Escaping Los Angeles
I am not a worrier, not given to hear the call of catastrophe. In the middle of the night on Monday, amid the squeal of the wind, my husband got up to take down some chimes ringing through the dark. I laughed: What a ridiculous time to have wind chimes. The wind moaned, whimpered; doors shook. It made no sense that we lived here. We could barely afford this house, which was, in any case, a two-bedroom too small for a family of four. We had been entranced by the view of Silver Lake, and Atwater Village, and the mountains beyond them.
When the sun rose on Tuesday, we could see, from our balcony, palms bend in the wind. Cacti shivered. Bamboo rattled madly. The air was newly animate, calling attention to itself, and I listened, interested. Many institutions emailed to tell us that they were watching and waiting but remained open. I walked my 5-year-old to school, racing and laughing down the staircases cut into the ridge, and we arrived to a surprising silence. The children were being kept inside. This was the “rainy-day protocol,” a protocol with which we were not familiar because it had simply never rained on a school day.
We have lived here three years. Everything still feels new. The view and the light lift me more than I would have expected. At school, the children hang their backpacks on hooks outside their classrooms. I can marvel for minutes at the way strange-fruited cacti wind round one another like tangled hair, nothing like the fork-shaped plants for which cartoons had prepared me. When I hear about fires, it is from friends in New York, who, ignorant of the geography of Los Angeles, ask if I am okay, at which point I, less justifiably ignorant of the same geography, say I have never heard of the place where that fire allegedly burns.
“Are you tying things down?” a friend asked, but we are not the kind of people who tie things down; we watch them fall. A house you cannot really afford is one that doesn’t feel particularly yours, and so, though we have lived here for years, our picture frames remain on the floor, waiting to be hung by people with the capacity to decide what color the walls ought to be. On Tuesday, while the children were kept inside at school, the wind slid shingles from our roof. Occasionally we heard a knock as an unidentified object hit the house. The view remained pristine, 30 miles out, a thin skein of white clouds and snowcapped mountains, lines of cars snaking through the valley. It was true that one could walk three minutes to the other side of the ridge and see smoke rise from the edge of the vista, but one could also not do that. In the evening, the kids wondered at our sun umbrella, stripped clean of its cloth, a skeletal presence standing sentry on our deck. The wind was making a strange sound through the doors to our room. “The door kazoo,” the 10-year-old called it.
“What’s that?” my husband asked. The mountain was backlit in orange light, just as it appeared at sunrise. “The moon,” I wanted to say, but the moon was already up. My son began playing his electric piano; the power went out two minutes into “Für Elise.” Absent the hum of the air filters, the wind felt twice as loud. “We all have a job,” I told my 5-year-old, “and it’s your job to go to sleep.” “Yes,” she said ominously, “and it’s Felix’s job to figure out how to finish his piano practice.” The glow behind the mountain grew stronger. The door kazoo hummed. Things were falling off my neighbor’s roof. “I don’t know roof words,” I told another writer — “pieces of roof.” “Chunks,” she said helpfully. Chunks of my neighbor’s roof assembled next to the denuded umbrella. From my bed, I could see the fire, 15 miles out, past the sparkle of houses and headlights, growing toward the sky, tessellated triangles of orange light. A second fire appeared beside it.
I tried to sleep in my own bed, but some instinct would not allow it; I crawled into bed with my daughter in the room she shares with her brother because her parents, entranced by the view, bought a too-small house. I awoke at 5 a.m.; the room smelled of smoke. The 5-year-old opened the curtains to a kind of light I’d never before seen, a valley bright but overhung with black clouds, all of our greenery, the trees and cacti and bougainvillea, unbelievably crisp in the contrast, as if lit from within. “I think,” she said, evincing a kind of groundedness lacking in every other member of her family, “we should … get away from the bad things.”
Our phones buzzed with an evacuation warning, which is not an order. “Who would win in a rap battle,” the 10-year-old asked, “Kendrick or Eminem?” We made the decision to leave not because of the warning but because of the power; without power, there was no filtration, and the sting of black smoke seemed dangerous for an asthmatic 5-year-old. We would go to Ventura, meet up with friends. As we were booking a hotel, a fire popped up in Ventura. We looked at a map. Palm Springs?
My husband thought Kendrick would win the rap battle. We packed for Palm Springs. The packing was easy in the beginning: passports, birth certificates, baby books I had started too late and only fitfully completed. A shopping bag full of medicine. It was the next level of packing that paralyzed. Did I care more about my clothes, or my grandmother’s dishware, or the kids’ best-loved toys? Jewelry? Instead of deciding, I unloaded, for no discernible reason, the dishwasher. I felt the same level of attachment to all of it, which meant taking none of it. In any case, I told myself, we were not fleeing a fire that would relieve us of all our worldly possessions; we were merely leaving a power outage that had left one member of our family vulnerable to smoke. She quietly put a cylindrical pool toy in my suitcase. There wasn’t any room in hers, she explained. “I have my erasable marker!” said the 10-year-old. A house belonging to his classmate was in the process of burning to the ground.
Wildfire in Los Angeles is inevitability; much of what is most beautiful is meant to burn. The fire would run to the ocean repeatedly if we let it; the most stunning vistas would be erased and regenerated, over and over. Instead we try to hold on. Even as the winds grow more extreme, the droughts longer, each errant spark more dangerous, we are enamored of views held, unnaturally, in stasis. On Wednesday, a fire larger than the area of Manhattan blossomed unchallenged because the winds were too intense for the helicopters that might attempt to constrain it. The most destructive fires in the city’s history burn tens of thousands of acres of chaparral and what anyone has dared build around the edges. Pacific Palisades, Altadena, the Hollywood Hills: neighborhoods even New Yorkers can name.
The county orders 180,000 people to leave as the flames jump highways and find new fuel. Paris Hilton loses her home, as does the janitor at my son’s school. “I’m glad you’re safe” is a thing we say to one another, but are you safe if your house and everything in it has simply ceased to exist?
From Palm Springs, another city made habitable by questionable choices, we debate whether to go back. A smaller fire in the Hollywood Hills inches closer toward our neighborhood and is, a day later, under control. Our power pops, unexpectedly, back on. The worst may be over, but the winds may pick up again soon, and there is no rain in the forecast. Every Angeleno measures the allure of the light against the cost of the fire; the calculation is changing in ways we cannot predict. We are never going to hang the frames on the wall.