Fire, rain, love, marriage -- and an idyllic Modjeska Canyon to intensify it all
I'm lined up with my neighbors in a ragtag human chain on a chilly Saturday, heaving rocks across a gargantuan pile of mud. There's a numbing comfort to the routine in a year when our routines have been upended.
I married in late October, and abandoned my Orange County home 48 hours later because of a raging wildfire. Since then I've been ordered to evacuate five more times because of the threat of mudslides.
It is a stock feature of Southern California life that took this native New Yorker a few years to grasp. When wildfires, floods or earthquakes strike, thousands of people must leave their homes, often very quickly. Reporters like me vacuum colorful quotes from the wreckage, and life picks up again for all but a few waiting patiently for insurance money or building permits. Or in our case, until the siren atop our community firehouse moans again.
Other people cluck at the news reports and ask, 'Why live someplace so dangerous? Just move.' Might as well ask, Why marry that one? How can I explain rounding the hairpin turn and seeing the peaceful valley in front of me, layer on layer of mountains soaring behind it?
The first time I saw the canyons at Orange County's eastern edge a decade ago, I winged a silent prayer upward. My wish was granted. Every time I near home, it comes true again. And this is no lonely hideaway. Modjeska is a matchless mixture of rednecks and hippies, longhaired men in huts and "downtown" folk in historic hunting lodges and stucco mansions. The occasional rooster or tarantula struts maniacally across the road.
Folks in Modjeska Canyon have always lived on the edge. We are tucked into the Santa Ana Mountains next to free-flowing creeks, protected from the outside world by the long arm of a ridge. There are no street lights, only majestic live oaks and long-limbed sycamores, dense poison oak and restless mountain lions.
We are bound together by a perhaps unreasonable passion, as surely as any married couple. I don't think I could survive sprawling Southern California without my canyon.
But the price of admission is steep -- freak acts of man and nature. Last fall, during high winds, an arsonist set a fire in crackly shrub near the main road.
I was back east, getting married in my mother's small New England town. The wedding was joyous. To walk up from the stone basement of the lakeside chapel, into a room filled with friends and family turned toward me with faces shining, was mind-blowing. It was so easy to look into Frank's eyes and say yes, loud and clear.
