Community

Saturday morning. I went to a morning business meeting in San Diego and no one felt much like doing business. They didn't feel like doing anything. They felt flat, dragged out, no energy, depleted.

Including me. "I think we're all enervated," I said. "Just like after you've had an orgasm."

Not everyone identified with that. But the enervation I felt was identical to the post-orgasm kind. It made sense to me. I don't think anything focuses a person quite like the runup to orgasm. But the fires had an approximate effect. People in San Diego may have tried to involve themselves with other focuses this week, but somewhere in their minds, there was a constant presence of fire. Doubt, fear, anxiety, blood pressure, expectation, hope, flight in many cases, preparation for flight in many others, long black nights trimmed in bright orange. It has been a hell of an affair this week, shared by three million people.

In 1978, in San Diego, there was a midair collision of airplanes over the North Park section of the city. A Pacific Southwest Airlines 727 overtook and collided with a Cessna 172. The Cessna and its two souls on board were knocked straight down to the ground. The 727 crashed, in a near-vertical attitude, at the corner of Dwight and Nile streets in North Park. In the planes and on the ground, 144 people were killed.

After its investigation, the National Transportation Safety Board concluded in its compulsory "Survival Aspects" paragraph: "This accident was not survivable." It was the greatest disaster in San Diego to that date. Thousands of us remember 9:01 a.m., Sept, 25, 1978, and the stories and images that followed. To this day, in San Diego, people all over the city watch jetliners on approach to Lindbergh Field in a more than impersonal way.

One of the stories I wrote after the crash addressed community involvement. I interviewed Dr. Michael Mantell, chief psychologist for the San Diego Police Dept. He said that after such a crash, people experience three emotional stages: shock or disbelief; a "cataclysm" of emotions (anger, fear, guilt), and, finally, equilibrium.

He said a city reacts in the same way. After the crash, San Diego suffered its own collective emotional passage, also defined by stages of shock, emotional chaos, and finally equilibrium. In San Diego today, some number of people, torn from homes that then were torn from them, no doubt are still in deep shock. Others, probably most, of us, felt shock giving way to vigilance and emotional chaos by Tuesday or Wednesday. A member of our business meeting this morning told of a friend, forced to evacuate on the first day, by the third day was insisting on buying and delivering goods to other evacuation centers.

Yesterday, Friday, we started to see a chance to breathe, carefully, because the air quality over this beautiful region was dangerous, from the mountain foothills to the beaches. The media and the people are entering the post-mortem stage, looking back, summing up, some with pride, some with anger, but all in more or less total connection to their community.

Equilibrium? Out there somewhere. Dr. Mantell said equilibrium arrives when the city can think about the disaster without the urge to "do" something. He said reaching equilibrium takes time and effort, for both individuals and the city.

He said there is also an anniversary effect. What a strange future this city has. This October's fires started on Oct. 21. The 2003 Cedar Fire, another true disaster, started on Oct. 24. Next October will be the Cedar's fifth anniversary, and the Witch/Harris's first, both major anniversaries in the human process of remembering and observing.

I remember the Cedar's first anniversary, in 2004. I remember watching the weather as Oct. 24 approached, praying to God to wake up that day to blue, clear skies. Instead, it was dark that morning, low, gray clouds from an early storm arriving from the Gulf of Alaska, that poured rain on the county for two days. I remember the relief like it was yesterday.

Media and the Fire

People tend to have their news media preferences, which is a good thing when the news is going 150 miles per hour, as it has this week in San Diego County.

For local news, I prefer Channel 39, which is San Diego's NBC affiliate. Preferences are always personal, and are founded in all the demographic minutiae from which an individual personality is composed. Age is part of my mix that accounts for an NBC preference. I can remember the novelty of waking up in the morning in the 1950s and watching the original "Today" show on NBC, with Dave Garroway.

So I still like the "Today" show, and so I watch Channel 39 locally. Other San Diegans this week have favored Channel 6, or 8, or 9, or 10, which is good. With news proceeding at 150 mph, it is not a good idea to channel-surf.

Why? Confusion. I did surf some this week, because I am in the media business. Regularly, what I heard on Channel 39 did not square with what Channel 8 was saying, and those both were different from 9, or 10, etc. This was to be expected.

In the news media, as in any enterprise, there is always a tension between principles and realities. The first news media principle is accuracy. Accuracy is also the second and third principle of news media, and it is so important because of credibility. Lose accuracy, lose credibility, forfeit consumer trust, and the consumer remotes off to another channel.

But the news media also must acknowledge reality. When a news story is going 150 mph, accuracy tends to suffer. This is a particularly mean reality for television news organizations. A vital component of accuracy is editing – checking facts – and when stories happen at speed, editing can't keep up. Principles become overrun by realities, just as fire overruns dreams. It can happen even in newspapers, with their overnight cushion, but it happens on the fly, on television, and nothing can be done about it.

A consumer watching Channel 39 will hear these inconsistencies as they happen, and two or three members in a family will look at each other and ask: "What did he (she) say?" It doesn't help that people typically also hear things differently. When 10 people witness the same event, they will present 10 differing reports of what they saw and heard. Thus it is difficult enough to follow a 150-mph story on a single channel. Surf across three or four, each with its own inconsistencies (both on the part of the channel and the viewers), and you see the kind of confusion that can result by the end of the day.

I had an interesting moment on Wednesday morning, just at dawn. First light had risen in the east, but the horizon was still in silhouette, and obscured in places by smoke. I saw flames, bright in the darkness, in the area of the Jamul community, where I used to live. In the line of flame, I could see the silhouette of a ridgeline that I believed to be Vista Grande, a populated hilltop just to the west of Jamul. Where I lived, Vista Grande was literally just across the road. Wednesday morning, were I to believe what I was seeing, the relationship of the fire to Vista Grande meant that the fire was in Mexican Canyon, directly below the house where I lived. My ex-wife still lives there.

I feared for her, and her husband. The fire must be directly below them, not 200 yards down the hill. But then the accuracy principle kicked in. Positively identifying Vista Grande was not possible, in the darkness and the smoke. So I called my daughter, who was in touch with her mom, and learned that the flame line actually was a couple of miles south of what my eyes had wanted to tell me. Taking the time to call was a form of editing, and accuracy was the result.

All this being said, I think all the channels did a pretty good job this week, with this story, particularly my channel, 39. On Wednesday, they were showing an aerial view from a helicopter, and Bill Menish, the 39 morning news anchor, said, "That is Channel 8's chopper, might as well go ahead and give them credit." I thought that was very cool. Another news media reality is competition, which drives networks, particularly, to be first with the news, and accuracy be damned. The San Diego channels actually pooled their identities this week, which for the news media is a fabulous direction in which to head.

Many channels also augmented their reporter staffs by bringing in reporters from others cities: Dallas, Chicago, etc., which was a great idea. Finally, as I was surfing on Wednesday, I saw all the channels except 39 zeroed in on yet another news briefing by local and state officials that was five percent information and 95 percent backslapping. Channel 39 ignored the briefing. Good for them.

Mt. Miguel, Tuesday a.m.

DC-10

Yesterday afternoon I saw something that ordinarily you would think could only come to you in a dream. I saw a DC-10 used as a tactical aircraft.

Channel 39 in San Diego had its chopper up, over the "Harris Fire," which continues to plague the back country east of where we are. It is the fire we have been watching since Monday, and the "mother fire" responsible for the Mt. Miguel fire that was within five miles of us on Tuesday.

So suddenly, about 4:15 p.m. yesterday, on our screens we see a DC-10, white with red markings, cruising at treetop level above one of the hot spots east of Jamul, out by Barrett Lake. A DC-10 has three engines, is 180 feet long, and a wingspan of 160 feet. As a passenger airliner, it could seat almost 400 people. And here it was, orbiting a smoky drop spot in a wide counterclockwise circle, no more than 500 feet off the ground. From the chopper camera, we were looking down at it.

You can tell when one of these firefighter aircraft, large or small, is about to make its drop. It orbits a couple of times, coordinating with a fire boss in a helicopter hovering above, deciding exactly where the drop should be. This week, all the drops we have seen, both from water helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft, have been awesome in their accuracy. Like the PGA commercials say about pro golfers, these guys are good.

After the second orbit, the aircraft settles into a nose-up glide, like a hen positioning herself over a nest of eggs. The DC-10 did this, gliding on, and we could see the drop starting, red fire retardant starting to trail from tanks underneath the fuselage. And then the plane disappeared. We realized it was flying into a narrow gully, between the backdrop mountainside and a ridgeline in the middle distance. I don't know who was flying that DC-10, but he (or she) could work for Steven Spielberg.

It was a long gully, and finally the DC-10 emerged at the other end, still trailing retardant. Then the retardant was spent, and the jet climbed sharply, banked left, and climbed. If it had been a movie, the music would have swelled, suggesting a corner had been turned.

A corner has in fact been turned, thanks to time, weather and firefighters including the crew of that DC-10, but fires are still burning everywhere today. We can no longer see any fires from our house in La Mesa, which has a 270-degree view from northeast around to west. The wind has calmed and turned, now coming off the ocean, which is good and bad. It is now blowing the fires back on themselves, but also increasing a new danger of the fires spreading east instead of west. Our picturesque mountain town of Julian has been evacuated and much of the effort today is to stop the Witch Creek fire, which started just west of Julian, four days later to turn back and enter the town.

This morning another impressive aircraft, Air Force One, appeared from the east through smoky haze and touched down at Miramar Naval Air Station. President Bush got off, shook hands all around, and got into a helicopter with Arnold to go inspect the devastation. There was some commentary about how important it was for Bush to respond quickly and completely to our fires, after his performance after Katrina. Oddly, two years ago he was in San Diego, on the evening of the Monday when Katrina hit New Orleans, and it was on his way back to D.C. from San Diego that his infamous indifference to the Katrina disaster first began to show. Air Force One touching down here now represented an interesting circle closing.

Say what you will about Bush, that huge aircraft, representing the office of the President of the United States of America, picked spirits up here as it settled toward the runway and then touched down.

Fire

We had been in Berkeley for the weekend and were flying south Sunday afternoon. Passing Los Angeles we saw two thick chimneys of smoke rising and then blowing toward the ocean. The strong Santa Ana had been predicted, and when you live in Southern California on a hot, clear October day, you always watch for smoke.

It was discouraging, but not surprising, to hear the pilot's San Diego weather report: warm, clear, but visibility only four miles because of smoke. Going downwind and turning back to our airport, we saw several origins of smoke. The sun was low and diffused by smoke to the extent that our pilot "couldn't get a good fix on the runway," as he put it, and he aborted the landing and went around again.

On the ground, thin smoke hung above the airport and turned the sun a signature raspberry color. Driving home, though, we entered a blue wedge of clear sky between smoke streams to the north and to the south. The radio said the wind was blowing from the northeast, and fires in the Ramona area were blowing smoke across our view from our La Mesa house toward the ocean, and a fire near the Mexican border was producing the southern smoke.

The wedge has persisted since. We have been watching due east, for any sign of a new fire that might threaten us, but so far so good.

We did, Tuesday morning, wake up at 1:30 a.m. to see Mt. Miguel, about five miles south of us, on fire. There is only one word to describe a Southern California wildfire at close range at night, and that word is "dramatic." It may be the drama that makes the fire appear closer than it is. I have seen this effect several times before, when I lived in Jamul, farther east in the foothills. We had begun some evacuation preparation on Monday, watching fires force the evacuation of 250,000 people. Watching Mt. Miguel flames fill our bedroom window at 2 a.m., we completed those preparations, loading both cars and saving the "three P's" – puppies, paintings, and 'puters – until the last moment.

Now it is Wednesday morning, and the last moment has not come. Media coverage has been intimidating. Media reports are like fire at night. They make the event appear closer than it actually is. My experience has taught me two things, about media appearance, and map appearance. In Italy, I learned that maps often have a weak relationship to what is actually on the ground. In Southern California, in fire season, I have learned that media reports often have a weak relationship to what is actually on the ground. The lesson: always believe the ground. Events on the ground, even the sight of Mt. Miguel burning five miles away, convinced me we have not been in direct danger. When they do, the cars are packed, we'll grab the Three P's, and be gone. At this point, knock on wood, I don't think that is going to happen.

In the meantime, we watch fires growing elsewhere, fires even worse than the catastrophic Cedar Fire in 2003. The Cedar Fire was a thoroughbred, racing at 6,000 acres per hour. This fire, or cocktail of fires, is a marathoner, covering a mile at a time until the miles start to reach from the inland foothills clear to the ocean. This morning, a finger of the fire jumped Interstate 5 in Camp Pendleton, right on the ocean. Astonishing. But the real headline of this story is the movement of people. More than half a million people have been forced to evacuate, and new evacuation orders are being announced this morning.

The firefighters and other response personnel are writing heroic chapters, working 24-hour stretches to save what they can. Like the Cedar Fire, though, this is a fire that humans can't stop. The ocean can stop it, and a change in the wind can slow it to a point where the fighters can beat it. After the Cedar Fire four years ago, I wrote a commentary about humans arriving to live in a land where fire previously had unlimited space to roam on the winds, which it did, regularly. I sent that commentary to our San Diego paper on Monday, and it was published yesterday. In that story, I wrote that whatever humans learn about fighting fire, the next fire that they can't fight is already out there, waiting. Now it is here. On hot October nights, we in Southern California listen to the wind rising, and rattling the windows, and always hope, in our land of wind and fire, that we wake up to a clear dawn. This October, hope wasn't enough.

Introducing The Write Outsource

Click here, please, when you are ready: http://www.writeoutsource.com/

The link will take you to my online writing service, "Michael Grant – The Write Outsource," which is now open for business.

Have a look around. See what the business is about. It is the natural passage from my long career as a journalist, columnist, essayist, writer and editor, into my new career as a provider of services to people who need something written, but don't want to, or know how to, write it themselves.

Their solution: outsource it to me, via the Internet, from anywhere in the country, or around the planet. The site will show you how it works, and who it works for. Do you need any of these services yourself? Come on in. Does anyone you know need such services? Thousands of your friends possess all kinds of skills, talents, genius, ideas, all that need to be communicated to someone else. But writing is hard for them, a struggle they try to avoid, but can't.

What should they do? Outsource it! Click on http://www.writeoutsource.com/, tell us what you need, and go do your really important stuff. I'll have your written materials back to you, ready for your approval and distribution, on the timetable that matches your need.

I've been doing this kind of work for years. In the old days of journalism, we called it "rewrite." Someone developed information and phoned it to the "rewrite man," who turned it into a top-notch story, on deadline, for the newspaper's next edition. Rewrite men are famous in journalism lore, for their skills in turning raw information into polished stories.

In those days, it was specialized work, exclusive to newspapers, requiring a source, a phone, and a writer, working on deadline. The service was not generally available, between a business and a writer, for example, because communications were slow and could not handle raw information that was either voluminous or complex. In that world, the word "outsource" didn't exist. The information had to be delivered overland, and the finished stories returned the same way. Businesses had to create and maintain on-site departments of writers, in their public relations and marketing departments.

The arrival of the computer age started to change that, and it really changed when Tim Berners-Lee developed the code that created the Internet. This global sharing of information evolved commercially into the World Wide Web, and today the information being routinely shared globally includes beleaguered individuals such as corporate executives outsourcing writing needs to old pros like me.

In other words, "Michael Grant – The Write Outsource" is an idea whose time has come. Go see http://www.writeoutsource.com/ and let me know what you think.