LOS ANGELES _ Brock Kant first heard of the Creek fire in an early morning text from his father.
"Fire down by Camp Sierra near Big Creek, FYI."
"Smokey?"
Brock stepped outside of his cabin, looked up through the pines into the mountain blue sky and replied.
"Nothing yet."
A fire had broken out the night before, 10 miles to the west and down a 2,000-foot grade near the small Sierra Nevada town of Big Creek. Firefighters had responded with an aerial attack, limiting the fire's spread through the dry, parched hills.
By that Saturday morning, though, the blaze had begun to explode.
Brock's five-bedroom cabin on the north shore of Huntington Lake was nearly 100 years old. He had lived there for four years with his girlfriend and their 2-year-old son, a cousin and roommate.
They weren't concerned. Every season brought new fires, and crews had always been able to manage them. Then a neighbor came by shouting for everyone to get out.
"Emergency evacuation," he repeated.
Brock, 23, looked again to the sky, and he and his cabin mates started packing, grabbing food, clothes, pictures, kid toys, the PlayStation and two 65-inch televisions. They didn't expect to be gone for long.
Driving east toward the fork with Highway 168, they slowed through the town of Lakeshore on the northeast corner of the lake. His grandfather was talking to employees. Brock stopped the truck and leaned out the window.
"We're going down," he said.
Stephen Sherry shook his head. As the owner of Lakeshore Resort, he felt he had too much to lose to leave the place in the hands of local authorities, and this year he wasn't able to get fire insurance for the complex. He and about a dozen others weren't going to have anything to do with an evacuation.
They had already begun dousing the place with water. Large hoses snaked from the roadside hydrants, and a giant tractor, its wheels as tall as any man, was ready to start cutting a firebreak around the place.
"We're staying," said Sherry, 80, in defiance of anyone who would try to order him out.
Sherry tried to persuade his grandson to stay. But all that went through Brock's mind was the image of the captain going down with the ship.
