Malibu Burning by Robert Kerbeck

Author:Robert Kerbeck
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MWC Press
Published: 2019-10-16T22:58:34+00:00

The heat from the 2,000 degree flames melted the lettering on this Airstream.

Photo Simeon Sturges

Supplies at the Point Dume Relief Center

photo Judy Merrick

12:

Point Dume Relief Center

Judy Merrick looks like the Oscar-winning actress Allison Janney. She’d moved to Malibu from northern California in 2002, which meant I had her beat by two years. Malibuites measure themselves—and others—by how long they’ve lived in the city.

“I’ve been in Malibu for forty years,” I heard a guy brag once at a party using that number to give him the upper hand in some argument.

“What’s fifty get you?” was the response that came back.

The guy shut up.

Having both lived here just short of twenty years, Judy and I won’t be bragging about our longevity in Malibu. Judy did have something, however, that gives her a leg up on me. She is married to one of those fifty-year locals, a realtor named Brian Merrick, the son of the legendary John Merrick, who’d been the municipal judge in Malibu for over twenty-five years. Judy and Brian live on Point Dume in the house he’d grown up in.

Throughout his childhood, Brian had seen many fires. His agreement with his mother was that he could watch—and fight—any fire so long as it didn’t cross the PCH and enter their neighborhood. Then he would have to come home. But in his lifetime, no wildfire had ever burned into Point Dume and no one thought the Woolsey Fire would be the first. After all, no matter how big the fire, the firefighters had the firebreak of the PCH to stop it. Certainly, the highway would be lined with engines to ensure that homes remained safe.

But when flames crossed the highway and began to burn Point Dume in the late afternoon on Friday, November 9, there was no line of engines waiting to help. Many people had evacuated to homes on the Point from communities that already burned. My family had done so; like others, we believed we’d be safe there. We were wrong.

Brian began to prepare his property, filling trash cans with water and setting up wet towels to “snap” the fire out. That evening, they could hear the fire approaching “like a monster” as it devoured the wood of nearby homes, popping windows and exploding propane tanks. In her first fire, Judy was stamping out embers with her shoes. The fire came to the backside of their property, but they let it get no further. By Saturday at 2:00 a.m., after ten hours of flames, they felt as though they were out of harm’s way. Sitting together at their kitchen table, they took a moment to savor that fact.

“You know I would never leave you,” Brian said.

Judy was moved. Her husband wasn’t normally an openly sentimental guy. “Thank you, honey,” she said and touched his hand.

When Brian looked up at her, frowning, she knew. “You weren’t talking to me, were you?” Judy asked.

“No,” Brian admitted, “I was talking to the house.”

Later, they tried to sleep but kept hearing the sounds of popping embers.

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