3M Dual-Cartridge Respirator

Oakland, 2018

A small airplane waited on the tarmac in Alice Springs, bound for Darwin. My connection from Sydney had been late, and though the twin-engine aircraft had started down the runway, the pilot stopped for me and lowered the steps. By the time I boarded, hauling my satchel, I was dripping sweat. The only free seats were in the rear. Grateful, still pulsing with adrenaline, I dropped into the nearest one.

All 16 of the other passengers turned around to look at me. One woman, toward the front, half-stood. “You’re a Yankee, aren’t you?” I nodded. “Where from?”

“Oakland, California.”

“Well, mate—your town is on fire.” She held up a newspaper. On the page was the now famous black-and-white photograph of the Claremont Hotel, its venerable edifice framed by a backdrop of flames. This was October, 1991.

An artist couple I knew, Janet and Richard, lost their home in the Oakland Hills firestorm. They were at a San Francisco beach when it occurred, with only the clothes on their backs. Everything was consumed. Janet’s father had built the house, which held her life’s work in experimental sound recording. Richard lost all of his paintings. Furniture, clothes, jewelry, keepsakes, bicycles, dishware—all gone.

When I returned from Australia the following week, we visited the site together. Of the house, only the foundation remained. A hardened silver pool was once a refrigerator; a twisted ball of glass their computer monitor. In the charred garage, a sculptural mass of wiry metal, filled with ashes, had been a suitcase. It held the love letters that Janet’s parents exchanged during World War II, when her father was a pilot and her mother a nurse. “We kept them in a suitcase,” Janet explained, “so we could save them first if there was an earthquake.”

After the fire, Janet and Richard did something remarkable. Having lost all of the material objects that defined them, they looked at their non-material lives. Starting from zero, they decided to reinvent themselves. Their first question was, “Do we stay married?” They did—and rebuilt their lives from there.

Twenty years later, wildfires are pandemic in the wooded world. As I write this, Australia itself is burning. The Amazon is in flames. And fires visit California every year, engulfing thousands of acres. The smoke in Oakland is sometimes so bad that we need filtration masks. For me, I’ve discovered, the smaller, lighter N95 face masks are good enough.

Fire is so terrifying. And yet somehow, cleansing. Sometimes I wish, if only for a nanosecond, that a fire would take all of my own possessions, while sparing my life.

Thousands of slides from scores of trips; journals dating back to 1970; letters from my brother, and past loves; my stereo and television and bass; every worldly possession described in this book, and a thousand other objects as well. Everything I have ever had the compulsion to save.