I Drove Into a Burnin’ Ring of Fire

Driving home from a weekend in San Francisco, I had already made several bad road choices.

Maybe that should have warned me that I was headed into the weirdest freeway ride of my life.

Last week, I haplessly rolled down the Golden State Freeway into Los Angeles County after authorities closed the highway following the huge Marple brush fire. Biting my nails, leaning cautiously over the wheel like my grandmother used to do, I followed a CHP cruiser in a small convoy creeping through a hellish landscape of smoke, flames and abandoned cars on an eerily empty freeway.

I certainly didn’t plan it that way, to drive through the eye of the firestorm. It was a simple case of being caught in the wrong place, reaching the CHP roadblock at California 138 just as the officers there opened it up and channeled southbound traffic into escorted convoys.

So it became a 20-mile trek hugging the back bumper of our escort, watching the flames and smoke darken the horizon right above our heads, feeling small and insignificant at the very feet of a major fire.

This wasn’t the scariest fire ride of my life. As a reporter, I have covered numerous fires where I have had to dash down narrow country roads, avoiding flames and the husks of fallen trees to reach the fire department command post.

In the famous Malibu/Calabasas blaze a few years back, I purposely ignored a Fire Department roadblock to reach people who owned homes in the fire’s path. Along the way, driving into the burning hillsides, I picked up four people hitchhiking along the road.

These were residents whom the Fire Department allowed to return to their homes but without their cars. I remember the drive, me behind the wheel trying to take notes while listening to these frightened people talk about what it might be like to return to the dream home they left safe and sound that morning, only to find it reduced to charred ruins that afternoon.

I dropped each off in front of their as-yet-untouched houses, watching them race up the driveway with worried, faraway looks in their eyes. I asked for their names, even walked up to the door with a few, taking cursory notes.

But I felt more like a neighbor than a reporter that day, especially while shaking hands with people who thanked me profusely, as though I was the one who was battling to save their homes, not a professional observer who wanted to help but also wanted a story.

Last Monday around dusk, there was no story to tell, no editor to oblige, no chance even to alert any editor that I was inside the fire zone. I was riding through the flickering chaparral because I was stubborn and tired and just wanted to get home--sort of like those people I picked up hitchhiking in the midst of the Malibu fire.

After encountering a monster traffic jam along U.S. 101 south of San Francisco, I had made a misguided dash for the I-5 corridor, making several wrong turns along state routes 156 and 152, bumbling through small towns like Hollister and San Juan Bautista, just wanting to get back to freeway civilization. And fast.

I reached Interstate 5 in the middle of the afternoon. Tired, running late, I fell hard to the impulse to slam the hammer down to 85 and 90 mph.

Somewhere along the way, I saw the flashing emergency road sign: There was a fire blazing just south of California 138 beyond the Grapevine. The sign suggested several fine alternative routes to Los Angeles, all of them along the rim of the known world. I ignored them all. I wanted to get home. I’d already had enough of the Golden State’s boondocks for one August afternoon.

So I pushed on, wondering if the successive signs I saw were broken. Because as I left the Central Valley floor, heading south up the Grapevine toward Lebec and Gorman, I still saw no signs of fire. Climbing the tortuous mountain inclines, I did notice one strange thing--almost no cars were coming the other way.

It wasn’t until I was just outside Gorman that I saw it: the mushroom smoke cloud that looked like some brown and wispy Godzilla menacing the mountainside to the south. By now, the northbound lanes were completely empty, save for an occasional firefighting vehicle, a rare sight in car-choked L.A. County.

As I reached the 138 turnoff, I followed the trickle of traffic to a brief halt behind a slowly moving CHP cruiser, and it was obvious that we were supposed to fall in behind him as he took us on a 30-minute adventure on a freeway that the fire had only a short time before stubbornly relinquished.

So we drove slowly behind the cruiser, about 20 cars, all of us gaping at the smoke and the blackened devastation around us.

From the road, we could see the flames looming large just over the next hillside. We could see the black earth, footprints of the fire monster’s heavy tread that came right up to the freeway and then jumped over it, over abandoned cars left behind in what was no doubt a mad rush for safety.

We saw firetrucks and firefighters scurry up hills and into smoke-choked ravines. In a way, I felt like the first line of reinforcements entering a combat zone following a battle, encountering the dead--in this case, abandoned cars. The sight made the normal Los Angeles freeway nightmare, your simple stop-and-go glut, seem like a cruise through the park.

Our motorcade remained together until we reached Castaic, where the CHP cruiser pulled over and let us continue on, unprotected, toward Los Angeles.

At one point before that, wide-eyed at the event occurring all around us, feeling none too safe even within the steel and glass confines of my car, I made eye contact with the woman in the next vehicle, something I usually avoid doing in Southern California, where the term “freeway rage” was born.

She looked back at me and smiled.

And then she made the sign of the cross.

And you know something? I did, too.