The Fires.(The Talk of the Town)

Southern Californians don't like to wake up to hot weather. It's a sign of the short and eerie autumn season that's marked by the influence of the Santa Anas--dry winds that come from the desert, dervish through the canyons, and head for the sea. People blame the Santa Anas for their headaches and their allergies. Starting last Saturday, the winds drove brush fires that, by the seventh day, had burned nearly five hundred thousand acres, injuring sixty-four, killing seven, and destroying some seventeen hundred houses, the majority of them in San Diego County. Hundreds of thousands across the region fled their homes.

The fire in Malibu started before dawn on Sunday, in the canyon behind Pepperdine University, where there were some downed power lines. (The cause is still under investigation.) Brush fires are dynamic: an ember jumped and fire consumed a Presbyterian church; another sailed on high winds (the gusts were more than eighty miles an hour) and devoured Castle Kashan, a crenellated Arthurian behemoth built by a doctor in the seventies and filled by its current owner, whose father was an oil minister in pre-revolutionary Iran, with Presidential and Elvis memorabilia. Movie stars evacuated their houses at the beach.

At the top of Carbon Canyon--blackened down to the ocean--on Tuesday afternoon, a thick, warm wind still blew from the east. A couple of kids, Michael and Colin, stopped on the side of the road. They were trying to bring their dogs home after two nights away, but their street remained closed. They had watched the flames leap the road from the canyon and come toward their house. "There was a lot of smoke," Colin, who is eleven, said. "It was like a tornado." Michael, his seventeen-year-old brother, said, "They said that we were the most prepared house. We have a fifteen-thousand-gallon tank." Colin chimed in, "And a fifteen-thousand-gallon pool!"

A jeep splattered with pink flame retardant pulled up. "I was in the war zone," the driver, Marty Dugan--fifty years old, corduroy shorts, no shirt, good watch--said. He pointed out his house, in Carbon Canyon: perfectly intact, at the center of an island of green, surrounded by burn. His family left, but when the police came by to clear the area he hid. He had five horses to protect, and a donkey named Waffles. "I was there for the duration--if the fire was taking my house, I was going with it," he said. "The anticipation was the scariest--seeing hundred-and-twenty-foot flames coming at me. Not a lot keeps me up at night, but I was up for forty-eight hours straight." He said he had got a great deal on his property, sold to him by a member of Guns N' Roses who was scared off by the devastating Malibu fire of 1993.

The defiant mood of the mountains was more muted at the beach. Scotty Brown, a local real-estate agent, stood in front of his office, at the end of Malibu Road, looking up at the ruins of the castle. "That was my listing," he said glumly. It had been on the market for seventeen million dollars. Only the guesthouse was still standing.

Smoke in the air makes for extra-beautiful sunsets. The sky purpled to the color of a mussel shell, then turned a muzzy black. The Compton sheriff's deputies, called in to help guard blocked roads, dined on food donated by Nobu Malibu. At nine o'clock, the thermometer read ninety-one degrees. By the next night, the Canyon Fire, as it was called, had been contained, and the command center had released a number of firefighters and support crews to points south.

The Witch Fire, the largest in the state, started in San Diego County midday Sunday, a ...