Photo courtesy of the Los Angeles Times
I’d planned to drop another reworked post from the archives today, but the massive fires that burned so much of Los Angeles to a charred, smoldering husk this past week kicked that can down the road.
It’s been a bad week in LA. I witnessed some terrible fires during my 40 years in that entropical paradise, but nothing like this. An old friend lost her home in Altadena on Tuesday night, while another reported that five of her friends had to flee their respective burning houses. Many of the people I know in LA — including my nephew, his wife, and their two dogs — evacuated to safety and have remained glued to news reports ever since, hoping for the best.
I worked on countless commercials in Pacific Palisades back in the day, and always liked it out there. Nestled amid the hills overlooking the blue Pacific and blessed with cool ocean breezes, the Palisades wasn’t plagued by the thermonuclear heat that hammers much of LA all summer long. Malibu was more spectacular, of course, but the idea of living in or around “the colony” was pure fantasy: Malibu was for movie stars, producers, and successful screenwriters, people with the financial torque to afford a lifestyle far beyond the reach of a below-the-line Hollywood workbot.1 Living in the Palisades actually seemed attainable, but the roller coaster of sporadic employment in Hollywood precluded renting, much less buying, out there, so I stayed put in my cheap urban hovel — where a friendly landlord refused to raise the rent for ten years — and put what resources I could spare toward my future home far from LA.
Malibu has routinely suffered the ravages of wildfires driven by the howling Santa Ana winds, to the point where wind and fire seem embedded in the DNA of Southern California. As Joan Didion put it in her classic Slouching Towards Bethlehem:
“Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Anas affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The winds show us how close to the edge we are.”
Still, I never thought the Palisades would ever face such destruction. The full extent of the damage there — and in the lovely little community of Altadena — remains unclear, but it’s truly horrendous.
These fires bring back memories: packing up my car fast before running from a big fire here on the Home Planet back in October of 1995. Then as now, the hot winds blew a small, manageable blaze into a conflagration that soon became a monstrous blowtorch. It’s a very strange feeling to look around your house deciding what to take and what to leave as the sirens wail and dark clouds of orange-tinted smoke draw near, all the while wondering if this is the last memory you’ll have of being here. That moment is burned into my brain, and is something I don’t wish on anybody … but it happened to thousands of people in LA this week. It might sound like an empty “thoughts and prayers” cliché, but having been there, my heart goes out to them.
Forty-five of my neighbors lost everything back in ‘95. Most rebuilt, but some didn’t, and I walk past those lonely fireplace chimneys and empty concrete foundations every week, monuments to the beautiful folly of living in a forest. But that’s California in a nutshell: the beauty and the beast of forests and beaches walking hand in hand with fire and earthquakes. It seems we’re all living on borrowed time here, where “the worst” can happen in the blink of an eye.
I got lucky in ‘95. After watching the flames churn through trees and houses from across the narrow bay, I retreated to a friend’s home 20 miles away, where the next morning’s paper reported “propane tanks exploding like bombs in the 300 block” — my address being 325 — on the road where my house stood. I assumed the worst. Several days later, the fire tamed at last, I girded my emotional loins and ventured out to see what was left. The fire department agreed to take us up one at a time into what looked like a war zone after a battle: rays of orange sunlight filtering through the smoke, exhausted firemen moving in slow motion, charred trees and gray ash everywhere … but by some miracle my home still stood, complete with its highly combustible wood shake roof. The flames had come within fifty feet of the house and just six feet from my carport, where a motorcycle with four gallons of gas was parked. The fire had been slowly pushing a crew of firefighters down the hill, dousing houses as they retreated, when the wind suddenly shifted at 3:00 a.m. and drove the flames all the way back to the beach. In the end it wasn’t humans who stopped the fire, but the elemental forces of rocks and water — and it was the wind, that most fickle of all elements, that put my house in the bullseye of destruction, then pushed it back to safety at the last possible minute.
Luck was with me that day, but things didn’t go so well for the Palisades and Altadena last week. If their insurance comes through, many will recover and some will rebuild — those that choose to remain, anyway — but none of them will ever forget this fire.
That much, I can promise.
Photo by Robert Crais
One of my fellow juicers lived in Malibu for a while after going through a tough divorce. He shouldered the heavy rent because he wanted his young daughter to have great memories of weekends at the beach with him … which she does.
Superb, Michael. A clear view from one who's been there, seen that.