They stood together, their backs to the church, staring at something they could not quite see. They just knew that the world had changed somehow, and this was the place it happened.
It began as just another Sunday at a little church along Las Virgenes Road, on a quiet edge of suburban Los Angeles. The Church in the Canyon is an unremarkable box of a building, with a flat roof over glass front doors.
It was about 9:45 a.m. The Sunday worship service was an hour away. A ceiling of low clouds obscured the tops of the bare, brown hills across the road.
You cannot always see the moment that the world is about to change.
Elizabeth Howland Forrest had just arrived from Santa Monica, mesmerized along the way by the low-flying helicopter that she followed west for several miles on Highway 101. It weaved so masterfully with the bends in the road, she thought, until she lost sight of it ahead of her. She got off at the Las Virgenes exit, hit green lights at the strip center and the apartments, and parked at the church. She checked her makeup in the rearview mirror.
Scott Daehlin, who lives in a G.M.C. Safari in the parking lot, had prepared the sanctuary’s sound system for choir practice and stepped outside to get something from his van. Jerry Kocharian, a church member and maintenance worker, stood with his coffee on the opposite side of the building.
Pastor Bob Bjerkaas was inside, teaching Sunday school to teenagers, focused on Genesis. What does the ancient book say about the life we live now?
Pastor Bob, the congregants call him, heard a low helicopter through the church walls. That was not unusual on the edge of Los Angeles, where so many copters — news copters, traffic copters, police copters, search and rescue copters, private copters catering to those rich enough to fly over traffic instead of drive through it — provide a thwap-thwap-thwap backbeat to daily life.
But this one sounded really low.
Outside, Daehlin tried to trace the sound moving through the clouds. His body felt it — a persistent percussion, “like a kick drum” — but his eyes could not spot the helicopter, invisibly gliding away from him.
“Oh, no,” he muttered. “It’s too low.”
On the other side of the church, Kocharian caught a vague glimpse, a dark phantom in the murky clouds. It crossed Las Virgenes.
“It didn’t circle like it was trying to land,” Kocharian said. “It was moving.”
Out of a corner of her eye, from the driver’s side window, Howland Forrest saw a flash that spun her head toward the hills. The men outside heard it less as a boom and more as a thud — abrupt, a quick beat of shattering parts, and utter silence.
It burst through the walls of the church.
“Oh, dear Lord,” Pastor Bob said. “Something happened.”
The Sermon
There was no explosion, no Hollywood-style fireball. The helicopter struck the earth about a half-mile from Church in the Canyon, on high ground scorched by the massive Woolsey fire in November 2018.
Fifteen months ago, the mountains burned, all the way to Malibu, but the fire spared the church. The story was everywhere but there.
Not this time. By topographical luck, the church had the only real vantage point of the wreckage. The best view was from the church marquee along the street. Neighbors ambled there immediately, mingling with the churchgoers. No one in the growing crowd knew what to make of what they saw.
There were flames, but no inferno. Witnesses described something like flares, at least for a while. Pale smoke rose into the low, gray clouds.
Daehlin called 911. Within minutes, patrol cars zoomed past, toward Malibu Canyon, then spun around. They pulled into a driveway at the Las Virgenes Municipal Water District, a smattering of buildings at the base of the hills, directly across from the church.
Fire engines of various shapes and types came next. Television trucks followed. Emergency medical workers scampered up the hills, on trails usually used by dog walkers and mountain bikers, with all the best intentions.
Sunday services at the Presbyterian-affiliated Church in the Canyon, begin at 10:45. About 75 worshipers came on Sunday, chattering about the commotion outside. They filed into the small sanctuary, with rows of padded chairs under a low ceiling lined with fluorescent lights. The budget is tight, but Pastor Bob hopes to upgrade the lights by Easter.
Pastor Bob is 51, with red hair and a red goatee flecked with gray. He is legally blind in one eye and does not drive. He is married with four children — three boys and a girl, ages 15 to 20. He has a big laugh.
Many call him Coach Bob because he has coached lacrosse for decades, including at a high school. Pictures of past teams fill the walls of his office.
No one calls him by his last name, Bjerkaas. He spelled it, with a plea.
“Do not spell it a-s-s,” he said. “It’s bad enough to have ‘jerk’ in there.”
Pastor Bob’s planned Sunday sermon was about Job — “the suffering of a righteous man, and how we make sense of it,” he explained in his office on Wednesday.
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