As I drove up Pacific Coast Highway, the postcard places of my childhood rushed by.
The Malibu Feed Bin — the country store where our family sold wildflower honey made from the dozens of beehives we tended in our backyard.
The Reel Inn — where we sat at picnic tables and gobbled down cut-rate seafood, and where my dad once asked a guy in line about an acting job.
Something’s Fishy — the sushi place of yesteryear where my brother worked as a busboy and where sake warmed the soul after a day in the cold Pacific.
All gone now, reduced to ash, like so many other landmarks of my youth.
So I kept driving up PCH, my eyes overwhelmed with the grim new images, while my heart welled with memory, nostalgia and regret. I came to see how the town where I grew up had been transformed.
But I also hoped to find that our family home of more than half a century had dodged the capricious wildfire gods, just one more time. I would come to an understanding of sorts as well, courtesy of my late father, and another wise old Malibu original, still among the living.
This isn’t just a hometown love note. I had been so ambivalent about being from Malibu that I tended to fudge when asked where I grew up. I’d say “the Westside of L.A.” Or “I went to Santa Monica High.” Both true, but not the full answer.
In my mind, modern-day Malibu was freighted with so much baggage. Nouveau riche. Ostentatious cars and consumption. Double- and triple-sized homes, walling off Carbon Beach, which had been obnoxiously (but somewhat accurately) dubbed “Billionaires Beach.”
Much of Malibu had come to hold a lurid, TMZ-style fascination. I had grown up here in the 1970s, in what felt like (cue violins, or maybe a little Cat Stevens) a more modest time.
Rainey’s parents, Sheila and Ford, paid less than $70,000 for their Carbon Canyon home and an acre of land when they moved in 1969. Malibu had more of a frontier feel then. At times, the family dogs would venture out into the hills for days.
(ErbeBlackham Team)
When we moved to Carbon Canyon in 1969, central Malibu boasted not much more than a lone supermarket, a couple of gas stations and a lumberyard. No liposuctioned influencers or over-groomed pets. No City Hall. No city, actually, prior to the 1991 incorporation.
An easy, boho charm prevailed. I recall young women riding their horses, bareback, to pick up snacks at Market Basket. Surfers wandered the grocery aisles barefoot, sometimes shirtless. PCH felt like Main Street, not the driving death trap it would become.
When our big yellow school bus passed a favored surf point, the bros would call out: “The Cove is cookin!” Which always seemed to be answered with something like: “Yah. This swell is gonna be sick.”
We always had two or three dogs, of no breeding whatsoever. Beautiful mongrels. The first, and wildest, was Zala, a Hungarian sheep dog (sort of) who would lead her pack into the hills for what we called “deer hunting.” They would return days later, covered with ticks. And what seemed like satisfied smiles.
An undated photo of the Rainey family home in Carbon Canyon, designed by architect Cliff May.
(ErbeBlackham Team)
Our ranch house’s high windows opened onto the sagebrush hills and a bit of an ocean view. My parents, Sheila and Ford Rainey, paid less than $70,000 for it and an acre of land.
The beach had its own joys. We could walk a quarter mile and duck under the low PCH underpass, then spend long hours body surfing and doing absolutely nothing. Later, I would surfcast for perch and corbina and the occasional leopard shark.
Even under the smoky orange sky, the waves rolled gently into our favorite beach. Sandpipers drilled for sand crabs, just like they’d done the week before.
As a kid, I didn’t understand what privileges we enjoyed. Mainly what I remembered, at first, was that we had left a perfectly nice neighborhood in Pacific Palisades.
In our new home in Malibu, we had only one immediate neighbor, an older couple with no children. It meant I bonded more deeply with my brother, Robert, and my sister, Kathy. But I remember feeling lonely, missing the friends who had been within hollering distance.
A lot of the Malibu kids made me uneasy. They seemed cooler, blonder, better looking. I was the dorky guy who played basketball all through his school lunch periods and once was elected president of the Malibu Jr. Optimist Stamp Club. I didn’t find my main people until Santa Monica High, where I joined the newspaper and met the buddies who remain my brothers to this day.
In a time before most local traffic lights, Malibu had more of a frontier feel. Landslides would close PCH fairly regularly, and, indeed, last week, the immolation of ground cover sent rocks onto parts of PCH. In the old days, landslides would cut us off from “town” (read: Santa Monica) and the luxuries it provided. Like clothing stores, movie theaters and a laundromat.
Yes, a laundromat. Mom would drive into Santa Monica to wash and fold mountains of towels, socks and underwear at a coin-operated laundry on Montana Avenue. (Unthinkable today along tres-chic Montana.) It wasn’t until the 1980s that my brother insisted Mom and Dad buy a washer and dryer.
Alison Rainey, the reporter’s wife, stands among framed artwork when the home was being prepared for sale.
(ErbeBlackham Team)
Made of wood, our Carbon Canyon house was light and airy, to a fault. The wind would whistle through and chill us to the core, but Dad thought the radiant electric heating cost too much. We never turned it on.
Instead, we built fires in two fireplaces and a wood-burning stove. When the winds got especially fierce, like they did last week, smoke would billow back down the chimney and fill the living room.
Then, as now, you couldn’t live in Malibu without encountering actors and other celebrities. But in a time before ubiquitous video put everyone on public display, the Big Names would hang out at the supermarket or post office. They were just people, albeit with a little glow of success for us, in a family where the next acting job was never assured.
My dad had a long career as an actor, transcending a fairly bleak working-class upbringing in the Pacific Northwest, to repertory theater and then innumerable roles in TV and movies.
My dad knew and worked with several of the folks who lived in the bigger, grander houses down on the beach — Ryan O’Neal, Lloyd Bridges, Yul Brynner. But he was a bit of a loner and never became a creature of Hollywood. If not on a set or stage, he’d likely be holed up at home, tinkering with his beehives or homemade solar heater.
Mom mostly kept to herself, when she wasn’t attending Mass at Our Lady of Malibu Church or kibitzing with the checkout clerks at Ralphs. She spent long hours making woodcut prints, paintings and the occasional sculpture and sold her work at local shows. Disco diva Donna Summer bought one of her woodcuts. That made her smile.
A Malibu mainstay, then and now, was Bill Stange. He surfed. He spearfished. He took loads of halibut and abalone off the La Costa Beach. The Stange family’s patriarch paid for their home on Rambla Vista, with a sweeping ocean view, largely with his salary as a Los Angeles County lifeguard.
“Malibu was a community. It was firefighters and aerospace engineers and regular people,” along with the Hollywood crew, Stange recalled last week. “Everybody knew everybody. And there was a kind of innocence.” Stange called that world, and the remnants of it that survive, “Old World Malibu” — more funky than fashionable.
An orange tree stands among the ruins in the Carbon Canyon neighborhood of Rainey’s youth.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
Then, as now, wildfires arrived with as much regularity as perennial fights over whether to build a sewer system. (It never happened, at least citywide.) I remember loading up the station wagon on several occasions and fleeing to our Aunt Faith’s house.
The worst fire threat, until now, arrived in 1993 — when great firestorms ringed Southern California. After so many fires and so many years, my parents evacuated only after the wind shifted and fire suddenly appeared inside the chain-link fence at the back of their one-acre property. Dad, 85, stayed on the roof with a garden hose until the last moment.
“The house is gone,” they said, when they evacuated with their two large German shepherds to our home in Venice. But the next morning I got one of the great thrills of my still young newspaper career: My press pass allowed me to cross the police roadblock on PCH. I found Carbon Canyon blackened but “Rainey Manor” (as I had archly dubbed it) miraculously intact.
I rushed miles to the nearest pay phone, to tell Mom and Dad the news: They would be going home.
More than 30 years later, I find myself back on PCH on the same mission, wearing my press pass and my yellow firefighter jacket and carrying a notepad.
Already frazzled by a couple days in other fire zones, my head was clouded with doubt and, yet, an abiding belief that the old house might have another life. At Fire Station 70, I turned right on to Carbon Canyon Road. Hillsides choked with sumac, sage and buckwheat a week earlier now had the look of the inside of a very ancient barbecue. Rounding the first bend, I caught my first glimpse of the house.
Only it’s not a house anymore. It’s an ashy void. The electric gate is broken, so I hop a wall and see the swimming pool we had enjoyed recklessly as children, now reduced to a watery charcoal pit. The two chimneys still stand. But now they have become a pair of tombstones.
It’s too soon to know what should happen next. My dad died in 2005, just before his 97th birthday. My mom passed last May, at 91, right within these walls.
We were among the fortunate ones: The house had been largely emptied of precious possessions — family photos and most of my mom’s artwork — in preparation for selling.
Malibu is a place that “no matter what, goes back to its wildness,” mainstay Bill Stange told Rainey.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
When I walked away from the old house Thursday morning, I finally had a good little cry. Not for the tired old place that had seen better days. But mostly for my parents, who had worked so hard for so many years to create a refuge from the hurly-burly of the outside world.
So many other refuges are gone now — from Malibu to Pacific Palisades to Altadena. I feel for every one of those families.
I still didn’t know what it all meant, so I called the bard of Old World Malibu, the man who for years has used his Facebook page to report on wind and surf and sea creatures just below Carbon Canyon.
Bill Stange told me that his family home of more than 60 years had also burned. He, too, has decisions to make about what comes next. One thing he knew: The tides and the surf would abide. The graceful pelicans would soar, and sandpipers would drill for sand crabs.
Malibu, he said, is a place that “no matter what, goes back to its wildness. They can build those big ol’ houses and do whatever they want. But they’ll never be able to tame Malibu. It turns out we are all just renters here.”
In one of my last visits to the house before the fires, I found my dad’s well-worn script of “Our Town.” His part as the Stage Manager had been marked with abundant thoughts in the margins.
My mother had kept the Thornton Wilder classic and written a tribute just below the title to “My love, my one and only love.”
How fitting, then, that my friend Steve recalled the Stage Manager’s most famous soliloquy.
“We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars,” it goes, in part. “Everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. … There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being.”
