San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Lost in the flames
On Christmas Day, I went with my wife and two adult daughters to the place where we’d spent the past 17 Christmases, a little house in Magalia, in Butte County, that is no longer there, taken by the fire that took so much from so many people who called the Paradise ridge their home. One of the things it took from us was our long-acquired library of books, books nearly as familiar to our daughters as they were to their mom and dad.
We drove to poke around in the rubble because it was a gorgeous day, as clear as they ever come, because we expected traffic to be light, and because we wanted to see what could be salvaged. And we wanted to say goodbye to all that. So, on a gorgeous Christmas Day, in the middle of a blackened forest, we raked the ashes, finding pieces of glass and occasionally intact dishes, ceramics or pottery.
What we didn’t find was books, not so much as a hint of them, not spines or a fugitive cover or a refugee page. We knew where all the books had been standing against the place where this or that wall had so recently stood, so we came to figure out where to look. But to no avail. Ash was all there was to find.
Fire, it seems, has an appetite for books. History is aflame with libraries burning, from the one Julius Caesar accidentally burned down in Alexandria to the fire that devastated Los Angeles’ Central Library in 1986.
The public library in Paradise was spared by the fire that leveled that town on Nov. 8. The fire that spared the town library didn’t spare mine, however. Since those books burned, I have spent some time taking a rough inventory of the books I lost, imagining the pages curling in the heat, the shelves that held them collapsing, the smoke from all those books joining with the smoke generated by everything else that was under our roof.
One of the pleasures I took from living in Magalia, just a few miles up the hill from Paradise, was the visits I paid to the book sale held at that library every other Saturday. Of the 2,000 or so books that crammed our little house, probably a third of them had been acquired at that book sale over the course of the 16 years my wife and I lived there. I rarely missed one of those Saturday morning sales, and never left without a dozen or so books, sometimes more.
On the day we fled the fire, there was a recently purchased stack of books from that sale on the bookshelf beside my bed, among them a novel by Robertson Davies, the wry Canadian novelist. There was also a book by V.S. Naipaul I’d started to read in those blissfully calm days before the fire and the dislocation that followed.
Aside from the recent acquisitions, there were books that had survived dozens of winnowings, those cullings book lovers engage in routinely as they seek to make room for new additions to their libraries. Among those books was a hardbound copy of the complete works of Shakespeare, a book my wife had used for a college class she took almost 60 years ago and that I would use myself when I took classes in Shakespeare a few years later.
There were all the novels written by George Cuomo, a most valued friend, writing teacher and lifetime mentor who died a few years ago. There was a book — “The Cunning Little Vixen” — I’d bought for my older daughter when she was young. There were works of fiction I’d read more than half a century