SAN DIEGO — There is little reason to all the destruction; few patterns that explain why one house turned to ashes while the one next door escaped the searing flames.

One home is little more than a pile of melted memories. Next door there's a charred palm hovering in the yard but no damage to the house. It's as though the San Diego wildfires cast a shotgun of flames, hitting some homes, missing others.

Steve Palm thought for sure his Rancho Bernardo home on Locksley Street was a goner Monday when the wall of flames charged toward his home. But on Friday, he was washing the ashes from his driveway, the only effect on his house.

"Luck is all it is," he said, looking at his neighbors.

Across the street, the Lane family dug through the ashy remains of their home trying to find something — anything — that survived the Witch fire.

"You've got to wonder why you were picked out," Mark Lane said as his family collected broken plates and warped beer bottles from the wreckage. "It was fate, I guess."

"It doesn't seem right," said his daughter Megan, who spent her 20th birthday trying to figure out where her room was in the mess so she could search for her belongings.

When the fire was advancing on their neighborhood early Monday, embers were flying from the hill behind Palm's home, over the road and to the sea of stucco homes beyond. It looked like the Fourth of July, Mark Lane said.

The embers shot through the air, all the way to a hill in the distance where it burned the grassland. But the embers also landed on two homes — Mark Lane's and his next-door neighbor's. Both of them were lost to the fire.

And except for those two homes, the street looks completely normal.

Firefighters said all it takes is one ember landing in the right spot.

Mark Lane has thought about how the wind was just right to make one little spark start all this mess. He wonders if he'd moved the pingpong table from the backyard, if that would have helped. Or if the umbrella or barbecue out back somehow exacerbated the problem.

"I've been angry and mad at myself, wondering what I could have done," he said.

Firefighters told him an ember likely got into the attic.

The anger and frustration has waned in the days since, and he's more optimistic about moving on. Searching through the ash was for reasons therapeutic, as much as practical.

"What else do we have to do?" the Qualcomm engineer said.

They found pieces of a ceramic tea pot, charred textbooks, one pair of unscathed boxer shorts, a lucky horseshoe and a porcelain windmill with one blade broken off. But not much else.

"Ten points to anyone who can find my gold!" Mark's wife, Joanne, said to the group wearing leather gloves and surgical masks. She, too, has spent some time wondering why her, why her house. But she has precious few answers.

In another neighborhood, east of Rancho Bernardo, the Witch fire also caused scattershot destruction.

Tom McCollum said he believes prayer may have had a hand in why his house survived. His Poway neighborhood is snuggled into a tight valley filled with 10 homes shaded by old oak trees.

"That was a house," he said, pointing to the hillside. "That was a house, that was a house."

All told, five of the 10 burned to the ground. Two belonged to former firefighters.

But his is fine. And it seems illogical.

He has wooden shingles on his house. His fence burned within three feet of his home. A wooden deck burned to the ground, and the hot tub it held is a mess of frayed fiberglass.

He even lost a barn that housed his late grandmother's antique Chevy Impala, his old train set and a scrapbook of articles from his day as a high school football star. But his home was unscathed.

"The fire chief told me to buy a lottery ticket," the former Camarillo resident said, as he looked down at his green property among all the blackened landscape. "It's like an island."

Though upset by the loss of his barn, McCollum still feels lucky he came out with his house. It's hard to look at his neighbors who lost so much without feeling a twinge of guilt, he said.

He did all the proper weed cutting and got ready for the fire that he knew would one day come. But he wonders if something else protected him, too.

A flock of people were praying for him and his family, he said. His mother was in town when the fires hit and got down on her knees and prayed to God to save his home.

And while he thinks that had a very large part in saving his home, he says his neighbors were also spiritual people who also prayed. But they lost their homes.

"There's no explanation, really," he said.