The 2007 Santiago Fire was about seven weeks ago now.  The fire left the hillsides behind our house bare and covered with ash.  There were two kinds of ash.  There was the black ash that pretty much covered everything.  Then there were patches of white ash where a larger shrub or small tree had once stood.

Immediately after the fire the outside of our house was covered in ash.  What would one expect when a fire of that magnitude burns right up to your back door.  The day after the fire some members of a local church (Saddleback Church) came through the neighborhood, cleaning up the ash from our yards.  This is an excellent church that is very community oriented.  We’ve seen them in front of our local supermarkets collecting cans of food for the needy.

But back to the ash.  The fire still raged on for another week so the ash continued to rain down.  During this whole time (from the start of the fire on 10/21 until the fire was pretty much out) we kept our doors and windows closed, running the air conditioner when needed.  Strangely, it was one of the few times we ran our air conditioner all year.

In the weeks that ensued we had a several windy days and the black ash was blown everywhere.  It was so fine that even with the windows closed it still found a way into our house where it collected in the window sills.  The smallest crack was more than wide enough to admit the fine particles.

About four weeks after the fire we noticed the land was already starting to recover.  One morning we looked out and there were splotches of green on the slopes.  I grabbed my binoculars for a closer look and sure enough, the thistles were flourishing.  There had not been any rain.  The closest thing to moisture we had was some fog hanging in the canyons in the early morning.  But the thistles must be very hardy as they began sprouting almost immediately.  By four weeks they were already six inches tall.  These are nasty plants, not particularly nice to look at with their gray-green thorned leaves.  To walk through a thistle patch on a warm day wearing shorts is to invite a myriad of painful scratches all over your legs.  There was a large thistle patch on the slope below our house that I would go out of my way to avoid.  I must confess, my hope was that the fire would have eradicated the patch but alas, these annoying plants proved to be the most hardy and recovered the quickest.

But in its defense, the thistle has a beautiful purple bloom in the spring and in another form it’s something we regularly enjoy for it is the cousin of the rich and delicious artichoke.

 For weeks the thistles, now in full recovery and growing like weeds, had the slopes all to themselves.  They grew profusely and rapidly on the more gentle slopes.  Soon the slopes were peppered with green.  The contrast of the green against the black ash was striking indeed.  Within the next few weeks they doubled in size and seemed to triple or quadruple in numbers.  Still, they held dominion over the slopes.  Then the rains came.

Last weekend the first storm after the fire (and the first real storm of the year) moved through.  This one storm dumped 2 1/4 inches of rain (more than the entire ‘rainy’ season last year – the worst drought on record).  The rain came down over a period of two days so it wasn’t a gully washer.  But with 30,000 acres of hillside denuded of virtually all vegetation it was a gully washer in the canyons.  Friends of ours that live in nearby Modjeska Canyon had to evacuate – again.  This time the threat was potentially lethal mud slides.  It’s happened before in my lifetime.  Fortunately, the emergency authorities were anticipating the threat and ordered people out of harms way.

I watched the hillsides after the rain, looking for more signs of life.  It took several days but within a week some of the gently sloping areas started to show a new blush of green.  It didn’t demand your attention; it was very subtle and delicate but none-the-less, there it was.  The grasses are making a gentle but unstoppable comeback.

Through my binoculars I noticed another miracle of nature.  Some of the chaparral shrubs that had been burned to charred skeletons were throwing up bold, vibrant sprouts at ground level.

Amother storm came through this weekend, leaving another inch of rain.  It too was spread over a couple of days which is the best kind of rain we can have.  More of it will have a chance to soak into the scorched earth, even though the moisture capturing vegetation is no longer there.  And a lot of it is running off.  The larger streams in the area are flowing again after nearly two years of being dry.  Normally one wouldn’t expect the streams to be flowing after only three inches of rain.  But the runoff is greater because of the fire.

The ash problem no longer exists, thanks to a combination of the winds and the rains.  All the little white patches of ash are gone although the black ash still covers most of the land.  We don’t have to be concerned about the fine particles of black ash blowing into our house through the smallest of cracks.  The ash, however, is nutrient rich which is now soaking into the earth to further nourish her recovery.

So seven weeks after the fire and the hills are already in recovery.  These hills have lived with fire for thousands of years.  Fire is part of the natural cycle of things.  We humans complicate the matter a lot by wanting to live in the heart of this beauty and therefore expose ourselves to the natural processes here.  Fortunately this encounter turned out well for nearly all of us.