In early November, Seahaven resident Lena Bivens woke up around 1 a.m. to a cacophony of mysterious crackling, booming and popping. When she opened the door to the living room, where her teenage daughter was sleeping on the sofa, she discovered a room suffused with smoke and French glass doors and windows beginning to burst. Ms. Bivens rushed her two children to the carport, grabbed a jacket and a few more items from her home, called 911 and started hosing down the fire, which had started two or three hours earlier on the deck for reasons still unidentified. “I ran back down to the house and all I could think about was, ‘I’ve got to fight this fire,’” she said. The fire not only damaged the deck, wall and carpet; it also claimed a new, aluminum-frame bike she had just bought for her son’s birthday. “I watched it turn to liquid and melt before my eyes,” said Ms. Bivens, who works as a hair stylist in Mill Valley. “It was sad. It was a big expense for me, and he was riding his bike to school most days. He loved his bike.” Her daughter’s steel-frame bicycle also suffered damages. When her landlord, Tom Hickman, learned of the loss, he enlisted neighbors and contractors who worked on the house to chip in for two new Schwinn bikes for Christmas. At a holiday party at his home, just up the road from Ms. Bivens’, he gave the kids two helmets (donated by a San Rafael bike shop). A bit later, after hors d’oeuvres, he announced the other part of the present. “I said, ‘Oh I forgot, those helmets came with bicycles,’ and I took them out…They went from, ‘Okay, so I got a bike helmet’ to ‘Good Lord, I have a bike!’” Ms. Bivens said the gifts were a complete surprise. “It’s a very sweet story,” she said.