Mall Haven

"I was evacuated Monday night and we went to Home Depot," says Lisa Owen, popping two aspirin to relieve the backache she got from sorting the boxes of donations that keep showing up as strangers drive up to drop off whatever a displaced heart may desire -- platform shoes, 24 cases of mouthwash. Forget the classic Red Cross disaster sandwiches of American cheese on smushed Wonder Bread and witness, instead, the evacuee sauntering back to his hard-shell pickup with a seeded baguette from the boxes of artisan bread offered at a strip mall at the base of a smoky mountain in Rancho San Diego.

Three teenage girls wander up. "You guys need any bananas?" asks one wearing a T-shirt with the slogan "I'm a Good Witch." Owen shakes her head and directs the girls to another makeshift camp a few miles away.

At the Home Depot across the street, assistant manager Kat Weissenburger was surprised to find herself in charge of quarter horses instead of kitchen cabinets.

"Crisis management isn't usually my thing," she allows. The store postponed its construction for two days to make room for the refugees, and Weissenburger spent the night in her car rather than abandon the strangers who kept pulling into the lot, "so scared and stressed. They just wanted to be somewhere safe." She comforts a sobbing woman with four golden retrievers and fusses over a family with a son in a wheelchair. She worries about a pony covered in hives and is relieved when the grass-roots network dispatches a roving veterinarian.

"A lot of people said they were just going to meet up here, then ended up staying," Weissenburger says.

Her colleague Andy Martin adds, "The only thing we turned away was 10 ducks. We didn't know how to deal with ducks."

At the foot of smoldering mountains in Jamul, Diana Wake notices the RVs filling up the parking lot of the supermarket strip mall and begins mustering volunteers to solicit donations from nearby businesses.

With a rhinestone-studded Bebe baseball cap shielding her face from the punishing noon sun, she pauses long enough to squirt drops into eyes stinging from the smoke and drifting ash.

"Any masks?" asks a woman wandering up from the RV camp. "I got asthma."

"No, we gave them all out," Wake apologizes. Feeling dizzy, Wake looks for a folding chair and sits down.

"Put her in timeout," another volunteer declares, while someone else appears, proffering a turkey sandwich.

"Your blood sugar's low!" she tells Wake, who takes a grateful bite.