I do not know whether the young men arrested on Thursday started the Corral Canyon fire. If they did, I do not know whether they deserve jail. What I do hope, as a homeowner who lost our family home in the Nov. 24 fire, is that a way be found for the perpetrators really to understand what their stupidity has done.
It has meant that people have been badly and irrevocably hurt. Firefighters have been injured. City and County employees and public service workers as well as residents have been hurt. Losses probably exceed $100 million. Those of us who lost our homes will recover something from insurers (who themselves lose money), but for years we will be dealing with the resultant problems.
But beyond monetary damage, the perpetrators have removed from his home of 70 years a man in his mid-nineties, who has subsequently taken ill, and despite his indomitability, who knows how this will end?
The 52 other families will all have stories like ours. It feels like the death of your parents. That’s the only other time we’ve felt a loss like this.
For my wife, it’s losing all her father’s paintings. For both of us, it’s losing the last 40 years. They say that you live on only as long as people remember you. When all the documentation of your life has gone, when all of the photographs and the things by which you can be known and remembered have been destroyed your ability to live on is vastly diminished. When you have lost all the pictures and records of yourselves when young, and of your children growing up, when you have lost all of the things you were going to treasure and enjoy in your retirement, you are like a refugee who has lost everything. When you are a publisher whose whole life has been about books, and you lose your 5,000-volume library, assembled over a period of 40 years, that expressed all your values and interests, and that was to be your intellectual joy for the rest of your life, you feel an ineffable loss. When your music and map collections, also assembled over your entire life, are suddenly destroyed, you feel completely lost. When the art and artifacts collected from around the world over a lifetime of unrepeatable travel are taken from you, they are gone forever. When the journal you had been writing for years to give to your son when he was old enough is lost, you feel absolutely without hope. When all the creative writing you have amassed, when all the old family correspondence, when all the old love letters, when everything that defined your life and your dad’s life and your mother’s life and your family’s life and your whole history has been destroyed, it is impossible to describe the loss.
This is what we and the other fire victims need the perpetrators, whoever they are, to understand: you have taken away our entire life histories at a time when you are just beginning yours.
Christopher Hudson