The Fire This Time

For each fire is all fires, and the first fire and the last ever to be.

—Cormac McCarthy

The house where I lived for 12 years sits at the foot of the Santa Monica Mountains, on the edge of Pacific Palisades. It is a mid-century wood-and-glass rambler, built by a Canadian architect who, like many other pilgrims, sought paradise in the Golden State. A California ranch house invites the natural world in, and wildness made itself at home: the backyard hosted ground squirrels, opossums, skunks, raccoons, and a dazzling array of hummingbirds. A great horned owl hooted in the redwood tree outside my son’s bedroom window. Lizards and spotted towhees invaded our airy living room, and a red-tailed hawk ate its meals on the roof. Seeing coyotes amble down the street was an alarming but routine occurrence.

In the second-largest city in the country, I could step out my front door and, within minutes, find myself in a rolling landscape of live oaks, chaparral, and canyon sunflowers, inhabited by mule deer, quail, and the occasional mountain lion. In springtime, vibrant yellow and orange California poppies bloomed on hillsides rising above a cobalt sea.

Up in those dusky hills, with the sprawling urban basin to the left and the Pacific stretching endlessly to the right, you grasp the dangerous allure of Los Angeles. I spent my formative years in California, and no matter where I live, I will remain a Californian. But to be a Californian is to live on a paradisiacal razor’s edge and sometimes topple into an abyss.

The other day, a friend sent me a picture of my street swallowed by a demonic black cloud. It runs through a wildfire evacuation zone. As one of the few access roads in a devastated area, it's become a checkpoint and rescue corridor. The canyons to the east are precariously safe, but turn left, toward what was once Will Rogers’ ranch, and the neighborhoods that spill out toward Malibu have been obliterated.

The scale of the catastrophe defies comprehension: streets, businesses, landmarks, schools, and the homes of a long list of people I love have been wiped away. Sunset Boulevard in Pacific Palisades—the community’s main street where we cheered on the antics of the local Optimists Club during the Fourth of July Parade—now looks like Dresden after firebombing. The winds that whipped the blaze into an inferno have weakened today, but only a tiny fraction of the fire is contained.

The Palisades Fire encompasses more than 31 square miles of Los Angeles wedged between the crest of the Santa Monica Mountains and the Pacific, an area more than twice the size of Manhattan. The Eaton Fire, which blazes in the San Gabriel foothills east of downtown, has devoured more than 14,000 acres. At this writing, three smaller wildfires burn north and west of the city. Powered by the Santa Ana winds, fire makes a mockery of human barriers, leaping roads, exploding Range Rovers, and devouring mansions and mini-malls alike. More than 100,000 people have been evacuated, and more than 10,000 structures have been destroyed. As a friend and lifelong Angeleno puts it, whatever outsiders have glimpsed of the cataclysm, it’s much worse.

You hear this refrain again and again: People have lost everything. Movie stars and paupers are leveled by the same uncontrollable elemental force. “Everything” can’t quite convey the enormity of the loss. It includes the dumb, sweet gimcrack of our lives—photo albums and pajamas, old love letters, faded heirlooms, warm coats, toothbrushes, a pillow. A friend took a video of the ruins of her home, burned down to its foundations, with only a charred child’s soccer goal left standing. She wrote: It really puts things into perspective when you have one pair of socks and shoes.

Already a city of nomads, L.A. is awash in displaced people. They find refuge in friends’ houses, hotels, and makeshift shelters. They endure the agony and indignity of dislocation—despoiled water, acrid air, long lines at checkpoints before they can survey the ruins of their old lives, and haggles with bureaucrats over insurance claims. There is dazed horror and gallows humor. “Los Angeles is a hellhole,” an evacuated friend cheerfully declared. Yet somehow the bougainvillea still bask in the sunshine. This is an environmental apocalypse, a political failure, an urban nightmare, and a crisis of infrastructure, all rolled into one.

At least 10 people have died in the wildfires, and a way of life for millions may have been destroyed as well. Angelenos can be blasé about most of the environmental forces that buffet their lives. You get used to tremors—those moments when it feels as though the earth is trying to shrug humanity off its back. Searing droughts are followed by torrential rains that can turn a trickle in a culvert into a raging flood. A Mission Revival villa may be obliterated by a mudslide, and the family Shih Tzu carried off by a coyote. But this is different. Driven by the Devil Winds that howl in from the Mojave, fire is defiant, feral, and ravenous. And these fires, raging across the spine of the city, are the most terrible in memory.

That force can be hard for an Easterner to comprehend, but L.A. is a 243-year-old imposition on an obdurate wilderness. Its imagineers approached it as a blank canvas, a place where any human dream could be made real. But nature is not so pliable. Angelenos contend with a host of civilizational ills, but these pale in comparison to an outburst of primordial fury. People turn their homes into concrete bunkers, install elaborate protection systems, and defend them with garden hoses. Still, fire comes. You pack a bag, debate which few things you will carry and all you must leave behind, and wait for the call to evacuate.

Living with that tension has become a way of life—not just in Los Angeles, but in all the places coping with a rising tide of disaster. When I was a child, wildfires were treated as seasonal hazards, confined to the drier parts of the state. Now they defy human boundaries. Fire erupts in the foggy north and the sunny south. It strikes in the raw heat of September and what should be the rainy season in January. Fire season in California is now a year-round affair, and residing in some of L.A.'s most scenic and desirable areas means constantly coping with risk.

Fire has shaped the Southern California landscape for millennia, engulfing live oak groves and sage meadows, blackening soil, and renewing it with fresh growth. The Chumash and Tongva managed this environment with small controlled burns, clearing underbrush that could become tinder for larger, more destructive fires. Europeans disrupted these ancient patterns, and in time, wilderness was coerced into a concrete grid.

Human ingenuity brought unforeseen consequences. A megacity has risen where the Tongva once roamed. Narrow mountain and coastal roads become choke points. High winds thwart airborne firefighting efforts. Yet here are four million souls, clinging to the hem of a continent, tempting fate.

To understand why, stand on the bluffs of Santa Monica and look northward, toward gentle folds of mountains tumbling to the sea. When the inland valleys are scorching, the temperature in Pacific Palisades hovers in the seventies. Oleander grows into luxuriant hedges, orange and lemon trees perfume gardens, and nearly anything you plant in the soil blossoms. Despite all that humans have done to despoil it, this is why they come—and why, despite the horrors of the past days, so many will try to stay.

People will argue for years about this catastrophe. They will blame climate change, feckless politicians, terrible planning, and the heavy rains of past years, which sprouted a profusion of tinder in this mean, dry season. But right now, it hardly matters. Fire is never long suppressed. It always returns with escalating fury. To live on the edge is to accept the cruelty and impermanence of everything, to concede that nature will always have the upper hand.

After all that’s happened, rebuilding Pacific Palisades may seem like a terrible folly. Yet human beings are driven more by sentiment than science. It is the place where my children grew up, played soccer, and were dragged to dance lessons. It is where we schlepped groceries, dove into the chilly Pacific, drank date shakes, and rode horseback in the untrammeled hills. It is where my late parents last looked out at the ocean, holding hands.

Whatever its reputation, it was simply home—an ordinary human place in a dazzling and hazardous land. Then the winds came and changed everything. They will come again. We can only bend to their power and mourn all that we have lost.

This article originally appeared in the January 10 2024 issue of CultureWag. The full article, with images and links to organizations helping with fire relief, may be read here.