Fires, Firefighters and Theater Makers

The Senseless Pursuit of Something Beautiful

BY STEVEN LEIGH MORRIS

We knew when we bought a place in Idyllwild that it was a tinder-box, though the Alpine village has never burned in 120 years. Still, we’re living in an age when, in politics and in nature, “never before” doesn’t mean much.

Idyllwild is nestled near the top of a mountain (Mt. San Jacinto) that’s like a huge pimple that emerged between Hemet and Palm Springs, disconnected from any range (such as the San Gabriels or the San Bernardino mountains). Locals call it “The Hill,” though Mt. San Jac is the third tallest peak in So Cal. One highway (State Route 74) goes from the rock-sandy landscape of Palm Desert, adjoining Palm Springs, through the chaparral of the Santa Rosa Wilderness through the Sequoia-laced Garner Valley (where they filmed Bonanza) to the lush pines of Mountain Center and (turning north on Highway 243, to Idyllwild. No private insurer would cover our home for fire. Only the State, through a policy called the California Fair Plan.

If you’re in the theater, perhaps you’ll understand – the senseless pursuit of something beautiful. Being sensible was never my forte. Almost nobody I know in the theater is sensible. 

I love this place. The town has an arts boarding school. It has an annual jazz and film festival. The landscape recalls the verdant forests of Sonoma County where I grew up, so there’s some nostalgia. I lived most of my adult life in claustrophobic, urban apartments, and I wanted something else before I die. I love gardening and I love nature. I could raise a few chickens without feedback from toxic neighbors. Simple pleasures that give life purpose.

On Wednesday morning, as I was getting ready to drive to the San Bernardino train station, to commute to LA STAGE Alliance, I smelled smoke, stepped outside to see ash floating down from a silver sky, like snow. Beyond my deck and a vista of pines and cedars was a daunting plume of black-gray smoke. Yet there were no sirens, no helicopters. The silence was eerie. Nothing yet was being reported.

My wife and I started packing, just in case. What to do with the dogs? The chickens? Then came the sirens. In our normally placid skies, DC 10s and helicopters soared overhead, chopping the air with thudding noises, dropping layer after layer of pink phosphorous fire retardant on Idyllwild’s southern ridge. The fire was encroaching from the south west. The breezes were blowing north east. They knew they had to fortify a line to protect the village. They knew.

5 p.m. Wednesday, sun behind smoke in Idyllwild

People who put out fires are more sensible than people who create theater, though it could be argued that both are in the business of saving lives. Firefighters have the lowest suicide rate of any profession, because they always, eventually succeed in what they set out to do. Theater makers almost always fail at what they set out to do. But when they don’t fail, oh my, what miracles ensue. Perhaps because of these cruel odds, firefighters are generally more confident than theater makers. Is that an over-generalization?

At 11 a.m. on Wednesday, temps were already creeping over 90 degrees, neighbors were packing. At 2 p.m., power went out across the entire town.

A sensible person would have planned better for what to take. But such choices seemed absurd in our situation. Once the animals were packed in our two cars, there was no room for anything but crucial documents, toiletries and a couple of changes of clothes. I chose to take almost nothing but that.

To leave a home, not knowing if it will exist upon one’s return, triggers inexorable despondency – to leave behind mementos of family and career, newspaper clippings, photo albums, paintings, the piano bought by my now-late mother for my now-late father for one of their anniversaries, to leave behind the last remaining evidence of history itself, knowing that it all might burn – even though it will burn anyway in the cauldron of time. And the garden, the cedar trees in containers that I’d grown from seed – some still seedlings, others, now four feet, six feet tall. I watched them emerge, and grow, and reach for the sky, like all of us at some point.  

A kennel in Banning took in our dogs and chickens, while we decamped to a motel. Three days later, The Cranston Fire had burned 13,000 acres of brush and timber– including five homes in Mountain Center and on the outskirts of Idyllwild.

View from behind the South Ridge, after the evacuation was lifted,

How do we know what we think we know is true?

From Colton, I read the reports in the LA Times, the New York Times, Newsweek and local TV Stations. Their incentive was clear. Paint the most dramatic, drastic portrait possible. Show nothing but photos of the charred remains of timber and homes lost. Over and over. Images from Mountain Center and the monstrous Carr Fire in Redding, in Northern California – all blurred into one. By that time, the Carr Fire had destroyed 89,000 acres and 500 homes.

One TV reporter stood by the gas station in Mountain Center boasting how well trained she was for fire reporting, when she suddenly felt a surge of heat and ordered her crew to run away from the gas station to safety. I wondered if she did it just for theatrical effect, to star in her own reality TV show.

Another TV reporter got the numbers of the local highways wrong. There are only two highways in the Mountain Center/Idyllwild region – 74 and 243. He misreported them as 47 and 263.

Meanwhile, our intrepid next-door neighbor– a biologist and wilderness expert — defied the evacuation order and remained in Idyllwild, providing sensible reports via text message and on his website, about what was actually happening. While the media were salivating over the prospect of an entire town on fire, he reiterated the constant truth that the southern ridge fire line was holding and that the town was safe. Perhaps such useful truth defies the premise of click-bait journalism, because his calming truth was ignored by every “legitimate” news outlet. He couldn’t have gotten a press pass had he tried, yet he was the only one who got it right.

On Sunday, the day the mandatory evacuation order was lifted, as we were preparing to go home, Channel 7 ABC News was reporting that the fire was “still burning out of control.” In fact, it had been contained within the prescribed lines established by the unified command of the National Forest Service, Riverside County Fire Department, Cal Fire Riverside, and Idyllwild Fire Department. Channel 7 could have found this information by simply logging on to the websites of either Cal Fire, or my neighbor, as we had. That our heroic, tenacious and skillful firefighters had saved our town was a story that went largely untold by our professional news outlets. By the time we were going home, to homes that were still there, to a town that was scarred but intact, they had moved on to the cataclysm in Redding.

Going home:

On Sunday, they were allowing only residents to return from the one checkpoint in Banning. Checking IDs, a woman from our local post office recognized my wife in the car in front of me, and waved her through.

““Welcome home,” she said to me after I’d pulled forward and given her a form with my name and address. I admit I almost wept at those words. The pent up anxiety of being rendered homeless. The dread of loss.

Along the winding route 243, up the mountain, a silver sky threatened rain. As we approached Idyllwild, fire trucks were parked along embankments. The firefighters waived to the townsfolk returning home. The mood was ebullient and relieved. A collective sigh.

We are encumbered, even tortured, by our aspirations and perceived entitlements – life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness: a career we imagine we deserve, prosperity we imagine we should earn by virtue of our virtue. In actuality, the world is on fire, and always was. The flames can strike at any time, and at barely a moment’s notice.

People who create theater know this, or should. To create something of beauty is not sensible, it is essential. The world is engulfed in flames and lies. All we can do is counter all that with beauty. Face resolutely the truth of our inadequacies and failures, and try harder to be better, to do better, to find some kind of insensible beauty, in some kind of art, until the smoke comes wafting over the ridge. At least we can say we created something. At least we can say we tried.

Some have been perplexed by my cedar trees. Seedlings and saplings in containers. I could never say why I sprout them, other than I want to grow something that will outlive me. It could be argued they waste water, that in the middle of a forest, they have no discernible purpose. But I grow them anyway, for no sensible reason, except that in Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, written in 1898, Doctor Astrov’s eccentric habit of planting trees always moved me to tears. Explains Astrov:

“The forests are disappearing, the rivers are drying up, the game is being exterminated, the climate is spoiled and the earth becomes poorer and uglier every day. I see you do not take seriously what I am saying; and — and — perhaps I am talking nonsense. But when I cross through the forests which I have saved from the ax, or hear the rustling of the young trees which I have planted with my own hands, I feel as if I had had some small share in improving the climate, and that if mankind is happy a thousand years from now I shall have been partly responsible in my small way for their happiness. When I plant a young birch tree and see it budding and swaying in the wind, my heart swells with pride and I — well  — I must be going. Probably it is all nonsense, anyhow. Goodbye.”

And now there is a charred landscape in the south of Idyllwild, where once looming cedars resided. Now I know were my saplings will go.