photos - r. whittaker



The Rockridge BART station in Oakland has a mural featuring some 2,000 hand-painted tiles—“The Firestorm Community Project.”  Installed in October of 1994, it is dedicated to the people affected by the1991 fire that swept through the Oakland Hills for four hot, dry days in October. An estimated 10,000 people were evacuated and over 3500 homes burned. It's an uncanny circumstance that one morning, about a month before the firestorms in Los Angeles, I was drawn to write about it - something I'd experienced first hand. - R. Whittaker

More often of late, I notice sometimes how my attention is awakened subconsciously. It happened just recently as I was walking along College Ave. in Oakland. All morning, in the back of my mind, I’d been preoccupied with how to complete the last few pages of issue #43. I had plenty of material, but none of it felt quite right. As I was walking under the Rockridge BART station [Bay Area Rapid Transit], I happened to stop for a moment. Standing there, and feeling more present, I took in the daily bustle around me. In my peripheral vision I barely noticed the display near the stairs that leading to the tracks above. After a few seconds, something made me focus on it, and I walked over for a closer look. It’s composed of two thousand 6” x 6” tiles and dedicated to the memory of the Oakland Hills firestorm in October of 1991. Each tile was hand-painted by someone affected by that dire event.

I didn’t remember ever taking a close look at the memorial before. It’s not that I didn’t remember that fire. I did. Vividly. On the day of the fire, I’d been in San Francisco in Monterey Heights with a group of people working together in a garden. Around 11am, one of them approached me. “Don’t you live in Oakland? There’s a big fire over there. Maybe you should head home.”      

 

I did have a house in Oakland, and I left for my car immediately. I’ll never forget what I saw when I topped a hill and could see across the bay—a massive column of smoke. As the wind that day was coming from the East, the top of this huge column had been blown west across the bay over San Francisco. It’s why I’d been half-aware that morning of something odd about the atmosphere—a strange sort of muted light.

My first impression when I could suddenly see across the bay to Oakland/Berkeley Hills, was akin to seeing an atomic bomb. As the reality of it sunk in, the shock put me in an altered state of consciousness.

It took at least two days, maybe more, for the firemen to get control of the fire. I was anxious to see if my house had survived. It was everyone’s question. And for many it included, did my cat(s) survive? My dog(s). My parrot? My... ?

Finally, I was allowed to ride my bicycle past the yellow tape. (Cars were not yet being allowed in the burn area, which was still smoking in places.) Bicycling slowly through this devastation was so strange. In many places, the smoldering continued. I was coming from the west below the main burn area. On that side, the fire had burned in uneven patterns, and it was hard to predict what I’d find. Finally I was only a block away and in a strangely detached state. And there it was. The houses to east, all burned. The houses to the south, burned to the ground. The fireman had stopped the fire at my house.

Some of the firemen were still there, in fact. They were taking a breather on the bank where my neighbor’s house across the street was now an ash pile. And the house next door to the east, nothing but ashes. In fact, with every house in more than a 1800  of my view, it was the same story.

I’d gotten off my bicycle and was standing there just taking this all in. “Is that your house?” one of the fireman asked.

“Yes. It’s mine.”

“You’re a fireman, right?”

“No.” I was surprised by the question.

“We thought whoever lived there was a fireman because of the sticker on that car ‘Oakland Fire Dept.’”

He pointed. It was my tenant’s car. Patricio’s girlfriend’s car, to be exact. She was estranged from her husband, an Oakland fireman, but had gotten the car. 

“We thought one of our own lives here! We thought, ‘Hey! Let’s try to save it.’”

And they did. Only the corner of a deck had been burned, and the paint on that side of the house was blistered. My tenants were fine. Jennifer had to drag Patricio away, she told me later. Standing on the back deck, he’d become mesmerized as towering vortexes of the fire danced closer and closer, their flames leaping across streets.

In the next two or three years, there were many articles about the fire and some additional memorials constructed or proposed. At a certain point, life started to move on. Much more easily for me, of course. By an odd trick of fate, I’d been lucky.             

I went back a second time to the tile mural. It was soon weighing on me—the reality of what had happened. In looking more closely, the innocent power of these few tiles is more than sobering. How did those who were truly affected get through it? Was there love nearby? There must have been.  ∆