As I drove down the Pacific Coast Highway, I kept passing by places that I remembered on postcards from my childhood.
Malibu Feed Bin — A country store that sold wildflower honey made from the dozens of beehives our family tended in our backyard.
Reel Inn – This is where we sat at picnic tables and devoured cut-price seafood, and where my father once asked a man in line about acting jobs.
Something’s Fishy — The old sushi restaurant where my brother worked as a busboy, and the sake warmed my soul after a day in the cold Pacific Ocean.
Like so many other landmarks of my youth, it’s all gone now, reduced to ashes.
So I continued driving down PCH, my eyes overwhelmed with terrifying new images, while my heart welled up with memories, nostalgia, and regret. I came to see how the town I grew up in has changed.
But I also longed to discover that our family home, more than half a century old, had once again avoided the fickle wildfire gods. Thanks to my late father and another wise old Malibu original who is still alive, I have come to some kind of understanding as well.
This is not just a local love note. I was very vague about being from Malibu, so I often glossed over when people asked me where I grew up. Things like “L.A.’s West Side” or “I went to Santa Monica High School.” Both are true, but not the complete answer.
In my mind, the modern Malibu has come loaded with so much baggage. Nouveau riche. Flashy cars and consumption. Surrounding Carbon Beach were houses double and triple the size, giving Carbon Beach the unflattering (but somewhat accurate) nickname “Millionaire’s Beach.”
Much of Malibu had come to embrace a TMZ-style macabre fascination. I grew up here in the 1970s and it felt like a more humble time (cue the violin, a little Cat Stevens).
Rainey’s parents, Sheila and Ford, paid less than $70,000 for a house and an acre of land in Carbon Canyon when they moved in 1969. Malibu at the time had more of a frontier feel. Sometimes the dogs would go out into the hills for days on end.
(Elve Blackham Team)
When we moved to Carbon Canyon in 1969, there was only one supermarket, two gas stations, and a lumber yard in downtown Malibu. No liposuctioned influencers or over-groomed pets. There is no city hall. In fact, none of the cities existed before its incorporation in 1991.
An easy-going, bohemian appeal spread. I remember a young woman at the market basket riding naked on horseback buying snacks. Surfers roamed the aisles of grocery stores barefoot and sometimes shirtless. PCH felt like Main Street and not a driving death trap.
As our big yellow school bus passed our favorite surf spot, my brothers exclaimed, “The Cove is awesome!” The answer to this always seemed to be: This swell will make you feel sick. ”
We always had two or three dogs, but no breed at all. Beautiful hybrids. The first and wildest dog was Zara, a Hungarian sheepdog (something like) who led herds into the hills for what we call “deer hunting.” A few days later they returned covered in ticks. And he smiled with satisfaction.
Undated photo of the Rainey family home in Carbon Canyon, designed by architect Cliff May.
(Elve Blackham Team)
The high windows of our ranch house had views of sagebrush hills and a little ocean. My parents, Sheila and Ford Rainey, paid less than $70,000 for it and an acre of land.
The beach had its own fun. I could have walked about 400 meters under the PCH’s low underpass and then spent a long time doing nothing but bodysurfing. We then surfcast for perch, corvina, and the occasional leopard shark.
Even under the smoky orange sky, the waves were gently lapping against our favorite beach. Sandpiper did the same digging as the previous week to catch sand crabs.
As children, we didn’t realize what privilege we enjoyed. The first thing I remember was leaving a perfectly nice neighborhood in Pacific Palisades.
In our new house in Malibu, the only immediate neighbors were an elderly couple with no children. It meant that I had a deeper bond with my brother Robert and sister Kathy. But I remember missing my friends who were far away.
A lot of the kids in Malibu made me nervous. They looked cooler, blonder, and better looking. I was a silly guy who played basketball all day during school lunch breaks and was even elected president of the Malibu Junior Optimist Stamp Club. I didn’t find my main group of friends until Santa Monica High School, where I joined a newspaper company and met my group of friends, who are still my brothers to this day.
Malibu had more of a frontier feel back when most local traffic lights didn’t exist. Landslides close down the PCH fairly regularly, and in fact, last week, ground cover burning caused rocks to fly into parts of the PCH. Once upon a time, landslides separated us from the “city” (pronounced Santa Monica) and the luxuries it offered. Clothing stores, movie theaters, laundromats, etc.
Yes, it’s a coin laundry. My mother would drive to Santa Monica and wash and fold mountains of towels, socks, and underwear at a laundromat on Montana Avenue. (Now unthinkable in the swank streets of Montana.) It wasn’t until the 1980s that my brother convinced my mom and dad to buy a washer and dryer.
Alison Rainey, the reporter’s wife, stood among the framed artwork as the house was being prepared for sale.
(Elve Blackham Team)
The wooden houses in Carbon Canyon were light and airy to a fault. When the wind blew through, it chilled me to the core, but my father thought radiant electric heating was too expensive. We never turned it on.
Instead, we started a fire in two fireplaces and a wood stove. When the wind gets particularly strong, like it did last week, smoke flows back up the chimney and fills the living room.
Back then, as now, you couldn’t live in Malibu without meeting actors or other famous people. But in the pre-video days, celebrities hung out at supermarkets and post offices. They were just people in a family where the next acting job was never guaranteed, even though they had a small glimmer of success for us.
My father had a long career as an actor, overcoming a fairly bleak working-class upbringing in the Pacific Northwest, working in repertory theater, and then countless roles in television and film.
My dad knew and worked with some people who lived in bigger, nicer houses on the beach, including Ryan O’Neal, Lloyd Bridges, and Yul Brynner. However, he was a bit of a loner and never became a Hollywood creature. If he wasn’t on set or on stage, he’d probably be holed up at home tinkering with beehives and homemade solar heaters.
My mother mostly kept to herself, when she wasn’t attending Mass at Our Lady of Malibu Church or playing kibit with the cashier at Ralph’s. She spent many hours creating woodcuts, paintings, and sometimes sculptures, and sold her work at local shows. Disco diva Donna Summer bought her woodcuts. It made her smile.
Bill Stange was the mainstay of Malibu then and now. he surfed. He spearfished. He harvested large quantities of halibut and abalone from La Costa Beach. The Stange family patriarch used most of his salary as a Los Angeles County lifeguard to pay for a home on Las Ramblas overlooking the ocean.
“Malibu was a community. It was firefighters, aerospace engineers and ordinary people,” Stange recalled last week. “Everyone knew everyone, and there was a kind of innocence.” Stanje calls that world, and what remains of it, an “old-world Malibu” that is more funky than fashionable. is.
An orange tree stands among the ruins of the Carbon Canyon area where Rainey spent her youth.
(Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times)
Then, as now, wildfires occurred as regularly as constant fights over whether to build sewers. (That never happened, at least citywide.) I remember several times loading up the station wagon and running off to Aunt Faith’s house.
The worst fire threat to date came in 1993. At that time, a massive firestorm hit Southern California. After years of frequent fires, my parents were evacuated after the wind shifted and a fire suddenly started inside the chain-link fence at the back of their one-acre property. My 85-year-old father was on the roof using a garden hose until the last moment.
“We’re homeless,” they said when we took shelter in our house in Venice with our two large German shepherds. But the next morning I had one of the great thrills of my career as a young newspaper reporter. Thanks to my press pass, I was able to get past the police barricade at PCH. Carbon Canyon was blackened, but “Rainy Manor” (as I called it) was miraculously found unscathed.
I raced for miles to the nearest payphone to break the news to Mom and Dad that I was going home.
More than 30 years later, I returned to PCH on the same mission, wearing a press pass, a yellow firefighter jacket, and a notepad.
My mind, already exhausted from days spent in other fire zones, was clouded with doubt, but I still had the belief that the old house might hold another life. At Fire Station 70, turn right onto Carbon Canyon Road. The hillside, which a week earlier had been choked with sumac, sage, and buckwheat, now looked like the inside of some very ancient barbecue. When I turned the first corner, I saw the house for the first time.
But it’s not home anymore. It’s an ash-like void. The electric gate is broken, so I hop over the wall and see that the pool I had recklessly enjoyed as a child has now become a watery charcoal pit. The two chimneys are still standing. But now they have become a pair of tombstones.
It’s too early to know what will happen next. My father passed away in 2005, just before his 97th birthday. My mother passed away just inside these walls last May at the age of 91.
We were one of the lucky ones. The house was devoid of many valuable possessions, including family photos and most of my mother’s artwork, in preparation for sale.
Malibu is a place where you “return to nature no matter what,” mainstay Bill Stange told Rainey.
(Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times)
As I walked out of my old house on Thursday morning, I finally let out a little cry. Not for a tired old place that has seen better days. But it was mainly because of my parents, who had worked hard for years to create a refuge from the rough world outside.
So many shelters are now gone, from Malibu to the Pacific Palisades to Altadena. I feel sorry for each and every one of those families.
I still couldn’t figure out what that meant, so I called Bard of Old World Malibu. He’s a man who has been using his Facebook page for years to report on the wind, waves, and marine life just below Carbon Canyon.
Bill Stange said his family home of more than 60 years also burned. He, too, must make a decision about what happens next. One thing he knew was that the tides and waves would continue. Elegant pelicans took flight and sandpipers were burrowing for gravel crabs.
Malibu is “a place where you go back to nature no matter what,” he said. They can build big old houses and do whatever they want. But they’ll never be able to tame Malibu. Turns out we’re all just renters here. ”
The last time I visited the house before the fire, I found my father’s well-worn script of “Our Town.” His role as a stage director was engraved with a wealth of emotion.
My mother kept the Thornton Wilder classic and had written an ode to “My Love, My Only Love” just below the title.
How fitting, then, that my friend Steve remembered the stage director’s most famous soliloquy.
“We all know that something is eternal. And it’s not a home, it’s not a name, it’s not Earth, and it’s not even a star,” it reads in part. Masu. “Everyone knows in their bones that something is eternal and something has to do with humans. … There is something deep down in every human being that lasts forever. .”
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