The Fire on the Mount
Thinking of Joan Didion & our lost humanity in the California wild fires
I’m reminded of the wildfires that Joan Didion correctly obsessed about in Slouching Towards Bethlehem in her essay, “The Santa Ana,” seeing in them not just the climatological metaphor of our sudden and common disaster but also the price of living in the dry paradise of Southern California. There is the existential volatility of the California dream. The huge shifts in temperature, climate, & safety within a single day and within the state itself that collectively characterize the cinematic ecstasy and devastation unique to life in the Golden State. The California wildfires in Didion’s estimation remind me of how French writers have described the Mistral in Southern France whose powerful howling gusts elicit feelings of melancholy, vulnerability, and even doom. For Didion, the Santa Ana winds are omnipotent and inescapable. They make us tiny humans feel uneasy about our tiny made-up worlds. They can bankrupt the richest life on earth and displace the displaced in a sudden burst of judgment on the California bush. They are merciless in their fury and power. Didion wrote fifty-eight years ago about the hot and dry winds that made Californians feel deeply aware of their own mortality because the power of the Santa Anas is unstoppable and unpredictable.
They destabilize the Californian dream at the same time they define it for most of us, reminding us of our helplessness and our fragility and luck, above all else, in the face of the bully and the prophet.
I’ve always wondered if the Santa Anas were one of the reasons why Didion moved to New York because she felt like she’d gambled long enough with California’s house money. Maybe, it just made sense to her to cash out before the losses started adding up. Maybe, it just made sense to stop flirting with catastrophe. Can’t say I blame her at all. But I do often feel her voice missing in the creative nonfiction space about California. For many readers, her voice was the voice of this state in all of its beauty, privilege, uncertainty, imperfection, danger, & mythology.
I’m reminded of how fragile our life is in this beautiful state which I love so much. Now more than ever. The precariousness intricately linked to the devotion. A week ago, I was watching Notre Dame beat up Georgia in the playoffs, jumping up and down and screaming myself into existence in an empty house. A week ago, thousands of people still had their homes and the weather was a hot 76º and the daydream was picture-perfect, too perfect for comfort, as it usually is in the Burbank studio. The lives that Angelenos had built for themselves here, the places that gave them safety and refuge and joy and community, were destroyed this week by the Eaton Fire and the Palisades Fire and the Sunset Fire and the Hurst Fire. The homes that many Angelenos (of every class, race, profession, religion, & nationality) had bought back when the American Dream was still affordable and one working spouse could earn enough money to buy a starter home in LA, are now long gone. And they will never be rebuilt again because of skyrocketing property values and housing scarcity. Suddenly, entire residential blocks have been erased in Pacific Palisades as if they’d never existed. Most of Malibu has been evacuated. Half of Santa Monica has been evacuated. UCLA has switched to remote instruction to keep its students off campus. Now, in every photo I stumble on, I see brick and steel carcasses and children’s toys and hollowed out cars all sleeping in detritus. It’s hard to believe any of this real even for those of us who live here and see wildfires spark up like this every 3-4 years with less fanfare.
But this time feels different. Two of our friends had to evacuate their home in Pasadena and so now they must return each day to check up on it and prevent looters from stealing their memories. One of our friends lost her grandmother’s home in Altadena that she’d been slowly renovating for the past three years. Countless Angelenos inside and outside the industry have been forced to watch their dream homes slowly disintegrate before their eyes on their own security cameras, watching the slow annihilation of their hearth on their smartphone apps. Spectators to their own erasure. The new will eat the old as it always does.
The fire and brimstone of the past week has reminded me of so many things I’ve wanted to avoid but can’t. Three nights ago, we packed our belongings into duffle bags and suitcases, ready to evacuate after the Sunset Fire erupted and the evacuation warning line was extended south just four blocks from our duplex. The line for mandatory evacuation in West Hollywood started at Sunset, just eight blocks from our home. We had to be ready to leave in an instant once the evacuation warning (phase 2) turned into a mandatory evacuation (phase 3). We packed family heirlooms, clean pajamas, a spare set of jeans, socks and underwear. We had to be ready in an instant to pack our favorite clothes we could never replace. We packed our babies’ urns, some watches and bags from our trips to Japan & France. We packed any object with sentimentality. We packed our passports and our Social Security cards and our medications. We charged external batteries and emergency flashlights that could pulsate in emergency code to first responders. We reduced our whole lives to a couple bags of mementos we would not relinquish to the apocalypse.
The fire would not take away our memories as it had so many others. That was the vow inside my head.
The truth is we got lucky. Very lucky. The Sunset Fire was contained within a couple days with the help of Québecois CL-415s known as Super Scoopers that helped stop its forward progress from stomping into the urban density of West Hollywood. As I was examining every object in my closet to decide what to bring and what to sacrifice on the altar of climate change, I realized how little I actually needed to be happy. How much stuff I had accumulated in the pursuit of happiness. I realized how fortunate I was to still have a home even two hours longer than others and how one uncontainable wildfire could take away my life in a flash.
I realized that like most Americans, I am incapable of distinguishing between need and want because every want in America feels like a need until an actual need comes in and takes over your life.
While Los Angeles still burns, I found myself reaching out to my neighbors to make sure they were safe. I needed to know they weren’t trapped or afraid to come home or that they weren’t alone unless they wanted to be. I reminded them that we were here for them. Every time I offered to help another neighbor, I became more and more aware of how unstable our lives were. I told one neighbor that I was worried that I wasn’t worried enough about how fucked up all of this is. He said he was too. He said that if things got dangerous, we could run from the flames together. Neither of us were joking. I talked to a 97-year-old neighbor on Friday as I walking Cleo who told me that at her age, her only concern was the giant tree crashing down on her apartment, not the fire above. I talked to another neighbor who said he would stay here until the end. He would protect his home and his butterfly garden and his dog and his history in this city until it was time to pack his feathers and beads into a suitcase and drive away. Maybe, he would never come back. Maybe, I thought to myself, this tragedy will somehow cleanse us of our past. But the Phoenix myth has no place in this tragedy.
I have seen a lot of energy on social media essentially framing the fires in LA as mother nature eating the rich or reality biting lala land, but that framing is neither accurate nor helpful. People have always seen what they want to see in America because we have select vision, but the wildfires cannot be an excuse to celebrate our own devastation for the simple reason that the entire area is devastated. Of course, rich people lost their homes, but so did working class people, so did sixth generation Latino families, so did middle-class Asian American families, so did Black and mixed-race couples, college students, first-time homeowners, LA creatives and Door Dashers, managers, security guards, and undocumented workers. So did all the beautiful creatures on earth who were forced to run out of a burning church, sometimes collapsing from exhaustion because no place was safe except deep in the ground.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about humans it’s that crisis activates identity. If you’re an anxious person, then the wildfires will make you chew your nails off. If you’re a calm and grounded person, then you probably see this tragedy as the tragedy it is but you also know that the most important things in your life cannot burn. If you’re petty, cruel, and malicious, you will use this opportunity to blame your opponents, celebrate the downfall of a state you don’t understand, & find some way to lay the blame on the progressive daydream (instead of climate change or record-low precipitation or supernatural winds) because schadenfreude is the only way you can feel good about the choices you’ve made in your life. If you’re a student of life, then you will learn as much as you can about this moment and try to evolve in your understanding of the delicate ecological balance of the anthropocene era. And if you’re a kind and empathetic person, you will take this opportunity to help others who need you the most right now just as you’d want them to if you were in harm’s way. More than anything, what I’ve seen are people coming together to help each other in this unfolding crisis in a way that is genuinely moving: friends and family in Barcelona, Denver, DC, Chula Vista, Oakland, Portland, Stourbridge (UK), Tokyo, Phoenix, Ada, Milwaukee, Bowling Green, NYC, Pahoa, Williamsburg, & Baku have all reached out to make sure I’m safe. I know that’s a small thing but it’s also large thing. And it’s not just me: the California National Guard, Mexican and South African firefighters (coming from the very countries that Trump has disparaged and belittled) have come to California to help contain the fires, Canadian airplanes and firefighters have come in droves, 150 fire engines have arrived from Washington State, Oregon, New Mexico, & Utah, helicopters, water tenders, bulldozers, and more than 105 specialized personnel have arrived from Los Angeles, Riverside, Orange, San Bernardino, San Diego, Santa Barbara, and Ventura counties to help fight the blaze.
As the fires ravages Southern California, good people from all over the county, the state, the country, & the world have responded with kindness, altruism, and determination when they could easily have looked the other way as all of us would love to do. As most of us would if our own state was not burning down.
I’m mourning for all those who have lost their homes in these unforgiving fires, which is tantamount to losing their way of life, their sanctuaries, their source of wealth, & their history. I’m also deeply inspired by the way that this crisis has activated the best part of own humanity in powerful and profound ways that can’t and won’t be forgotten (at least by those of us that still have a humanity). This is a time for mourning but it also must be a time for moral leadership and the collaboration of resources and the prioritization of the community over the individual. If there was ever a doubt, we cannot fix nor survive these problems by ourselves. But we can make a choice whether our own humanity dies in the flames or gets reignited by collective tragedy. For me the choice is obvious but for others it’s going to be a very long voyage back to their humanity. The truth is they may not return. But I will wait for them until the end.