Heat (9 page)

“Flame is burning smoke,” Aristotle wrote, “and smoke consists of air and earth.”

It is hard to know if Aristotle understood the truth of his words. Flames glow as they do because fire releases fine particles of soot, and that soot, heated, glows, just as a toaster element glows from the heat of electricity, just as the filament of an incandescent lightbulb glows from the heat of electricity.

Faraday described glowing soot in his candle lectures. “You would hardly think that all those substances which fly about London, in the form of soots and blacks,” he wrote, “are the very beauty and life of the flame. It is to this presence of solid particles in the candle flame that it owes its brilliancy.”

Neither Aristotle nor Faraday was familiar with chaparral, but both men would have been quick to understand its nuances. When fire burns through chaparral, it goes in two stages: first comes the roaring flame of the crown fire, which passes quickly, and then the slower burn of the undergrowth.

“Fire may burn rapidly through the crowns of brush,” wrote G. W. Craddock in 1929, “causing leaves and small stems to fall in flames to the ground where they ignite the litter to produce maximum surface soil temperatures in 2–9 minutes.”

Two closely spaced points may suffer through different experiences. The first point might heat abruptly, spiking to 1,500 degrees in minutes, consuming all its fuel in an angry burst and then cooling quickly after the fire passes. The second point might be hit by a crown fire that heats the soil suddenly to 1,000 degrees before passing, after which it cools to 200 degrees before the ground fire arrives. Under the flames of the ground fire, the soil might reach 900 degrees. The ground fire might burn for two hours, working its way through leaf litter and duff and even burning the richest organic parts of the soil itself, ending with the softly glowing combustion of a few smoldering stumps and, five hours after the fire has passed, a soil temperature of 600 degrees. A day later, the ground, in places, might still burn through boots. The photographer and the neighbor discuss their memories of the fire. As they remember the Tea Fire taking their homes and their possessions and threatening their lives, I choose not to bring up Aristotle or Faraday or Craddock.

The neighbor’s wife is a painter. Her paintings went the way of the photographer’s photographs. After the fire, when the neighbor returned and searched through the ashes, he found lumps of gold that had once been his wife’s jewelry. Fourteen-carat gold, typical of jewelry, melts at temperatures close to 1,500 degrees.

“I sometimes imagine the house burning room by room,” the photographer says. “I think about the things that burned.”

Afterward, he says, the first thing you buy is a toothbrush and pet food. You rebuild from there.

Ben Franklin, the man behind Philadelphia’s first volunteer fire department, died in 1790, the year before Faraday was born. Franklin would not have thought of heat as an expression of molecular motion. In all likelihood, he thought of heat in terms of Lavoisier’s caloric theory, as a subtle fluid.

Lavoisier and Franklin knew each other. In 1784 they served on a French commission that debunked the medical theories of Franz Mesmer. Mesmer believed that what he thought of as the vital force of animals—what he called their
magnétisme animal—
could cure illness. The essence of life, of health, flowed like caloric, as a subtle fluid. Mesmer believed that his subtle fluid could address stomach cramps and blindness and fevers.

Mesmer’s techniques did not always work. Despite this, his name found its way into common usage. People can be mesmerized in any number of ways.

The commission on which Franklin and Lavoisier sat is often credited with developing controlled clinical trials, a technique used today to test drug therapies.

Also on the committee was Joseph-Ignace Guillotin. In 1794 the invention named after Guillotin ended the life of Lavoisier. “The Republic needs neither scientists nor chemists,” ruled a French judge, and Lavoisier lost his head, ending any opportunity for him to revise his caloric theory and to recognize heat for what it really is, an expression of molecular motion, not a fluid at all.

From the astronomer and mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange, soon after Lavoisier’s execution: “It took only a moment to cause this head to fall and a hundred years will not suffice to produce its like.”

The photographer and I leave the neighbor’s house to drive uphill to where the photographer once lived. Someone has cleaned up the rubble that was once his house. Someone has hauled away his melted file cabinet. At first it seems there is nothing left but a concrete slab and a beautiful round chimney made from rough bricks, tapering near its top, where the roof would have been. But odds and ends appear. We find an abalone shell, blackened and burned thin by the fire, but its mother-of-pearl inner face still intact. We find a battery, its label burned away and one end melted. The broken ends of wooden beams turned to charcoal jut from holes in the chimney, suggesting that there had once been a ceiling. On the ground, in splotches, are pools of hardened metal of the sort that the photographer had collected and photographed. In what was once the living-room floor, weeds poke up through cracked concrete next to a hardened pool of melted glass. There is a blackened barbecue grill. Next to it the plastic plumbing is still more or less intact, unmelted.

The photographer shows me where the kitchen was. He shows me where the bathroom was.

“Coming here after the fire,” he says, “was like working through an archaeological dig, but what should have taken centuries took only a few minutes. It was hard to tell what things were.”

We hear a dog barking. We hear the pounding of a hammer, of someone rebuilding. The landscape, though charred in places, is for the most part green again. Prickly pear cactus grows thick along a trail leading up from the remains of the house. Castor bean grows in dense thickets. Low weeds and grass grow on what may have been a patch of lawn.

The house next door did not burn. It sat in a pixel skipped by the flame. Other pixels, too, were skipped. There is, for example, an unburned tree. Another neighbor’s house was gutted by flames, except for the bathroom, an unburned pixel, where towels hung on racks unscathed, and a plastic shower curtain hung unmelted. In the driveway of what had once been the photographer’s house, the fire skipped past his wife’s Alfa Romeo convertible. Everything around it was gone, but the car remained intact. Its vinyl roof did not melt. Its tires held air. It started. It ran. The photographer and his wife drove the car away, down the hill and away from the ashen neighborhood where they had lived, evidence that even the gods of fire love
Alfa
Romeos.

I call the Firewalking Institute of Research and Education. I reach the instructor. “Ever been in a house fire?” I ask him. He has not. Nor has he been in a wildfire. But he knows firewalkers who live in the California hills, surrounded by fuel. He is not sure if any of them have lost their homes.

“Firefighters come in for our fire walks in Dallas,” he tells me. “Some of them come on a regular basis. They tell people about skin melting. They tell them that the fire, the ash bed, will still be hot in the morning, maybe six hundred degrees. Their stories are great. It’s important for everyone to be outside of their comfort zone. We want to stretch the students. We want them to understand that this really is hot. This could be dangerous.”

I meet a firefighter with twenty years of burning chaparral under his belt, and I ask how close he is to the flames when he fights fires on hills like these. It varies, he says, but he knows he is too close if his skin starts to blister.

We drive ninety miles north and east from Santa Barbara to park on a dirt trail inside the gate at Spanish Ranch. We leave the truck where a firefighting crew had set up a command post in 1979. It was from here that a team of now dead firefighters was sent up Sycamore Ridge, told to catch up with a bulldozer that was cutting a firebreak along the ridge. By then the fire seemed under control, almost contained, and the firebreak, running along the ridge, was well removed from what was left of the flames.

We walk uphill along Sycamore Ridge, toward where the men died.

This is scenic California ranch land with steep, rounded hills and sandstone bluffs above flat meadows, dry but not scorched. Brown and black and white cattle graze in the flat meadows, leaving nothing but nubs of grass where the fire started. On the hillsides, scraggly shrubs stand two or three feet tall, peppered across the slope and separated from one another by bare earth. Even now, during what passes for the wet season, dry chaparral paints the hillsides brown.

The chaparral would have been even drier after weeks without rain in August 1979. And the firefighting had started in the afternoon, after the sun flushed out what little water the plants had absorbed the night before. Despite this, it is hard to imagine that this place of stubby grass and sparse shrubs could carry a flame. It seems to me that the chaparral must have been thicker in 1979, that what we are seeing is incomplete regrowth even after thirty years.

The firefighter disagrees. “If anything,” he says, “it is thicker now.”

It is hard to imagine this place, even bone dry, burning with a ferocity capable of killing four firefighters.

Walking, we gain altitude quickly. Ten minutes above our truck, we stop at a marker. This is where firefighter Scott Cox, badly burned, emerged from the smoke.

We continue upward another ten minutes. Three stone cairns stand near where three bodies were found. Each cairn is adorned with a brand-new cloth badge from Cal Fire, reminding the world that these three men have not been forgotten, that Cal Fire remembers its fallen even after three decades have passed.

Around the cairns, thirty-year-old blackened nubs of burned-out shrubs remain, not quite hidden now by new growth, by new fuel.

By the time they reached this point, the firefighters would have been sweating from the climb. They might have noticed a wind suddenly against their faces, a wind that had not been blowing when they started uphill. This was more than a breeze. This was a wind of twenty-five or thirty miles per hour, the breath of a bellows exhaled into the base of the fire. They might have looked down toward the flat grazing land below, expecting to see a fire that was more or less under control. Instead they saw a conflagration.