Josh's fiery experience

Leave it to Geneil to one-up me in the scariness factor--her up close and personal experience with the Santa Ana wind-driven fires on Monday was similar to mine last October (although perhaps a bit more panic-inducing). Since a blog acts essentially as a captive audience, I will assume that you are on the edge of your seat, waiting with baited breath to hear the account of my own "fiery" experience. And I won't disappoint...

I was driving back from Glendora, where I had been conducting transfer appointments at a community college. As I headed east down the 210 freeway towards San Bernardino, I saw smoke in the distance and thought it was coming from the mountains directly north of campus. As I got closer, I could see that it was in fact pouring over the side of Little Mountain, a dry, grassy hill a couple hundred feet high in the middle of north San Bernardino. About a mile before the San Bernardino freeway exit, traffic pretty much stopped moving. I thought that was strange for 3:00 in the afternoon until I saw the first sheet of flame shoot up over the side of the hill (the hill slopes down literally to the edge of the freeway). Apparently what had happened was that because the edge of the hill was close to the exit ramp, San Bernardino police had closed the exit ramp, forcing all of the cars to remain on the freeway while flames licked down the dry grass, jumped over our cars, started the railing on fire in the median, then jumped from there to some more dry grass on the other side of the freeway.

Personally, I thought it would have made more sense to let us off the freeway (the fire still would have had to get through an IHOP before it got to us, and once we were on the streets, we could have found a safe alternate route home). But no, instead, the police trapped hundreds of cars on the freeway, between walls of flame, and it took another hour to slowly crawl a mile up the road to the next exit. People weren't panicking in their cars the way Geneil saw them doing, but they were being their usual California-driver selves--people passing you on the right-hand median, other drivers purposefully driving a bit off the road to block those other selfish drivers, etc., etc.

Anyway, that was definitely a highlight of the day. So now, the Johnson family has survived 2 close calls with fires, and one experience with a respectable earthquake. I say the score is Johnsons 3, California 0. I just hope the shutout continues...