by Pico Iyer
The razing of Lahaina, among other losses from a fiery summer, shattered the illusion that towns, monuments, icons – even our homes – will always be there for us. In this fragile time of climate change and social upheaval, we need to accept that nothing gold can stay
Pico Iyer is the author of, most recently, The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise.
One hot summer evening, 33 years ago, I walked upstairs in our family home in California to see flames five-storeys high surrounding me on every side.
I grabbed my mother’s cat to try to run to safety, but when I got outside, I saw there was nowhere for us to go. Fires were rising on every side of me, made crazy by wild winds swirling at more than 100 kilometres an hour. There was no way to drive up our narrow mountain road, no way to drive down.
For three hours, I was stranded at the bottom of our driveway, at moments watching the blaze systematically make its way through the house, reducing every last childhood souvenir in my bedroom to ash and then wiping out my next eight years of writing, all outlined in handwritten notes.
Through what felt like a miracle, I was rescued on that occasion by a Good Samaritan. Blessed with a water truck, he saw a fire up in the hills and drove up to be of help, only to find himself stranded right outside our driveway. The hose he pointed at every onrushing surge of orange saved my life, as well as his own.
But when I walked up the silent road next morning to see what was left, I found bronze statues reduced to ash. My parents’ cars were hollow skeletons. All 60 years of their photos, mementoes, lecture notes – gone, as if they’d never existed. A once-in-a-generation conflagration had overturned my family’s lives in an evening.
Our insurance company gave us just enough to rebuild on the same property, and we moved into a much sturdier house, though an empty one. Yet more than 10 times since, we’ve received reverse-911 calls that have sent us fleeing from the new structure, pursued by flames. Every time I drive down to the grocery store, I can’t be sure I’ll have a home to return to.
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