Commentary: When the Mountain Fire hits close to home, this community is united

It was the morning after election day, and the distraction I had hoped for from the chaos of the previous night found me first. My brother-in-law wrote a message that says: There is a fire near my mother-in-law's house.

OK, but many fires over the years have left homes in Somis, a rural community in Ventura County between Moorpark and Camarillo. I Thomas fire in December 2017. I Maria fire in October 2019. Both are disasters of other people's buildings, not his.

I Mountain fire in November 2024 it could be different. The Santa Anas blew hard that morning, and my mother-in-law's place was dangerously low, maybe half a mile from where the fire started.

First thought: This is great.

Second thought: Make sure Kit, my children's beloved grandmother and my wife's family teacher, has escaped. I called. He was at a Starbucks in Camarillo (which, after a few hours, would be evacuated due to the alarming spread of the fire). Her longtime partner, Ian, was on the way.

They were safe – mission accomplished. So were their two desert tortoises, who now live as outcasts in my Alhambra yard.

But the fate of their home and their neighbors seemed very bleak. Later that day, a firefighter map posted on the Watch Duty smartphone app (a must-download for anyone living in a fire-prone area) showed much of the community, including its property, completely engulfed.

I often look at wildfire maps of local mountains and get a sense of which trails have burned and which hikes are off limits as the country takes time to recover. It's a sadly common occurrence in Southern California.

But now I know how that doesn't compare to seeing a scary red blob shadow part of the map there yours life happens – the 25 or so acres of rolling green, chaparral-filled hills that my wife's parents bought decades ago and turned into a beautiful California farm with lemon groves and horse stables.

The home where my wife grew up, where she posed for prom photos, where she took care of pets that to this day are as tall as legends.

The place where, 18 years ago, my wife and I got married in the tree that marks the burial place of her father's ashes. When my kids now run free with their cousins ​​after Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner.

Miraculously, the small house in this area is still standing, so my mother-in-law and her partner have shelter (other neighbors lost a lot). But much of what made that place home is gone.

In my opinion after visiting the area on Tuesday, this fire was unusual. It came within feet of the house – so close and so hot that it warped the windows. Don't ask me why the steel melted and the double-glazed windows shattered but the wooden house didn't catch fire.

What remains of the nearby buildings are ghostly evidence of their existence – piles of toxic ash, concrete footings and metal furniture, that, take my word for it, became part of a relaxing, meditative outdoor space. Many of the lemon trees remain, as if untouched; others were completely destroyed, the hills where they stood became black and worn. In a closed office, Ian kept photos of the damage to his old house that burned in the Santa Barbara fire of 1990. That office – and those photos – are gone.

Still, during this disaster, my mother-in-law and her neighbors told stories of the community coming together – of lost pets pulled out as the flames raged, people checking to see if others escaped before they did, of houses saved. firemen and others who had to stay behind.

“Everybody was watching everybody,” said Trevor Huddleston, a race car driver whose family owns the property next door (and runs the historic Irwindale Speedway). On Tuesday, he showed me the damage to his property: Although his family's house was still standing, the fire burned many avocado trees (“green gold,” in Huddleston's words) that had produced large quantities of fruit the previous year. By a strange stroke of luck, the firemen were only able to enter the well on his property because the new concrete road had just been completed.

Don't get me wrong: Lots of people he lost everything in this firecertainly more than the mother-in-law. But where he lost his sense of security, he and his neighbors strengthened their sense of unity through simple but heroic acts of care. In a difficult time when powerful forces are trying to set people against each other, that's a good thing to hold on to.