The author and her father drove through the canyon back to their old house. At the entrance to the driveway of the author's childhood home, her father put up a sign: "Bilberry Ln." Was. (Photo by Brian Van Lau atlantic)
Last Thursday, when my family woke up, we learned that our friend Arthur Simoneau was missing.
The day before, as the Palisades Fire spread toward the neighborhood where I grew up and he still lives, my mom texted his ex-wife, Jill, asking if she knew where he was—he was left to defend our roads from the fire. forward. Gil thought he was out of town and in a hot spring. But the next morning she called to tell us he had run home and no one had heard from him since. She asked my father and I if we could go to him from a nearby residence.
My Old Neighborhood began as my father and Arthur each looked at the hills above Malibu and thought: I should build a house there. They each purchased land in a sparsely populated tract of land in Topanga Canyon, and the road from the main road to their lots was unpaved and passed through a forest of sumac, sagebrush, and winter-bearing trees. Hillside with toys with red berries. Each plot offers panoramic ocean and coastline views. City water and electricity hadn't quite reached our roads yet, so throughout the late 80's and early 90's Arthur and Dad jerry-rigged a well, generator, solar panels, and set up an informal network with the neighbor's utility Connections make this place livable.
Fires may be more of a concern in the mountains, but settling there doesn't appear to be any riskier than building a home in earthquake-prone Southern California. Fire is a part of life and they adhere to the codes, building driveways large enough for fire trucks and regularly clearing brush around the plot. In Topanga Canyon, a small group has formed called Arson Watch, a volunteer group whose members wear jackets with logos and travel around looking for signs of emerging fires.
Dad had his Arson Watch jacket with him when we went looking for Arthur last week. We all hoped that this piece of 25-year-old nylon would carry us across the closed road and into our original neighborhood. But the police we encountered did not believe that my 78-year-old father, wearing a faded jacket, needed to pass through barricades to reach an area that was still smoldering. A few hours later, we returned home, worried and exhausted, and then an evacuation warning for our area came on our phones. As we were packing, Jill called again to tell us that Arthur had died.
My first memory is of Arthur, and in my memory he looks the same as when I saw him last month. At my third birthday party, we were standing on my lawn next to the rose bush my mom had always wanted to make, but the deer kept eating it. He asked me how old I was and when I told him he was shaken. Wayman! "He said, pretending not to believe. "You are really like this. Old!He was wearing a T-shirt, a ponytail, and flip-flops (as he always does, no matter how formal the occasion). Backpacking at 9,000 feet, keeping bears away while camping - Flip-flops because they slip easily and don't collect burrs like sneakers.
He and Gil spent years building their three-story brick rectangle, painted olive green, with fragrant pepper trees lining the front walkway. Arthur wanted to build a house with his own two hands, just like his grandfather. (Bonus: He could design a garage door to fit his car and strap his prized hang glider to the roof.) Beyond a football field and across a small canyon, Dad and the construction crew built got what he wanted from his bachelor pad. After he met my mom, she went with him to Mexico to buy the tiles she put on the floors and walls.
At the time, the only other residence on our road was a geodesic dome about a half-mile away that housed a gay couple who drove a DeLorean and hosted a party for gay Filipino men with custody issues. Support group. Later, a germaphobic epidemiologist took over what we call the dome, thinking its remote location would help him avoid contagion. Uniqueness is a prerequisite for neighborliness. When Jill and Arthur saw people visiting who they thought would annoy their neighbors, they would walk around naked outside to scare them away.
In 1993, a fire broke out in the canyon, and Dad and Arthur stayed behind to use utility hoses and nearly 20,000 gallons of water to put out localized fires that broke out around their newly completed house. Somehow, except for a few warped windows, everyone and their homes remained intact.
My parents had children first, then Arthur and Jill had Andre, who became my first and best childhood friend. Eventually, our roads were paved, more families moved into the neighborhood, and we had a community. We call it "The Mountain" for short, to distinguish it from the "town" - Malibu. Our parents would weigh whether to take us to school, past an abandoned fire truck that burned in the '93 fire. My parents helped raise Andre; Andre's parents helped raise my brother and I. I just learned that Dad and Arthur created a road between our two homes so that Arthur could run the phone line from his house to ours. I always thought Andre and I would get to each other's houses faster this way.
Arthur is the unofficial Scoutmaster of our community. We could be as weird as we wanted, but he would nip any selfishness or malice in the bud with a stern "Not cool, man." He would help us squirm under the chain-link fence next to the no-trespassing sign so we could soak in the Ojai hot springs and tape pillows to our butts and teach us to roller-skate. He turned a wild garter snake and another snake into pets "Snakey" and "Snakey 2" that roamed freely in the living room; he would give us an extensive lecture on gun safety and then show us how to shoot a .22 rifle , and hid the gun in the bushes when we saw the Sheriff's helicopter. He made us believe we were on a wild ride and always kept us safe. When I fell asleep in the light of the ambulance that brought Arthur to our house the morning after my father's heart attack, I woke up thinking not what could be wrong, but wondering What adventures would he take us on that day.
Our house was never really finished. My brother's bedroom was originally a walk-in closet and my bedroom was a breakfast nook, but neither had a door. Meanwhile, Andre's bedroom has something extra: a door to nowhere overlooking the driveway. Arthur had always wanted to build a staircase there. This land can only allow us to live such a normal life. When my parents bought us a trampoline, the Santa Ana winds blew it down the hillside and into a tree at a 45 degree angle, where it began its second life as our slide. We've experienced fires, power outages, mudslides, rockslides and storms. But we have a feeling that enduring these dangers makes this life possible—you can see the Pacific Ocean from your kitchen, and watch coyotes trot across your yard from your bedroom at night, backlit by the lights of Los Angeles. When I started high school, my family moved away, simply because we had to downsize and other families left too. Eventually, Arthur was the only person from those years who still lived on the road.
Before my dad and I tried to get to that old road, we called the guy who bought our house up in the mountains. He told us what we didn't want to hear: It had burned down. He thanked my father for building such a lovely home. Dad immediately recalled the fossilized nautilus he placed in the center of the fireplace, made from rocks he had collected along the canyon to the house. He wondered aloud if it was still alive. On Monday we finally made our way through scorched canyons, past deflated cacti, and up the hills. We pointed at the piles of debris: I can't tell if that was once so-and-so's house. When we saw nothing on the mountain, I tried to superimpose what I knew about the land onto what I was seeing, but I couldn't. Sumac, sagebrush and toyon were crushed. We were on a new, black planet that happened to have the same terrain as where I grew up.
Standing in what I thought was once our living room, I couldn't tell whether a broken piece of metal was a washing machine or the 1920s Roper stove we sold with the house. But I did find a nautilus, perched on some rocks that Dad had collected. I thought about Arthur: He would know how long it takes for the sumac to grow back.
A lot of people here are concerned about losses like this. At least 10 of my friends' childhood homes burned down. If I drive along the coast now, I can see hundreds of razed houses housing people I have never met. Around Los Angeles, history is disappearing. When we first discovered Arthur was missing, the official death toll from the fire included only a handful of people; it has since risen to 25.
Dad and I drove off, and as we turned onto a road where Arthur was leading us on our bikes, Dad mentioned softly that we had only found one Nautilus. He actually put two of them in the fireplace, but his favorite one was nowhere to be seen. I can't believe I forgot. Yes, there are two.