Enlightenment from behind the wheel of a Ferrari
Seeing California’s wildfire devastation in a supercar a reminder tragedy touches us all
You can smell the destruction before you see it. It’s a familiar smell, akin to the pungent scent of charcoal that wafts up from the best open-air barbecues.
It’s a pleasant smell if it’s a couple of logs on the fire or a few briquettes in the barbie. But when it’s the detritus of 97,000 acres — and that’s Los Angeles and Ventura counties alone — scorched to earth, the odour is not nearly so innocent.
I’m not quite sure why I wrote this. I definitely didn’t mean to tread on delicate California sensibilities. I’m neither a news reporter, nor a devastation junkie with a fetish for forest fires. And those suffering this calamity certainly didn’t need my tourist gawking.
I was just out for a drive. I had borrowed a Ferrari Portofino for a joyride (why else does one borrow a Ferrari?) and while I had heard that Topanga Canyon had been well flamed, I was told that areas farther north weren’t nearly as devastated. So I headed up the Pacific Coast Highway and turned onto Corral Canyon Road, a familiar playground for me whenever I am lucky enough to score a four-wheel plaything.
That’s when the smell hit. Even with the Portofino’s windows rolled all the way up and its very well-sealed folding hardtop rigidly in place, there was no avoiding the crushing smell of ruin. At its lower edge, barely half a kilometre up the mountain, it was just blackened scrub brush. Farther up and the baby blue Ferrari’s fleetness — that I normally would be using to strafe the canyon road’s apexes — was busy dodging the tumbleweeds blowing freely across the road, the vegetation that once constrained them now simply ash.
Why didn’t I turn back? I don’t know, really.
Farther up, near El Nido, things got worse, because now I’m putting the Portofino’s quick-steering rack to work dodging football-sized boulders. It’s one thing to listen to “experts” on CNN as they “worry” that the loss of vegetation will promote mudslides. It’s quite another to be weaving in and out of the rubble barely a week later. A few key weak points had already been sandbagged, but with SoCal’s ever more capricious weather — where was last week’s New Delhi-like monsoon two weeks ago? — one suspects that with soil so bare, these canyon roads above the Pacific coast will soon be further ravaged by mud and sliding mountain.
I creep the idling Ferrari ahead. For once, I’m happy the quad exhausts that so scream the pistons’ plaint at high rpm, are — in the Portofino, at least — well subdued by twin turbochargers. Ferrari may be the ultimate in internal combustion symphony, but today I’m happier that, this being modern Maranello, the Portofino has an automatic start/stop mechanism, so that my transgression on what now seems like hallowed ground is not nearly so obtrusive.
Some of you are reading and thinking me crass for driving a Ferrari — of all cars, Dave! — in the centre of such destruction. And maybe you’re right. But Corral Canyon is Malibu, where even the hired help drive Q7s and blinged-out Silverados.
There was a modicum of welcome news once one became accustomed to all the destruction. It’s obvious the firefighters in this area deserve serious accolades. Though the surrounding mountains have been completely scorched, we don’t see a single burnt house on my quick sojourn (in fact, only two homes in the area burned and then only because access for fire trucks was restricted) even though, as one firefighter told the Malibu Times, “the fire burned on all sides.”
Indeed, so precise were the attentions of the rangers fighting at least this portion of the Woolsey Fire that you can see scorching right up to the property lines of many of the villas lining Corral, but virtually nothing on personal property seemed touched by flame. It’s either the most precise miracle I’ve ever seen, or the men and women who fought this portion of the conflagration should all be getting medals.
Only — and yes, that’s a very inappropriate descriptor when we’re talking about loss of life — three people died in Los Angeles and Ventura counties as a result of the Woolsey fire.
Some 88 more perished in the Camp Fire near Paradise and more are missing.
I’m not sure what conclusion I’m supposed to draw from having witnessed all this destruction.
I think it more helpful to remember that tragedy touches us all, even those lucky few rich enough to own Malibu mountain homes and drive Ferraris full time. I am not a religious man, but for once, there but for the grace of God went I. Driving.ca