Visiting the Aftermath of a Fire

The Legacy of Pine Manor

Wildfires are increasingly part of our lived experience. If you live in a fire zone, if you’ve ever evacuated, if you know or love people who’ve gone through fire scares or losses from fire, you know something of the emotional intensity of surviving one, and the absolute decimation it leaves in its wake.

For thirty years, my mom has lived in a fire zone. We’ve been through countless scares, two near-misses, one evacuation, and even the loss of a cabin in 1993 (the early Pine Manor blueprint), but two weeks ago in the Airport Fire in Southern California, my mom’s former retreat center, Pine Manor, was consumed by wildfire.

When you get word that something’s gone, as we did, you imagine the worst. Pine Manor sits on three-quarters of an acre of land. In addition to the main house are earth buildings (straw bale and cobb houses) and other tiny houses. Pine Manor was a community space where people came to stay for weekends or sometimes years. The number of lives this place—and my mom by extension—has touched numbers in the thousands.

Yesterday, we visited the site not knowing what to expect. Into this place and into these grounds, my mom poured thirty years of vision, heart, and meaning. Pine Manor was a home, a retreat center, a healing place, a sacred sanctuary, not just to us but to countless visitors and residents over the years. Though my mom sold the property two summers ago, it doesn’t just echo with with the meaning and feeling of Pine Manor. It still is Pine Manor. My mom’s vision there is wholly intact, from the signage to the buildings to the fabulous Earth Mama I thought surely went down in the fire. Only she didn’t. Look at her. Of course she didn’t.

Earth Mama on the other side of the fire.

The fire came right up to her, licked her and singed her, but she stands, as do every single one of the earthen buildings and the lower properties. The house is gone gone. The upper house that we called The Hillside House, a separate parcel of land with a little house on it that my mom chose to hang onto after the sale of Pine Manor, is gone gone.

Brent sifts through the ashes at the Hillside House

Pine Manor was named after another property by the same name in Japan that was owned by my mom’s uncle and aunt, Thomas and Frances Blakemore. Their life story and legacy (part of which is captured in Tokyo Underworld, featuring Tom as an important American lawyer whose cases directly impacted the underworld of the era) of their fifty-plus years living in Japan before and after WWII ripples through our lineage. It’s becuase of Tom and Frances that Pine Manor exists. They gave the seed money for the cabin that burned in 1993 and forgave the loan, which allowed my mom to purchase this Pine Manor, grander in size and scope. It was also her time in Japan with them on the grounds of Pine Manor that seeded the idea of a space tucked away from the city, a place of respite and community and healing—some of what she experienced when she spent time at the Japanese Pine Manor.

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To walk through a neighborhood decimated by fire is disorienting. I walked up the street and made a wrong turn because without the landmarks of the homes, I was lost. Up the street at a neighbors’ house, nothing remained but what is left of their garden.

Larry and Anna’s garden

Down at what was the Hillside House, we spent an hour raking through tiles and ashes to uncover what we could of my mom’s sand tray collection.

One week before the fire.

We salvaged a whole boxfull of things:

Amazingly, this little angel survived the first fire, too. Small miracles.

I am struck by what remains. That the earthen buildings survived tells us something about what structures we should be building in fire zones. In the before and after, there is heartbreak, but also gratitude. Gratitude for these thirty years. Places and things hold memories for us, but we hold our memories inside of us much more profoundly. I’m reminded of memorists I’ve worked with over the years who feel they cannot continue unless they have their journals, or their photos, or something to support them to capture what was in a tangible way. Yesterday, this little boxfull of tangible things was all we left with, but my heart is so very full. Pine Manor is my mom’s legacy and the fire does not change that. My brother and I were shaped as much by my mom and her life’s work as my mom was shaped by her uncle and aunt’s. My own life’s work is anchored by community, by story, and by holding a place and space for people’s self-expression. This was exactly what Pine Manor and my mom did, just from another angle. Our legacies inform us, carry us, give meaning to the things we choose to do—and the things that choose us.

If you have a story of legacy to share in the comments, I hope you will. To Mama-san, the gratitude runs deep and the memories are forever.