Mall Haven
As California Burns, Bastions of Retail Therapy Have Become Beacons of Safety for Some Evacuees

By Tamara Jones
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 26, 2007

VISTA, Calif., Oct. 25

This is where man flees when he cannot be separated from his purple dune buggy, the place where horses can graze at a bookstore and neighbors entertain each other with pictures of charred cabanas on their cellphones.

The free burritos just keep coming, the surroundings are oh-so-familiar, and anything they might possibly need -- Tires! Budget blinds! Mattresses! Organic juices! -- is right at their fingertips.

Such is the life of the rogue refugees, the hundreds in campers and RVs who fled the fires raging in Southern California and flocked not to official shelters but to what they considered the safest ground of all: the mall. Across the county, displaced San Diegans have sought refuge in the welcoming embrace of shopping centers, giving customer service a whole new meaning as merchants scramble to provide for the displaced, creating a grass-roots system that makes disaster, at times, seem like a giant tailgate party.

"I just wanna be in control," says Nancy Conway, explaining why she avoided the city's official shelter at the football stadium and instead parked her RV outside the Sears across the freeway from the flaming Escondido neighborhood she and her husband fled with four cats and two dogs Sunday night. Parked alongside them are their neighbors and friends, Roni and Dan Bethea. The families usually take their motorcycles and go camping together, so coming outside in the morning to see each other's RVs felt reassuring, Roni Bethea says, "except we're on asphalt."

After watching helicopters drop fire retardant on their neighborhood, the friends hiked up a back route to sneak a look at their still-closed community. Their houses were still standing, but the smoke damage was intense, Bethea says. She grabbed only the absolute necessities -- a bottle of vodka and some tonic -- and retreated to the parking lot.

Wednesday night, 20 friends dropped by for a big pizza party, and Thursday night, someone's husband is cooking a big batch of spaghetti.

"We're having a ball," Bethea insists. Sheila Roberts is in a similarly sunny mood, with a stay-behind neighbor's phoned assurances that her Ramona home is still intact. Her husband didn't want to leave his prized purple dune buggy, so the stadium was out, and it seemed natural enough to just pull up their 38-foot motor home and live where Sheila went shopping for her two sons' school clothes last month.

"I don't want to be surrounded by a lot of other people," Roberts says with a shrug, keeping an eye on a neighboring camper's four goats, which are helpfully pruning some shrubs outside Sears.

In El Cajon, the Westfield Parkway mall morphed into the Ponderosa during the peak of the evacuations, as more and more refugees began showing up with livestock.

"We had over 200 horses at one point. Goats. We had chickens. Some pigs. Also a porcupine," says Adrienne Bergeron, the mall's marketing director. A temporary corral was put up on the asphalt by Borders, and the RVs circled like a postmodern wagon train. Volunteers cared for the animals, and overflow was sent across the street to a Home Depot that was still under construction. The mall's multiplex became the refugees' home theater, offering free movies; the food court, their caterers.

"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.

The tenderness of strangers in crisis even conquers the sullenness of teenagers.

"Hey! You're here!" one girl greets another, who holds a bright green lizard, another evacuee.

"Did your house like burn down?"

"No, did yours?"

"Nuh-uh."

Behind them, the mountains keep burning, the fire close enough to keep most of the businesses in the strip mall officially closed for shopping. The same was true for most of the week at the Escondido center where fire on surrounding hillsides prompted mall security to evacuate the evacuees three times, moving from JCPenney to Nordstrom to Sears in a single day.

Sheila Roberts clings to her asphalt island, feeling secure even in the midst of Armageddon, California-style. Her husband wonders what to make for dinner. A cookout, maybe? Wouldn't that be fun? Sheila quickly nixed the idea.

"We're not building a fire ring," she tells him.