As I write, it is January 16, 2025, one week, two days after the beginning of the conflagrations known now variously as the Paradise Fire, Eaton Canyon Fire, Hurst Fire, Sunset Fire and more.
It is a quintessential California, Los Angeles day, the kind of day that enticed me on a first visit now nearly 48 years ago. I came in the summer then, so its a little cooler today, but there is that crystalline blue sky and crisp colors of the God Made hills and the man made buildings, and the ability, to enjoy the mostly always temperate weather. I was on my terrace as the sun went down. My hummingbirds seem unaffected by the trauma many humans and animals have experienced over the last week and two days. I feel even greater warmth for their comforting presence. They were dive bombing each other as usual for that last sip of nectar before the sun send them into their nightly sleeps in the trees. Happily our trees, though many blown to kingdom come during the wind that fueled flames all around us, are still intact. Tonight, it looks like those of us in West Hollywood are safe enough. Elsewhere the two biggest fires I mentioned, Palisades and Eaton, were still not fully contained, and the destruction they have already wrought has left some of the most beautiful topography and homes in war like desolation. Too many families have lost their loved ones as embers, then flames overtook them. Those who survived lost the artifacts of their years' long memories, more important to most than the valuables left behind that other disgusting human beings seek to pillage.
A friend of mine, Andrew McCarthy, also a transplant from New York many years ago, said it best. At once we are experiencing in this County and City is Paradise and Apocalypse, at the same time. Even for those of us that were not touched or lightly touched by the experience, there is an almost ungraspable incongruity. Over here, things are as always, driving on the local streets, Santa Monica Boulevard, Fountain, even Sunset, which runs from the ocean to downtown. Much of it is closed. Most is still open on the east side of things. Over there, there is ashes. There is also a ripping away of the veneer of safety we in America have tended to enjoy--until a disaster strikes and reminds us that our lives are on loan from God, and if you don't believe in God, from the Cosmos. And if you don't believe in any order at all, from Chaos.
My experience of the fires began on Tuesday last, when I was driving to Santa Monica to visit with an elderly friend who was in rehabilitation from a broken hip. It was about 1 p.m. and I noticed on the horizon a black and white cloud that I assumed was some kind of structure fire, and if so, a big one. Once I got to the facility, though, with everyone, from staff to patients watching the TV in the lanai, I first became aware of the Palisades fire. By the time I left at nearly five p.m., the whole sky was blackened. The fire explained why the power was out in the rehab facility, given the closeness of the Palisades to the facility. But at that point, there was no indication that there would need to be evacuation, and, strangely and happily enough, though the facility remained in the warning are throughout, there was never the need for an evacuation. The fire remained north of it, though other parts of Santa Monica were indeed threatened. My home is less than 12 miles from Santa Monica, but I was still surprised by the intensity of the traffic with me, I assume seeking to get out of the area. It took e an hour and a half to get home, trying all sorts of short cuts in which I ended up blocked. When I looked back through my side view mirror, I saw this:
If there truly is any such disposition, we are "used" to fires and earthquakes in California. There are endless numbers of homeless living in the hills and brush who have tent households and tempt the pagan gods of fire with their cooking, people throw cigarette butts out of their car windows, and broken glass that litters the ground can focus the sun to an igntion of the brush that environmentalists discourage being removed. (I believe the climate changes. It always has. The dinosaurs and other extinct species could testify to it, if they were here--long before humans had the hubris to think they can dispose the climate to be more cordial. And wind? Well the Santa Ana's begin in around September and go on through May so, January would not be an unexpected time for a burst that would fan flames. The word was, however, that these winds would be unlike any other, and sure enough they were. On Wednesday, the view from my little West Hollywood terrace (so calm today) was thus:
Malibu and the Palisades were already being consumed. And, like everyone, I was hoping and praying that people and places would be spared. There is nothing like coming out of the tunnel from the 10 to the Pacific Coast Highway and seeing the sparkle ocean and the lines of houses along the beach, and hanging at some of the restaurants that abut the beach. And it seemed little was being spared. And there seemed to be surprise by our leaders that it could get so bad, even though there had been advance reports of the wind, and long knowledge of the nature of firestarting, accidental and wilful. Oh, yes, we have those creatures who just like to burn things, called arsonists.
I watched the live news concerned for others but not particularly concerned for myself or my immediate neighbors. And then they reported there was a new fire, in the hills, less than a mile from me, the Hollywood Hills, Runyon Canyon, and it was sweeping down toward Hollywood Boulevard. That friend who described LA as Paradise and Apocalypse. He was ordered to be evacuated. The area from there to Sunsent, which I abut on my block was a mandatory one. I was on warning, but it was only one block. My HOA folks were walking the roof because embers could easily flee the hills and rest on our building. I would apparently be leaving, though some of my neighbors chose not to do so. I would take my friend to a safe place with a mutual friend, and return to be with my cousin, not too far away, such that she too had a go bag, just in case. I hustled my cat into a bag and waited as Andrew walked to me because the traffic had already jammed in his area, and mine was on its way to gridlock.
Two things mitigated that fire such that it was out by the next day, the winds quieted briefly, and the Lake Hollywood Reservoir was nearby for the large air drops from helicopters. I learned about the app Watch Duty and read every update, and listened to KNX 1070 through the night in which I hardly slept. I was lucky as too many people were not. But for the first time in my life, I had a small sense of what a refugee experiences taking the few belonging they can and escaping the potentiality of destruction--hopefully escaping the potentiality of destruction.
Days of danger and darkness. They are not necessarily gone. But today, a peace and quiet, at least in this small pocket of Los Angeles.
I could imagine that it never happened. But it has. A pretty good close up of hell.