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Behind the Hills

by Bradley Beylik

Who shall gather the smoke of the dead wood burning,
Or behold the flowing years from the Sea returning?
The days have gone down in the West, behind the hills into shadow.
- J.R.R Tolkien, Lament for Eorl the Young

Driving up ash-stained Silverado Canyon Road, three thousand evacuated residents of the Silverado area were making their way home. A week earlier, mandatory fire evacuations had turned them into refugees. Staring blankly out their car windows, they crossed the barricades that had kept them away. They were prepared to assess what had been lost in the fire. The hills that once preserved the look of ranch lands and riparian woodlands, the lost look of a more rural Orange County, were a dusty black. Here and there, short brown sage bushes stuck out of the soot blanket. Their leaves were singed away. Bundles of low, lobe-like cactus were melted like green plastic.

All week, government investigators in navy blue t-shirts with block letters on the back—ATF, FBI, FEMA, OCFA—stood with bent backs, digging and sifting through the ash at the entrance to Silverado Canyon, looking for any clues that might lead to the capture of the arsonists. There were people from the forest service, local cops, and reporters. The officials all milled around, marking things with tape and talking to the reporters. A foreign force had invaded the secluded canyon community.

***

Flames licked the dark sky. From the view looking east from Signal Peak in Newport Beach, the long north-south canyon called Santiago looked like a rift in the earth, ringed with the lumbering black shapes of the Santa Ana Mountains, spewing the earth’s innards skyward. Even the tall landmark of Old Saddleback looked threatened as the flames chewed at the bases of its twin peaks.

Fifty or so residents of Newport Beach and south Irvine had gathered at the end of Ridge Park, the steep, Estate-with-view-lined grade that leads to the top of Signal Peak. Past long, serene rows of gilded-looking oaks and willows illuminated by landscape lights, Ridge Park leads to multimillion-dollar homes crowning the highest point of the coastal mountains that stretch between Newport Beach and San Juan Capistrano. These mountains are called the San Joaquin Hills, and have been home to numerous fires of their own in the past.

It is a weird thing to watch the works of humankind burn. That’s what I thought when I was back at home a few hours later. I coughed up some ash in the sink and took off my jacket. My shoes tracked soot onto the carpet. I sat hunched on my couch, a mirror image of every other Southern Californian that night, staring into television screens glowing orange with the fires.

***

Old Saddleback—visible from locations throughout the Los Angeles basin, the San Gabriel, San Bernardino, and San Jacinto Mountains, Catalina Island, and the groomed suburbs of Orange County—is made up of the two tallest peaks of the Santa Ana Mountains, part of the Cleveland National Forest. Its shape looms behind all the bustle of overcrowded streets and rampant suburban sprawl like a tired old sentinel. The twin peaks have tortured, weathered sides criss-crossed with firebreaks and truck trails, mostly devoid of trees. The top of Santiago, the taller of the two, is stuck full of antennas and transmitters of all shapes and sizes, a haunting replacement for the foliage that must have covered the mountains in green long ago. On Southern California’s foggy days, the dark mass is shrouded in marine layer, seeming strong and ominous in its scarred hide. It conjures Moby Dick—immense and ancient, possessing an existence that is at once brutally simple and mysterious, and decorated with the marks of many encounters with men who have sought it out. The mountains seem to keep watch from their heights above the suburbs, keeping record with their scars of all the doings of humankind that unfold around their feet.

Less visible than the peaks, even to most Orange County residents, is the quiet canyon-and-mountain community that has been at the base of Old Saddleback for over a century. Made up of several canyons—including Silverado, perhaps the most famous—scattered with sleepy little cottages, the community seems to have resisted the tide of overdevelopment and kitsch that has ravaged the rest of once-rural Orange County. In that way, the area represents the last of its kind—a rural stronghold in a sea of apocalyptic change.

The issues are many: environmental degradation, disappearing wildlife populations, encroaching development, and damaged ecosystems and watersheds. And these aren’t the only concerns for residents of the canyons. Other difficulties abound: landslides, flash floods, and a special brand of political entanglements. Without input from canyon dwellers, big companies and nearby city governments draw maps for future exploitation of the land. A traffic- and water-bearing tunnel connecting Riverside and Orange Counties has even been proposed to run right through historic Silverado Canyon.

In the face of these struggles, Silverado, though in many ways unchanged since its days as a mining boomtown, is today tragically threatened. But more than that, this disputed landscape represents a deeply American experience of survival and change, determination and loss. The rugged mountains with their shadowy canyons tell stories of weary prospectors, defiant Indians, and determined explorers. For people who spend their lives in the anonymous suburban landscape of Orange County, the canyons and mountains are a source of urban myth and local lore, deeply connected to the fading glory of the American West, and to the contradictory national narrative of frontier living and resource exploitation.

 

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