so hard over the years to build a sanctuary for us from the hustle and bustle of the outside world.

From Malibu to Pacific Palisades to Altadena, many other shelters are now gone. I feel for every family.

I still had no idea what it all meant, so I called the Bard of Old World Malibu, who for years has been using his Facebook page to report on the wind, surf, and marine life below Carbon Canyon.

Bill Stange told me that his home of more than 60 years also burned down. He also needs to make a decision about what comes next. One thing he knows: The tides and waves are here to stay. Graceful pelicans will soar and snipe will burrow into sand crabs.

Malibu, he said, is a place that "returns to its wild nature no matter what. They can build those big houses and do whatever they want. But they can never tame Malibu. It turns out we're all just renters here." guest."

On my last visit to the house before the fire, I discovered my father's old play "Our Town." His role as stage manager filled the margins with a wealth of ideas.

My mother preserved the Thornton Wilder classic and wrote a tribute underneath the headline, “My Love, My Only Love.”

How appropriate, then, that my friend Steve recalls the stage manager’s most famous monologue.

"We all know that some things last forever. It's not a house, it's not a name, it's not the earth, it's not even the stars," it said in part. "Everyone knows deep down in his bones that something is eternal, something about humanity. ... Everyone has something eternal deep down inside."