The deer is running through a smoky street in Altadena, its hind leg perhaps injured, looking for where it should go next. The video records a living thing trying to survive and find its way through a perilous, life-threatening landscape. While I watched from the safety of frigid, icy New York City, I was grappling with fear, confusion, and anger as I tried to find out and ensure my loved ones in LA were safe; most people I know quickly identified the unparalleled threat of this fire and have gotten themselves far away, but some of my nearest and dearest will not give me the same peace of mind. They fear for their homes, and all that matters to them is staying put. The fire still rages, and winds are forecasted to strengthen. At some point, all you can do is share information, let people know you love them, and hope. I've tried every other tactic, to no avail.
I can't stop keeping track of the fire, I can't stop thinking about the fire, I can't stop worrying about the fire; so while fire was on the mind, I found myself only able to consume wildfire-related art and writing, of which three pieces felt useful, even soothing. It started kind of by accident, as the deer wandering through Altadena reminded me of the deer in Fantasia 2000's Firebird segment, and something told me to revisit the piece:
It's a beautiful animation, about magic, healing, and rebirth in the natural world. While in my bleakest feelings of fear and despair, the triumphant conclusion helped to inspire my first feelings of hope that we would see the other side of this disaster, and that the most dire landscapes will one day yield growth and repair.
I know of Mike Davis as THEE writer for all things Los Angeles, as an urban theorist with incredible insight into why the city is the way it is. But I had never read Ecology of Fear from which this essay was excerpted. I highly recommend this piece, which in its salience felt like a short-read. Davis shares the political, financial, social machinations that allowed for Malibu to exist as a place where people live, machinations that gave wealthy people federal subsidies to live amongst a fantasy idea of wilderness, albeit at significant peril. The story he tells here should serve as an important cautionary tale for the rebuilding that happens after this disaster is over.
Lastly, I found myself looking over at a book I had bought a year ago, wondering when I'd get to it if not now: Ignition, by M.R. O'Connor. I felt a little worried about reading the book, because it didn't feel like it would be helpful right now to read a chronicle of how wrongheaded our relationship with fire is, how nothing is changing, and how little motivation there is to make things better. This is not at all how the book has ended up feeling. To start, it's a straightforwardly compelling read: as a fly-on-the-wall chronicle of an outsider coming to learn wildfire firefighters and their ways in the world, it feeds my city-girl curiosity. But, not only does it safely plunge you into the danger and excitement of wildfire-fighting stories, O'Connor's book also felt hopeful: learning about fire and looking at it directly ends up making the element feel a whole lot less apocalyptic and murderous. O'Connor tells us fire is something we've always lived with, something we could do a better job of living with, and something that we could maybe even thrive with ❤️🔥.
--- Separately, watching the horrors unfold from afar of a place I consider my childhood home, I found myself learning this week that it's near impossible to understand the emotional scale of climate disaster, unless it's your own home.
I'm finding my messages filled with mourning and trauma and shock from current and ex-Los Angelenos, while my everyday NYC self is met with "wow, 10,000 structures, that's a lot of money!" People in my generation also seem desensitized to yet another freak weather accident, yet another time that the NYT suspends its paywall. It seems it's hard for East Coasters not to see this as anything other than just another California fire.
Watching videos, I'm thrown back to memories of N's Palisades' home: that beautifully-restored Spanish monastery, a feat of tasteful quality over eye-popping quantity in size-obsessed Los Angeles. I'm thinking of the top of the world, that scenic spot at the top of one of the Palisades' windy roads, where all the high schoolers would go to make out, looking over trees and valleys mixed with city lights and sprawling houses. Driving to the C's house through the winding valley of Palisades Drive, a road that winds between two hills in the Santa Monica mountains. The foreboding forests on either side; I was always scared of these trees, but in my imagination, I was scared of the possibility of scary people hiding in the trees, not necessarily of the trees themselves, or the way fire could propel itself through them. The regular drives I made out to Malibu, passing Reel Inn and Moonshadows, both now gone, like most of what I'm recalling.
Growing up, fires would happen in Malibu, and events would be occasionally cancelled or something far-flung might be destroyed, but it was never a business I frequented, or the home of someone I knew, or an entire village/neighborhood/town of people I grew up with.
As has been much-discussed on social media and in the news, Santa Monica's flats have been threatened in ways previously considered unimaginable. That neighborhood, the one where I grew up, has been threatened by fire for the first time in memory: from the South from Adelaide Drive and from the North from Mandeville Canyon. Adelaide Drive and Mandeville Canyon were the slightly more circuitous routes I'd take to other neighborhoods: the Palisades/Malibu and Brentwood, respectively. You'd take these long-shortcuts to circumvent gridlock traffic on the main roads (PCH, Sunset, San Vicente). I never thought about how they were also the more scenic, and therefore more ignitable routes, into Santa Monica from these more wooded areas.
It's impossible to understand the emotional scale of the disaster if you're not personally affected, but we have to try; climate disaster is happening at ever-greater frequency, intensity, and impact, and we can't wait until every single person can personally testify. I don't think the world should have grinded to a halt over this specific disaster, but modern life will require more give, more space, more time: for trauma and anger, for sensitivity and healing, for togetherness and remembrance.
