After the Fire

After the Bel Air fire, the hills behind our house were stripped bare of vegetation; all that remained of the chaparral were the charcoal skeletons of manzanita shrubs and river stones embedded in the pale gold dirt. So when the winter rains came and saturated the summer-baked earth, there was nothing to hold the water back, and rivers of mud began to pour down the hills. One night I woke up to the sounds of rain and shouts, and I ran out in my pajamas to see my parents out in the backyard filling up burlap bags with mud and stacking them up into a makeshift dam. 

It had only been a few months earlier that we had stood on the street watching the thrilling fire rage behind our house, and had then piled into our VW bug with our family photographs and my father’s art work and our new pajamas to head for my aunt’s house near the ocean. We had gone to sleep that night without knowing whether or not our house would burn to the ground or whether my father, who was helping the fire fighters, would be safe. So I knew that as exciting as these dramatic events were, they did come with a serious risk. 

My mother came in and sent me to bed, reassuring me that things were under control. And I woke in the morning to find the rain had stopped, the house was safe, and breakfast was on the table. Even better, school was cancelled because the road was flooded and no one could get out of the canyon. As my father sat leisurely drinking his coffee, the phone rang. It was about our neighbor Anna Mahler, he told us. The mud had completely flooded her backyard and all the sculptures were buried. He said he was going to head over there to help out and asked if I wanted to come along. Did I! 

I tucked my jeans into white plastic rain boots and headed out with him, down our driveway and onto Chrysanthemum lane. The first thing I noticed there was large tree lying across the lane. There was something wonderful about that because no cars could get through to where we lived now and we had to climb over tree trunk to get down to the main road. And when we reached the bottom of the lane, I stopped to look up and down Beverly Glen Canyon with awe. Oh, how glorious it was! For where there had once been a curving two-lane road—the street that led from West Los Angeles up into the hills and then back down into the San Fernando Valley—there was now a river, a rushing, churning, yellow-brown river. It was only many years later that I learned that this canyon had originally been a river, but at that moment I knew in my heart that what I was seeing—as destructive as it might be—was the return of my world to its primal origins. 

Somehow we made it over to Anna Mahler’s house, two lanes away from ours. And when we entered the front door, there she was, dressed in pants and a sweater, and with her long hair up in a bun, talking in her accented English with some grownups from the neighborhood. She was from Vienna, I knew, and I understood her to be the daughter of someone very famous, the great composer Gustav Mahler. I was briefly introduced to her, but my real interest was focused on the backyard—I was dying to see all those sculptures that were “up to the necks in mud.”

When we walked out into the messy, chaotic backyard, I was disappointed to see that it was crowded with other people from the neighborhood, who were all busy digging away. However, I was the only kid there, which was some consolation, and I was soon given a small shovel and my own sculpture to work on. And I immediately went to work with a dogged determination to free that sculpture from the thick, heavy mud that encased it. I don’t remember how long I worked, but I do remember that when my father told me it was time to stop, I had not made as progress as I had hoped, and I went home reluctantly. 

Do I wish now that I had gotten to know Anna Mahler any better? Not really. What I’m sorry about now is that I didn’t ask to be taken back to her house after the flood was over. I would really have liked to see that garden again with all its sculptures, beautiful and free.

by Nina Zolotow

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