The
first time my family’s hillside house in Napa, Calif., burned to the
ground, it was 1960 and my father was 14 years old. Everyone escaped in a
pickup truck, bringing little more than a handful of pictures and the
clothes on their backs. “Being novices, we took all the wrong things,”
my uncle remembers. “We grabbed lamps and blenders instead of
photographs.” The next day, mostly everything was gone. The hill was
charred earth and black trees.
That fire — like those in Northern California now, which have killed more than 30 people
and destroyed over 3,500 structures — was so tragic and random, and not
random at all. Napa is a hot, dry, dusty, grassy, wind-swept place.
Even as a child, I knew fire was an ever-present threat. As my dad said
last week, after our family home had burned for a second time: “You
build in these hills, you know this can happen.”
In
1960, my relatives mourned briefly. Then my grandfather built the house
again: a modest ranch with large square windows, redwood siding and
cinder block surrounded by low walls he stacked stone by stone, on 10
acres of raw land.
California
is a landscape of extremes, of arid canyons and coastal cliffs, fault
lines and flood zones; building here often feels like an act of
defiance. Of course you could not set a house on that hill and expect it
to last forever. And yet, when it came to the home my family calls “the
ranch,” forever was exactly what I expected.
At
3 a.m. Monday, when I woke in nearby Marin County smelling smoke, and
learned on Twitter that Napa was burning, I was sure, somehow, the ranch
would survive. When, at 2 p.m. Monday, I learned it was gone, I gasped
and sobbed.
“The
ranch was my happy place,” my sister, Meredith, said after the house
burned down, “where I always felt O.K.” For me, it was more complicated.
I disliked being outdoors, I hated dirt and bugs, I was no fan of the
manual labor my grandfather made us do there, I was scared of the snakes
in the pasture. Yet the ranch remains my purest idea of home. It’s the
place I know best, where my family felt secure, the constant in a world
that, increasingly, confuses and distresses me. It is a tether. Wherever
we are, we orient ourselves in relation to that house on the hill. Now
that house is gone.
Monday
morning, my dad drove to the ranch to survey the damage. One way or the
other, he had to know. He found walls of fire in the valley, choked air
and raging heat, charred oak and ash and a few cinder block walls where
the fire had devoured our home. The rock walls, he says, are still
there.
Last
Sunday, just before the fires, my family gathered at the ranch to
scatter Grandma’s ashes. This was a cosmic, bizarre coincidence. It had
been two years since my last visit. That morning, we sat on the patio
and looked over the valley.
There
was the gray rock wall and then the plunge, oaks and pasture, which had
faded to a pale, shimmerless gold; and beyond it rows of grapevines
dotted with wine estates that still looked new to me; and green-quilted
hilltops, and the chalk-line of horizon, and the endless, vivid sky.
This was every October in Napa: the heat intense, the grass so dry that
its brittle stalks would snap between your fingers and powder in your
palm. Silver Mylar, tied to grapevines to divert birds, glinted in winds
that blew every which way.
We
talked about the perfect heat, the worrisome height of the grass. I
touched the blue oak all the grandchildren had climbed. Its grayish,
textured bark was so dry it gave easily under my fingertips, revealing
living, pale brown wood. I returned to my chair, gazed upward. The oaks
reminded me of modern dancers, stretching limbs with easy elegance,
their branches crooked elbows, fingers spread over the sky.
Then
we went inside to sort my grandparents’ belongings. The living room was
virtually unchanged since 1961: turquoise armchairs, enormous ceramic
lamps, kidney-bean glass tables, a fireplace with a long, low hearth; a
wall of floor-to-ceiling windows. That room is char and ashes now — as
is much of the valley it overlooked — a fact I cannot convince myself is
true. Then, I pored over the scrapbooks that Papa had assembled. There
was a snapshot of teenage Grandma in a swimsuit, grinning goofily,
jutting her thumb in a hitchhiking pose. Studying it, I understood the
obvious — that she’d once been a girl, adventurous and vividly alive, to
whom nothing bad had happened.
That
afternoon, my family gathered in the pasture to lay my grandmother to
rest. We set a heart of roses in the grass. The plastic bag of ashes was
labeled with a number, which was somehow hilarious. We made bad jokes
and cried and laughed, because what else can you do? It is absurd, the
bureaucracy of death.
“Prisoner No. 745603, you’re scheduled for release,” Dad said. “Forever.”
Papa
would have liked that joke. Grandma would have rolled her eyes and
sighed — she was a champion sigher, her sighs contained multitudes. The
wind was unpredictable, lifting and scattering ash in all directions. I
tried to avoid inhaling her, but it was impossible. We said goodbye. We
said what we knew to be true, that she loved her family and she loved
her home. Now I search for meaning in the mad coincidence: that my
family scattered Grandma’s ashes hours before her home burned to the
ground.
We
wanted the ranch to be permanent. But maybe if you build your house in a
place like those dry Napa hills, you build it knowing it is temporary.
Maybe wherever you build, you know it is temporary. I’m grateful to have
been to that house one more time, to have paid attention.
Everyone
loves Napa in the fall, which is grape-picking season. But I prefer
springtime, when our pasture grass turns dewy and green, and wild lupine
blooms along the hillside, around oak trees twisting into a softer sky.
I liked to stand atop the long rock wall that my grandfather had
stacked and mortared with his own hands, and look over the spreading sea
of purple. It made me feel hopeful. It was nature’s insistence, a
rebellion of color, life pushing through.
