The Fire This Time

The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself.

— Joan Didion.

Last Friday, January 3, my daughter’s high school varsity soccer team traveled to Pacific Palisades. On a chilly afternoon, the GALA Goddesses (yes, really, that’s our mascot) fell to the Palisades Dolphins in a tough, physical match. Heloise played well, putting in time at striker and as right mid, emerging with bruises — but some sense that she gave as good as she got.

Last night, the Pali High stadium burned down. The stands where we sat are gone. We presume that most of the girls on the other team lost their homes as well. One of my daughter’s teammates lives in the Palisades but attends GALA; her home was destroyed last night. We will do what we can to help her rebuild a wardrobe. There are thousands of others in equal or greater need.

I moved to Los Angeles in 1989. I was here for the riots of 1992, when my friends and I baked cookies for the National Guard and huddled together during curfew. I was here for the Northridge earthquake of 1994, when every plate and glass in my tiny Santa Monica apartment shattered. The destruction of the last twenty-four hours is likely to be far greater than what I witnessed then, and far worse than any seen in living memory. The losses will exceed those of the earthquakes of 1994, 1971, and 1933; they will dwarf those of the 1992 and 1965 riots. We have no full sense yet of how much has been taken, as neither the fire in the Palisades nor the one above Pasadena is yet contained.

With my third wife, I lived in a wonderful Craftsman in north Pasadena’s “Bungalow Heaven.” That neighborhood is now under mandatory evacuation and the flames are just blocks away. Many old friends whom I knew from my days at Pasadena City College have lost everything except their lives. Many old haunts, like the Altadena Town & Country Club and St Mark’s Episcopal Church, are now in ashes.

I live in Miracle Mile, near the La Brea Tar Pits; my children and their mother are nearby. The “flats” of Los Angeles are, in this respect, much safer than the more picturesque and affluent hillside regions. The nearest flames are many miles away, and even the most catastrophic change in winds is unlikely to endanger us. My phone, however, reports the local air quality as hazardous (429). We are all staying indoors as best we can.

The temptation to politicize the disaster has proven overwhelming. The right-wing has bleated about mismanagement of natural resources. The left-wing has complained that Los Angeles took money from the fire department to give to the cops. For those who see every catastrophe as confirmation of their pre-existing prejudices, this firestorm is a chance to indulge in the addictive pleasure of recriminations, condemnations, and “I-told-you-so’s.” For those whose worldview already has a cast of villains in place, every new natural disaster can be stretched and molded to fit one’s unshakeable priors. It is contemptible, but it is also human. (Perhaps the best example of this comes from the far-left outfit Code Pink, who have found a way to blame the fires on Israel. Perhaps it was the Jewish space lasers that set the hills ablaze?)

Long before anyone spoke of manmade climate change, Southern California experienced prolonged droughts that turned the landscape into a tinder box. Long before anyone burned fossil fuels to power industry, the Santa Ana winds blew every fall and winter, roaring through the canyons to the coast. Terrible tornadoes roared across the Southern Plains long before Francisco Coronado first beheld what is now Kansas and Oklahoma. Great hurricanes battered the Gulf Coast long before Alonso Álvarez de Pineda first mapped the shores between Florida and Texas. Relentless firestorms ravaged these hills for centuries, even millennia, before Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo first sailed into San Pedro Bay (A place which he originally named “Bahia de Las Fumas,” the Bay of Smoke. Take a guess as to why.)

It is possible that human activity has made tornadoes, hurricanes, and firestorms worse, but that is — as yet — only a possibility. It is human nature to believe that “things have never been so bad.” It is human nature to soften the terrors of the past and magnify the horrors of the present.

Whatever climate change has to do with natural disasters aside, it should be clear that there is nowhere truly safe. Nature has made some places more pleasant than others; the weather in Pacific Palisades is generally more lovely than it is in Philadelphia, Peoria, or Pawhuska. Nowhere, however is immune from catastrophe. It is cruelty and snobbery alike to suggest that people just not live anywhere earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, ice storms or wildfires occur with some frequency.

Many years ago, I was in love with a girl who lived in Edmond, Oklahoma. I went to visit her, and one day, as we sat eating lunch, I heard a dreadful noise. “They’re just testing the tornado siren,” the woman I loved (fruitlessly, it turned out) said with a shrug. The sound echoed in my nightmares for weeks. I could not possibly live where that happens, I decided. I’ll take my chances with temblors and fire.

Joan Didion wrote,

Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The winds shows us how close to the edge we are.

The truth is, of course, that everyone is close to the edge. The pioneers in a Willa Cather novel, barely surviving a Nebraska winter? Close to the edge. Fishermen on the barrier islands, watching the ocean’s inexorable rise? Close to the edge. Our edge just happens to be both literal (we balance on the very rim of the continent) and metaphorical (we are a city that pushes boundaries and conjures up myths and fantasies for the world to consume.) We are a place widely despised for our indulgence and our excess; no other city’s sorrows seem to engender so much schadenfreude from outsiders. Yet we are not so different from you. It’s just that our tragedies are more cinematic. If the defining image of a hurricane is a white wall of water, and a tornado is defined by a fearsome black whirl, our wildfires burn a brilliant, even beautiful, red and gold.

As I write this, the wind is still howling. To our north, our east, and our west, fires burn and the thick smoke settles in the Los Angeles basin. My windows, normally open, are shut tight. My city — not where I was born, but where I have built and rebuilt several lives — is wounded and frightened. It is also resolute. Fire destroys, but a people accustomed to fire are a people familiar with what it takes not only to rebuild, but to create something surprising, something new, something that could not be if its predecessor had not been burned right off the face of the earth. Fire is loss, and fire is death, and fire is a chance to reimagine. Los Angeles, more than any other city on the planet, is the city of fresh starts. Fire scorches, and fire renews. We will defeat these flames, and we will grieve and comfort, and then we will, without any doubt — and despite any obstacle of nature or insurance — rebuild.