Learning to Stand on Moving Ground

A memoir of early instability and the resilience it quietly built.

My first wildfire evacuation happened before I even understood what fire could do.

I was almost four. My aunt Holly was visiting from Maryland. She was goofy. She nicknamed me poo poo doo doo bee bee gun and sang silly songs like “I see your hiney. It’s nice and shiny. You better hide it before I bite it.” I’ve always admired her spirit.

The mountains above Santa Barbara lit up and painted the sky orange from beneath. The fire roared down the hills in dry sundowner winds, reaching neighborhoods in a matter of hours. It became one of the most destructive wildfires in Santa Barbara County history, but I only remember the activity.

The adults moved quickly. Clothes tossed into a bag. My blankey. A stuffed animal.

I remember chewing on the frayed corner of my blue blankey, the way I did when I felt unsure of the moments I was in. My mother was in go mode, quick and efficient, not scared but focused. I remember being packed into the car.

I did not know the word evacuation yet. I only knew we were leaving home and heading to the Best Western at the beach. It was 109 degrees in some places that day. We did not actually need to leave, but Aunt Holly was fed up with the heat. We had no air conditioning. The fire became the excuse.

Four years later the danger came from beneath.

January 17, 1994. The Northridge earthquake hit at 4:31 in the morning and our apartment came alive as if it had a mind of its own. I was asleep in my mother’s bed. Despite her best efforts, that is always where I ended up, but it was just the two of us. The shaking tore us awake. Books flew from shelves. The windows rattled. For a moment the entire room felt as if it was floating. My mother held me while we waited for the world to steady itself.

Across the city freeways collapsed, buildings pancaked, and whole blocks in the valley were reduced to rubble. Gas lines ruptured. Fires ignited. More than fifty people died. Thousands were injured. We were on the outer edge of the destruction, close enough for the apartment to feel lifted and dropped, fortunate enough that our next move was to simply go back to sleep.

What came next was quieter but life-changing.

What I did not understand then, but the woman version of me understands now, is that my mother was yearning for more than the life she had. I became a single mother myself many years later, and for almost exactly as long as she was. I recognize the restlessness she carried, the ache for change, the belief that something bigger and brighter might be waiting just across an ocean. She was brave.

Around that time, in a most improbable turn of events, my mother fell in love with a man from Switzerland she met on a computer. This was 1994. Hardly anyone had the Internet at home then, but she was a math teacher at Santa Barbara Community College and her job gave her early access. She logged into CompuServe late at night. He logged in from across the ocean. They shared words long before they shared space.

Then one day he simply arrived. A stranger stepping out of a plane in the California sun, carrying the idea of a new life in his suitcase. I wore a red velvet dress when we met him for dinner. I can still feel the fabric between my fingers. He was playful and silly, flicking tiny pieces of rolled up paper across the table and laughing when I giggled. For a moment it felt like we were pretending to be a family already.

They agreed to marry quickly. At some point they both asked my permission. I awkwardly said yes, through a word of uncertainty. I can feel myself fidgeting even now remembering that moment. She left me with my friend Yolanda for two weeks while she explored the country that might become our future. I missed Yolanda. She was my safe space.

And then we left.

On the plane to Switzerland I pressed my forehead to the window and searched for Care Bears in the clouds. I did not know it then, but that was the last time I would look for them. I left American pop culture somewhere over the ocean.

I traded ocean air, sandy feet, and friends who felt essential to me for the cool blue light of the Alps. I traded English for Swiss German. At first it felt like I had gone deaf and mute at the same time. Everyone spoke around me in sounds I could not follow, and I could not answer back. I do not remember learning the language, only the frustration of being the child who could not speak and then, somehow, waking up one day able to.

I traded familiar streets for a place where I had no history and no footing. I learned new rules. New manners. New ways of speaking. New ways of being quiet.

So quiet that I got lost one day and the Swiss police eventually found me and returned me home. I was seven years old and allowed to wander alone in this new place. People were everywhere, but I did not know how to ask for help. I was leaning against someone else’s car, parked on the cobblestone turnabout in front of the ship station where the steamship docked, a normal form of public transportation like taking the bus or the train. It was getting colder because the day was turning into evening. That is when they collected me and called my new home.

Everything in our new apartment felt unfamiliar. There were no soft rugs like in Santa Barbara. The floors were smooth and cold. The light switches were square buttons you pushed instead of flicked. My room did not feel like my room.

And then there was the world outside. Behind our apartment stretched a wide open field full of dandelions. Chickens clucked behind a chicken-wire gate to the left, and I visited them daily. Snow-capped Alps lined the horizon in every direction. On clear days the lake at the bottom of the hill sparkled so brightly it looked like someone had scattered diamonds across the surface. You could see the rocks at the bottom. I pretended I was living in a fairy tale, trying to make sense of a life that no longer felt like my own. Even the silence seemed different.

Then there was the absence of silence. The bells. Every hour the church bells clanged and shook the air, with a long clonggg… badonggg… gong. Slowly the sound folded itself into my days. It was strange to realize that something so foreign could become part of me. The bells settled into my bones.

But the world kept shifting and I kept learning to balance.

Those early events shaped me long before I understood their meaning. They taught me that life can change direction without warning. That home can disappear in an afternoon. That the floor beneath you might not stay still. That love can redraw entire continents.

The disasters never stopped. My homes continued to disappear. Even today I am writing this from a hotel. The RV we moved into after the Palisades fire took our home has now flooded and needs major repairs.

Since that first move to Switzerland I have moved more than twenty-six times. Homes have never stayed still for long.

But still. At four years old the world was already changing under my feet, and somehow we still found a reason to go to the beach. I learned early that you cannot stop the world from shifting. But you can keep moving with it.

And in all that moving I learned something else. Home was never a building. It was me.