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(conclusion)
Chris’s crew was fighting landscape as well as fire. Palm trees surrounded by forty feet of dead fronds went up like Roman candles. Embers rose off of them in great shining clouds, flying on the wind.
There were firewood piles heaped up against houses. Patio furniture, hedges, and all those wood and shake shingle roofs homeowners hadn’t wanted to spend the money to replace. Fire consumed them like tinder, and it took all the firefighters’ effort to save the homes around them. Several were burning and couldn’t be saved. A few could. Prioritize, dig in, and battle.
They fought the fire, and the red light was in their faces.
The fire reached Temple Hills and El Morro, the farthest extent it would finally burn. In Temple Hills, it ravaged house after house, burning down twenty-seven buildings before firefighters could win control. El Morro was on the edge of the Laguna Coast Wilderness Park, with wilderness on one side and the sparkling Pacific Ocean on the other. That day, though, the residents fled the nature they had once craved as the fire burned its way into their village.
In all, the Laguna Beach Fire incinerated almost seventeen thousand acres and destroyed three hundred and ninety-one homes. Over a thousand more houses were damaged.
Yet the fire’s life was coming to an end. At 10:00 P.M., the winds changed.
With the shift in the winds, the fury of the fire faded. It had lost its drive and no longer could leap over incredible distances. Embers couldn’t spread spotfires so far. Chris found that suddenly, the fire he was fighting was gone. It startled him how abrupt it was; he and his friends had battled furiously for hours to save whatever homes they could against an overwhelming firestorm, and suddenly their opponent vanished.
“You can be waiting for hours for something to do,” Chris says, “and then for hours you can be working, just hoping you get a break. That’s the thing with these brushfires and strike team assignments—you never know what you’re going to get.”
At midnight, the Orange County Fire Authority declared the fire contained.
Chris lay down by Laguna Canyon Road, the same street beside which an unknown arsonist had started the fire, and he closed his eyes. Along the canyon slopes, the brush was blackened and the earth scorched.
The air around Chris was freezing, and Chris hadn’t had anything to eat since he was assigned. Food supplies tend to arrive on day 2 of an operation. Still, after so many hours of physical exertion, he would certainly sleep.
In the hills above him, convict crews were working time off their sentences by using hand tools to cut through the brush around the remains of the wildfire, surrounding it with an impassible zone where it would have no fuel. The con-crews would periodically walk down past the drowsy firemen at the road. The con-crews would be up all night, working in the tall grass, bushes and weeds of the hills to put the fire out.
In Chris Grogan, the job created a profound sense of humility. “The big thing you learn,” Chris says, “is: you’re such a small part of the picture compared to what’s really going on.” The firefighters could only see “a very small piece of the pie, one crew’s work.” Chris was really just a kid during this terrible “bBaptism by fFire,” second-guessing his superiors but bending to them and finally coming face to face with a chaotic nightmare.
Chris understood the fire’s intensity was “just the weather and the conditions.” He says, “It had just the right amount of wind, the right amount of humidity and the right amount of fuels, and it overwhelmed the resources quick enough that a lot of it had happened by the time we got there—we were just reacting.”
As Chris’s crew tried to rest, the fire was still burning, though it was contained. While it would probably take a couple more days to put it out, the rest of the Laguna Beach was out of danger. There were injuries, but no one had been killed. Chris’s crew had saved several houses. The firefighters’ response saved over a thousand homes directly threatened by the fires. Aircraft dropped sixty thousand gallons of fire retardant on the fire while two thousand firefighters battered it from the sides.
Humanity started this wildfire and nature ended it, a bizarre twist on the traditional man- against- nature firefight of tradition. It was a twist becoming more and more common, though. Behind Irvine is an open wilderness of about eighteen thousand acres, a vast area that has burned seven times since 1999. One of those fires was caused by lightning, but in every other, there was a human factor involved in the cause. There were arsonists, a welding accident, an accidental cigarette and once a bird hitting a power line and falling to earth in flames. Humans, sometimes on purpose and other times by accident, are taking nature’s place as wildfire’s cause. Nature itself is reeling from our onslaught, as native shrubs across the affected California regions do not have time to germinate before the next wildfire roars over them. Without the ability to seed the ground, native plant life is disappearing and being replaced by quick-growing weeds and grass. Nature and humanity together are suffering, as fires become both our children and our scourge.
Chris lay sprawled on the road, exhausted. As he fell asleep, ash, pine needles and bark still spewed through the air on the dense black clouds of smoke. Up in the hills the fire blazed, flickering under deep dark of the night sky. 
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