I-8 Jewish Travel: Flames of love and destruction

The Stroh family: Mason, Marty, Melissa and Max stand by mezuzah on front doorpost
The Stroh family: Mason, Marty, Melissa and Max stand by mezuzah on front doorpost

-57th in a Series-

Exit 27, Dunbar Lane, Harbison Canyon, California

By Donald H. Harrison

Donald H. Harrison
Donald H. Harrison
Sign on Harbison Canyon Road
Sign on Harbison Canyon Road

HARBISON CANYON, California – In this small community in the back country of San Diego County, the 4Ms of the Stroh family—Marty, Melissa, Mason and Max—are known for keeping the flame of Judaism burning bright inside their home, and for helping neighbors stave off the destruction of the massive October 2003 Cedar wild fire that killed 15 people, destroyed 2,820 buildings, and consumed 280,278 acres throughout San Diego County—up to then the largest fire in California history.

Located between the City of El Cajon and the unincorporated community of Alpine, Harbison Canyon gained fame in the 19th century for the thousands of beehives owned by John Stewart Harbison, who was one of the largest producers of honey in the United States of America.

According to A Brief History of Alpine authored by Carol Morrison for the Alpine Historical Society, the differences in elevation within the canyon area offered honeybees “a wide choice of plants within easy bee range. These include white sage, black sage, ceanothus, manzanita, columbine, collinsia, verbenia, wild rose, honeysuckle and wild buckwheat.”

Changes in elevation also result in some spectacular open-air scenery, and that is what attracted Melissa and Marty Stroh to purchase a home in the area.  “It was the farthest east I could get him to move,” said Melissa in a 2015 interview.  “We’ve been here 27 years” on a side street above Harbison Canyon Road.

Melissa Stroh burns Shabbat candles in her kitchen window on Friday nights
Melissa Stroh burns Shabbat candles in her kitchen window on Friday nights

Living in the Harbison Canyon area meant residing in a neighborhood where very few people are Jewish.  Melissa was constantly on the lookout for people with whom to carpool their children to religious school and to bar mitzvah studies at the Reform Temple Emanu-El.  Additionally, she took it upon herself to acquaint Mason’s and Max’s public school classmates with such Jewish holiday customs as making latkes and playing dreidel at Chanukah time, and eating matzo during Passover.

“When the boys were at Shadow Hills, I would go to their classrooms at Chanukah and make latkes and give each child a dreidel and some gelt and teach them how to play and talk about what it is,” Melissa recalled. “To this day, how many years later, kids will say, ‘I remember you.  I still have my dreidel.”

“Every single person asked for my mom to make latkes,” Max recalled.  His mother would send the potato pancakes to school and “they’d take them and eat them so fast.  I would go to school with 50 latkes and they would be gone by the second class.”

When Max first was starting school, Melissa remembered, he was asked to identify pictures of well known persons and objects.  A picture of Santa Claus stumped him.  “He didn’t know what it was, and the woman was shocked,” Melissa recalled.  “I said ‘honey, we’re Jewish –so he doesn’t know that.”

Every Erev Shabbat, after lighting the Shabbat candles, Melissa puts them in her kitchen window so neighbors can see that they are burning and that the family is Jewish.  Chanukah is even a bigger deal, as Melissa collects hannukiahs and puts candles in every one of them, and sets them in front of their living room’s large picture window. To underscore their pride in Judaism, the family also strings blue and white lights on their house for the holiday.

Marty, who was raised to “respect” all religions, but practiced none, said he has learned quite a bit from his Jewish wife.  “She keeps me well grounded” he said.  “Our kids have been bar mitzvahed, but sometimes I get the days mixed up. Like when do we open the door for Elijah and drink wine, that kind of stuff.”

On a Sunday in October 2003, a neighbor was carpooling the boys, who are three years apart, to religious school at Temple Emanu-El  in the Del Cerro neighborhood of San Diego when she called to say “you know there is a fire down here by the highway (Interstate 8).  I think it is probably not good to have the kids so far away.”  Melissa agreed: “Okay, okay, bring them home.”

Marty, who drives a UPS truck, said not long after that phone call, a law enforcement officer “came through with his loudspeakers telling everyone to evacuate, which they called ‘mandatory,’ which means that if you leave you can’t come back, but not that you have to leave.  We started gathering up the stuff, figuring we had a 20-minute time frame to get out of there, instead of two minutes.  We went through the house and gathered a file cabinet, computers , hard drives, a cedar chest, and some photos.  We loaded this up in the car and Melissa left with the kids for Granny and Papa’s.I had another car in the garage, and I thought if the house burned, I don’t want the car to burn too, so I moved the car outside.

Max Stroh sits on hill on which flames advanced upward during the Cedar Fire of 2003
Max Stroh sits on hill on which flames advanced upward during the Cedar Fire of 2003

“So I was taking care of that, putting the car at the bottom of the hill, when I looked up and saw that the hill behind our house was burning,” with the flames working their way up the hill, away from the house.  “The wind was blowing pretty good, 20-25 miles per hour, and I thought, well in that case, I will stay because if things go sideways here, I can run up the hill because it is not going to burn twice.  So I formulated a plan. I got a sleeping bag out, soaked it with water in case I had to cover up (which I never had to).  I called Melissa on the cell phone to try to explain what I was doing, but things weren’t going well with the cell phone conversation.  Especially back then, they weren’t very reliable.  All she heard was “under a sleeping bag.”

Said Melissa, who had driven to her mother’s house on Mt. Helix in La Mesa: “All I heard was that ‘I have beer and a wet sleeping bag.’ And I thought, how will either one of those save him from a fire like this?”

“I think I said there was fire all around,” Marty recalled.  On the back hillside, the flames had come within 15 to 20 feet of his house. Down the street “when the flames came through the canyon I watched the houses, one after the other, burning down, but it stopped about three houses away, and didn’t transfer to the next home.”

He related what he did next:

“I had a three-wheeler back then, and I was running around, doing what I could do.  I found out that most of the homes burned down because stuff caught on fire around the home.  It’s only a factor of time before the fire will transfer to the home.  You are not going to put a home out with a garden hose, but you can put out a fence, or lawn furniture, or a pile of wood, or whatever it is that is burning next to the house.  So I think I kicked down a couple of fences, put them out, put out some shrubbery that was burning, and did what I could.  I went across the street where they have a detached garage, which was completely involved. I tried to put some water on it, and it wasn’t doing any good, so I put some water on the side of the house and left because I didn’t want to get hurt if something went wrong.”

Most of the time, he concentrated on his neighbors’ homes, because “my house was fairly safe because it burned the back hill, so that created a fire break.”

Asked if professional firemen eventually arrived, Marty responded: “I have nothing but high regards for the fire department. I am sure that none of them were sitting on their butts doing nothing that day.  There wasn’t a single fire person in this neighborhood.”

Did his actions make a big difference?

Marty Stroh points to a hill that was completely engulfed in flames
Marty Stroh points to a hill that was completely engulfed in flames

“Who is to say?  Who knows?  I thought I did some good, but if I weren’t there, who knows.  But I did see some homes that caught on fire because no one was around.”  A large cone-shaped hill within view of his front door was entirely engulfed in flames.

While Marty was running around the neighborhood, putting out small fires, Melissa and the children worried about him from their evacuation point at her mother’s home.  “We were watching the glow across the valley and thinking, wow, I hope that is not my house.”

Marty said that even after the wildfire had passed, “the houses burned all night long, like giant bon fires.  There was not probably an hour when they weren’t burning.”  At 10 p.m., he recalled, he “saw the houses burning and propane tanks going off.  It was like a rush of rocket fuel that was released; you would see a flame like a giant pilot light, and it would go away in about 20 second when it would consume all the fuel.

“At 1 a.m, I heard footfalls on the street below, and I thought ‘wow! The looters don’t wait long’ but it turned out that the man who had moved in next door, a deputy sheriff, was able to get out here and check on his home.  He let me use his cell phone about 1 a.m. in the morning and I was able to contact her for the first time.”

Not surprisingly, Melissa had been in a near panic about his safety.  After a gasp of relief and thanking God that he had survived, she gave him a piece of her mind for risking his life the way he did.

According to Marty, she said something like, “I’m glad you survived, now I’m going to kill you!”  He laughed.

On his motorcycle, Marty then navigated his way out of the Harbison Canyon area, dodging downed power lines, passing car carcasses along the side of the road, and enduring a “fog of smoke hanging  about 20 feet off the ground.”

Today in 2015, Mason, like his father, works for UPS.  He showed up just after our interview in time for a photo session.  He plans on joining the Marines.   Max is in his second year at community college, studying to be a veterinarian’s tech.  Melissa works for a merchandising company, which arranges and rearranges product displays on grocery shelves.

So, having gone through the Cedar fire experience, what does the family do differently today in preparation for a possible wildfire?

Melissa said even before the Cedar fire, “we had a plan, we made it a practice to make our property very defensible by planting greenery on the property in front of their house.”  Marty said the “biggest changes were installing a fire-proof safe in our home, refining our exit strategy, and keeping more bottled water on hand.”

Twenty-seven years after moving in, and twelve years since the fire, the Stroh family confides it is planning to move from their first home.

Oh, not because of the threat of wildfires.

They said they were negotiating to buy a house across the street, which has more acreage and a swimming pool.
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From exit at Dunbar Lane, go straight to Arnold, make a right, and then turn right again on Harbison Canyon.

Next: Horses as therapy animals

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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World.  He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com