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.