Today's Wildfires, Yesterday's Memories

There's only one story on my mind this week: the Palisades Fire in Los Angeles.

The last few days tore my attention to shreds and patches.

I was in Vegas for CES when the Palisades Fire exploded in my hometown of Los Angeles. I flip-flopped between thoughtful business meetings and anxious refreshes of the Cal Fire website and back again, looking at the movements of the Palisades Fire through the tiny window of my iPhone, the Eaton Fire in Pasadena, the Kenneth Fire (where the heck is Kenneth anyway?), the fire in Woodley Park where I played as a kid, and where my kids played decades later.

The fire was how close to my daughter’s Santa Monica apartment? Three blocks? No, that was the "evacuation warning" zone, not the evacuation zone. Phew. She went to her grandparents in Encino anyway because it was a lot farther and the air was less smoky, less toxic.

I had planned to fly from Vegas to Burbank but pivoted and flew back to Oregon—thinking my presence wouldn’t add much value and that some of my parents’ friends who’d lost everything might need the space in their house.

A day later I regretted that decision; I still feel guilty.

Encino got the mandatory evacuation order. My parents and daughter went to a hotel far from the fire perimeter.

With La Profesora at a conference in New Orleans, I rattled around the house, my worries, my memories.

My parents have lived in their house for more than 50 years. My brother Evan and I grew up there. Evan’s ashes are now part of a tree, "Evan's Tree," at the side yard. It’s just a house. My parents and my daughter are safe. Their dog is safe. That’s what’s important. But still…

The “get ready to bug out” evacuation line receded in Santa Monica. Is it safe for my daughter to return?

“Dad, I want to go back. Is that OK?” “Just be ready to evacuate again if the winds change and keep in touch with Grandma and Grandpa.” “Of course.”

Thank heavens for the internet: it let me listen to NPR coverage of the wildfires on LAist.com. It let me watch the Los Angeles feed of CBS News stream on Paramount+. It let me text with friends and cousins to see how and where they are, what they lost, checking social media for “we’re alive” posts.

Curse the internet and social media for platforming celebrities and influencers with doughy ideas about arson and conspiracy, for platforming predators: criminals and scammers exploiting the dislocated lives of others.

Heroic firefighters from around the country beat back flames in Mandeville Canyon, but the wildfire is opportunistic, improvisational. It snuck toward the Tarzana hills.

Empty neighborhoods attracted looters. One looter dressed up in a firefighter’s uniform. The police caught him, but will other criminals think, “that’s a great idea” and do the same because they heard the Police Chief describe it on the radio?

How did the wildfires start? Was it arson? A power line downed by 100 MPH Santa Ana winds? Nobody knows. Will anybody ever know?

Everything is double vision. Tragedy follows triumph. Communities next to criminals. The present and the past mix.

I’ve lived through disasters and watched them from a distance.

1978. Part of the Mandeville Canyon wildfire started right next to my school on Mulholland Drive, in an empty field right next to my classroom. Do I really remember a blue flash as a power line snapped, or is that a confabulated childhood tale?

I do remember with hi-def clarity, all of us fleeing calmly across Mulholland to Bel-Air Presbyterian, Reagan’s church. Then we waited for somebody to come get us. Cars arrived. Kids left one by one. Except for me. Nobody came to get me for a long, long time. My parents were… I can’t remember—out of town? Nana, my grandmother, was unavailable. She sent her friend Ruth Gold to get me. I knew Ruth as one of the chattering old women watching TV and playing cards with my grandmother and great aunt Lena, but Ruth and I did not have a tight relationship. I remain grateful for the rescue, decades after Ruth died. She dropped me at our house, the same house.

Alone, I watched the sky from the front steps. A car exploded a few miles away and created a mushroom cloud. I was 10. I knew mushroom clouds from TV stories and school lessons about nuclear war. Was this one really from a car or was life over?

After a while, I realized it was just a car.

Mandeville is the same canyon where firefighters are working today, trying to contain that front before the winds shift.

1989. The quake hit Northern California and collapsed the Bay Bridge. No phones worked throughout California. This was before email. Before texting. Silence. My friend Alyssa and I sat on my bed watching my roommate’s tiny TV, willing it to cough up information about her family in Palo Alto, mine in Los Angeles. No contact for an endless time. Later, we heard. They were fine. All of them. Relief.

1994. The Northridge earthquake. My brother was visiting me and my fiancée in Berkeley. Grad school. We made contact with Mom and Dad faster this time, but Evan was due back at a college program in Long Island for learning-disabled kids. We got him a ticket from San Francisco, dressed him in my college-era winter clothes (I still miss that black winter coat), and sent him off to JFK. Soon after, Kathi (the woman who would become La Profesora) and I went down to LA to see my parents. They took us on a tour of devastation, including an apartment building where the first floor of apartments vaporized in the quake, killing everybody.

2020. The wildfires in the Columbia River Gorge east of Portland. An idiot teenager playing with fireworks. This was during COVID lockdown. We got a “be ready to evacuate” warning and started packing, but we were lucky. The fire never crossed the Willamette River that bisects Portland. My mother in law, with terminal cancer in a hospital on the wrong side of the river, had to flee one hospital for another. She was always slender and had lost weight because of the cancer. A firefighter easily carried her to an ambulance and the next hospital.

I don't know which is worse: being in the disaster or watching from a distance. Maybe I'll know when this latest calamity is over, and we start waiting for the next.

I'm still hitting refresh on the Cal Fire website. Nearly 24,000 acres burned just in the Palisades Fire. Only 11% contained. Another 14,000 in the Eaton Fire. My parents' house is still safe. My daughter's apartment is still outside the evacuation warning zone. With luck, these things won't change.

But the Santa Ana winds are picking up.

Thanks for reading. Let's hope things are closer to normal next Sunday.

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