The Endless Planning

We’d known that we were going to be moving east, with all the dogs, for five years.

Ever since the fire.

In the summer of 2000, we moved from Santa Monica south to Orange County, because Debbie took a job down there as a vice president in charge of media at the Taco Bell corporation, based in Irvine. She had been a senior vice president at the FOX television network for twelve years, so it was a big move, both careerwise and, to a lesser extent, geographically.

Normal people could just find a place, sign up to buy or rent, pack up their things, and move. But we were not exactly a normal family. We had to find a home that could house thirty-seven dogs, since that was the total at that particular moment. We also couldn’t have nearby neighbors, for reasons that are obvious but that I’ll explain in detail later. So house hunting became something of a challenge.

As we were soon to discover, Santa Monica was the only city in Southern California that allowed more than three dogs per household. Santa Monica actually had no limit at all; their rule was that you could have as many animals as you could comfortably house. Comfort, I can assure you, was and is a subjective determination.

So when we got to Orange County, we were obligated to look in what they call the unincorporated areas, meaning they have no city government and are run by the county. We quickly found a perfect house in a small canyon town called Silverado. We were up on a hill, with very few neighbors within barking distance.

Even though it felt like living in the middle of nowhere, it was only ten minutes from a supermarket, and twenty from large shopping centers. The house was a hundred years old, but it would feel a lot older once it had to put up with our “family” for a while.

It proved to be quite comfortable for us, and we had every intention of staying there until Debbie might decide to retire. With that prospect nearing, I set out in September 2007 to figure out where we should move to once there was no job keeping us in California. I could write anywhere.

Debbie and I had both grown up and lived back east, me in New Jersey and then New York, and Debbie in Pennsylvania and New York. We craved real weather, and we have grown kids in the New York area, so the East Coast was the likely place to move.

We settled on Maine, found a great house on a lake with no neighbors anywhere close, and bought it. The plan was to let it sit there, and do whatever renovations might be necessary when we got ready to move. We figured that would be at least four or five years away.

One month later, California was in flames. There were wildfires all over the state, the by-product of a weather phenomenon called the Santa Ana winds. These are winds that blow from inland toward the coast, and they are distinguished by very high gusts, temperatures in the mid-nineties, and almost no humidity. Obviously that creates the perfect conditions for out-of-control fires, and that’s what seems to happen every year.

With the state’s firefighting resources taxed to the limit, some moron decided to set a fire in the woods about six miles from our house. At first it spread in the opposite direction, but three days later it looped back toward us.

One morning I stood in our backyard and watched the fire slowly coming across the canyon toward where I was standing. It was small and slow-moving and therefore beyond infuriating; firefighters armed with water pistols could have stopped it in its tracks.

But there were no firefighters there; they were deployed elsewhere. And the fire kept coming inexorably closer, building in intensity.

Debbie was at work, and I called to tell her to come home; we were likely going to have to evacuate. Our neighbors had already gone, but for them it was comparatively easy. All they had to do was round up some important possessions and ride out of there. We had twenty-seven dogs to worry about.

We had one SUV at home, and Debbie went to a rental-car place and got another. The fire was picking up speed even more rapidly, and I told her to get home as soon as possible; we were running out of time.

There were police barricades not letting anyone into the area when she arrived, but that didn’t prove a significant deterrent. She went around them and barreled on home, probably making the correct assumption that what she was doing was not a shooting offense.

We then began the process of loading the dogs and one duffel bag into the two cars. I think there were maybe three dogs willing and able to jump in on their own; the rest had to be hoisted once we rounded them up. I did the rounding, and Debbie did the hoisting.

We did a final count, and came up with twenty-six; Coco was missing. I searched frantically for her while Debbie tried to keep the others calm, not an easy thing to do since they were squashed into two cars.

Finally I found Coco wandering on the property, grabbed her, and carried her to the car. I stuffed her in, and we were off.

There was not a square inch of unoccupied space in the cars. The flames were about a hundred yards away and moving in the direction of the house; we were going to get out, but there seemed no way it could survive. I remember turning to take a final look at it.

We called a friend named Ron Edwards, who ran the Irvine Animal Care Center, one of the best shelters in Southern California. He said he had room to take and care for as many dogs as we brought him. So that’s where we headed.

We left twenty-five of them there, a gut-wrenching thing to do. We had gotten these dogs from shelters, and had made a solemn promise to them that they would never have to go back. Their new surroundings would be temporary and safe, but they had no way of knowing that. They would be in cages, also something we had told them would never happen again.

Once they were in the dog runs, Debbie and I went in to each one, petting them and vowing that they would not be there long. But the truth was we didn’t know how long they would be imprisoned, or where they would go once we got them out.

We kept Louis and Hannah, both golden retrievers, to stay with us in a hotel. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a hotel, and once we dropped the dogs off at the shelter, we made at least twenty calls to try to get a room somewhere. But with much of California evacuated in the various fires, there were no rooms to be had.

We finally got lucky; the Irvine Marriott had one room. Amazingly, even though the law of supply and demand said that they could have charged a fortune, they gave us the room at half price, which was their policy for people displaced by the fires. And they made an exception to their no pet policy; we could bring Louis and Hannah.

I have been a fan of Marriott ever since. They really stepped up when we needed them.

So there we were, living in the hotel and watching news reports to monitor the progress of the fire. Louis and Hannah were living it up; they got to go on plenty of leash walks, since there was no doggie door for them to trudge through on their own. And we were on the concierge floor, where free food was provided, so I could get them plenty of miniature meatballs. If they felt any concern for their twenty-five friends stuck in the shelter, they hid it well.

But for us it was a frustrating time, made more so by on-camera statements that Governor Schwarzenegger was making to the press. He was explaining California’s inability to deal with the fires by bemoaning the perfect storm that had arisen, a combination of high heat, high winds, and dry air.

“Arnold,” I would yell at the television, “THAT’S WHAT THE SANTA ANA WINDS ARE! AND THEY COME EVERY YEAR!” It would be like the mayor of Buffalo explaining that they couldn’t effectively plow the streets because of a combination of low temperatures and precipitation. “THAT’S WHAT SNOW IS!”

One day became two, and two became four. We saw hints of the fate of our house on television; one reporter stood in front of a burned-down structure less than a quarter mile away. But even though we were extraordinarily pessimistic, there was no way to be sure since they wouldn’t let us back into the area where the fires were still raging.

So the question became, what the hell were we going to do in the likely event that the house was gone? When you have twenty-seven dogs, you can’t exactly rent an apartment. And even if there were possible solutions, we had no time. Our dogs were languishing in a shelter; we didn’t even go to visit them for fear of getting them excited and then letting them down when we left them there again.

We would have to move to Maine, or at least I would. Debbie would be bicoastal until maybe she could find a comparable job back east. The house in Maine wasn’t close to ready or livable; it was a log-cabin style that wasn’t even fully winterized. But we would somehow deal with that; we had no other choice. If only we could figure out how to get there.

On our fourth night in the hotel I got an e-mail from a reader in Maryland, who asked if we were anywhere near the fires. She described herself as a dog rescue person, and was of course concerned about the dogs.

I wrote back and told her that I thought we’d lost the house and asked if she, as a dog person, had any idea how to transport twenty-seven dogs cross-country. She didn’t, but she vowed to ask the question online and get some ideas.

Over the next forty-eight hours, I received 171 e-mails from strangers, most of them offering us their house on the way to Maine. If we were coming through Topeka, for instance, we could stay in someone’s home, with twenty-seven dogs!

It was an amazing example of what is a remarkable subculture of dog people in America. They are in every city and state, bound together by their common love of dogs. And it had just been demonstrated to us in a very powerful and touching way.

On the seventh day after our evacuation, we were let back into the area, and we were amazed to discover that our house had survived. Firefighters had foamed the house down and mounted a successful defense of the structure, and we will be forever grateful to them. Other nearby homes had not been so lucky, and the entire area seemed charred.

Two days after that we were back in the house, the whole family, shedding and panting away. But it had started us thinking about how we were going to execute the move to Maine when Debbie retired. It would be a voluntary move then, but just as difficult.

That was almost five years ago, so in terms of the length of time it took to plan our trip, it made the D-day invasion look like a spur-of-the-moment decision. Unfortunately, the effectiveness of the planning was another matter altogether.

The way I figured it, we could have used another five years, minimum.