Escape from Los Angeles

I moved to Los Angeles after graduate school because I had vague dreams of working in Hollywood. Those dreams didn’t materialize, but instead of going back East, where I’d grown up, I stayed. Twelve years went by. Time disappeared like in some fairy tale. I had a daughter; we bought a house. Life felt like a pleasant purgatory, surrounded by other artists and dreamers, drifters and schemers. Meanwhile, on the East Coast, my family got old. Some of them died. I felt trapped in an easy but maybe meaningless life. Then the winds started.

I had read about the Santa Ana winds in a Joan Didion essay but had incorrectly understood them to be a mood-altering phenomenon, something with positive ions that made people feel on edge. It did not occur to me that they were a very real weather event, not just a vibe. That day, January 7, the fires had already started in the Pacific Palisades, which is more than 20 miles from Highland Park, where I live, but even so, I was not overly concerned. At my daughter’s school, they’d kept the kids inside during recess. That seemed excessive—and when my friend texted me some X account, with a crudely circled map, warning about the winds, it sounded overblown. That evening, when I walked to pick my daughter up from her class, there were gusts of wind and palm fronds littering the road. It felt spooky, but also slightly exciting. A weather event! The L.A. version of a snowstorm.

When we got home that evening, the wind picked up and began to shake our old and poorly sealed house. Our sense of excitement tilted. My daughter began to cry. A shingle flew off the roof. From the laundry room window, I could see the red glow of the Eaton Fire in the distance, then the jump of flames. The back door started rattling against the dead bolt like in a horror movie. Then we heard a loud bang, and our living room flashed with blue light—a transformer outside our house had exploded, and we lost power.

My husband read a biography of J. Edgar Hoover by candlelight as the fire raged in the windows behind him. The air inside the house smelled like a bonfire, then like something toxic. The houses, the cars, the washing machines, the refrigerators, the libraries, the schools, the restaurants, the flagpoles, the books, but also the people and their pets that were burning. There were people in those houses. People who had not been able to leave. My lungs began to hurt. It was hard to breathe. My instinct was to leave immediately, but I was scared of getting trapped on the highway, of burning alive in the car. On my phone were images of evacuees from the Palisades Fire abandoning their vehicles and escaping on foot. I fell asleep at the foot of my daughter’s bed wearing a COVID mask.

On Wednesday morning, school was briefly open. There was little danger of our house burning, but we were inside the smoke plume with no way to filter the air. The sky was orange-gray and ash was falling. Dust coated everything. Pages from the Bible, or Alcoholics Anonymous literature, or old encyclopedias—thin pages that traveled downwind for several miles—drifted into people’s yards. We decided to leave for the desert, where our friend had a house. I packed in a panic—what if we would need to keep driving into winter, to places where we had family? I had no concept of how long we would be gone, of how long it would take to contain the fires or restore power. I brought a lot of underwear and did not think to pack any objects of sentimental attachment. I started to do dishes but felt insane. Is it an emergency or is it not an emergency? Did we need to flee or could I finish the dishes?

In the desert, the winds were strong enough to keep knocking out the power at the grocery store. My husband and daughter wandered the aisles in the dark. The terror I felt started to dissipate. Not much to burn. A lot of people from the east side of town were out there—the Airbnbs were full of us. The Tommy Bahama resort was offering discounted deals. A man came to my friend’s Airbnb in Twentynine Palms with a telescope and let the children use his laser pointer on the constellations we usually couldn’t see in the city. I hadn’t realized that Orion had not only a belt but also a sword, that one of his shoulders was a ball of fire named Betelgeuse. My daughter and the Starman discussed Greek mythology, as my mother texted me that I should come to Boston and never look back, and my mother-in-law texted asking for updates on a package of slime she had sent my daughter that was sitting in front of our house, getting coated in ash—she was eager for someone to bring the package into the house. I could not imagine going back to L.A.

My friend whose house burned down says that people for whom L.A. feels like home will disassociate or do whatever they need to stay, but for those who don’t have this connection—staying feels crazy. In the desert, for the next week, we walk the dog in the silver moonlight and feel as though we’re on another planet. The light is so bright you can read a book. But I find it hard to read or to focus on anything. We go to a bowling alley in Yucca Valley; we go to the crochet museum. Is this a vacation or an evacuation or neither?

On Nextdoor, someone posts about a man in my neighborhood who has been going around trying to set people’s discarded Christmas trees on fire. Another post is by a woman who says she tested the water using something for aquariums and it’s “off the charts.” Off the charts for what? people ask in the comments. Nobody knows. According to the city, the water is fine. The next town over has boil-water warnings, which are then amended to do-not-drink warnings, because boiling asbestos or whatever else does not get rid of it, apparently. Distrust in the systems of government is deep, and this is in the days before Trump’s inauguration. Why didn’t they send evacuation orders to parts of Altadena earlier? Why wasn’t the mayor in town? Why weren’t the first responders given proper protective gear and told to wear it?

The power has been restored to our house. Schools are back in session. All realities exist at once. Things are OK/things aren’t OK. The world is ending/the world is always ending. We go back and clean the ash out of our house where it blew in under the doors and on the windowsills. I’m in a state of hysterical terror. I want to go home. This is not my home. I fly to Boston with my daughter. I can see the fire from the airplane. My husband joins us, and we stay in my parents’ living room. My husband and daughter are not happy with this disruptive, unilateral decision I’ve made. I read a lot of think pieces that frame the fire as the price you pay to live in paradise. It seems presented like a moral question. Who would abandon their city when she is in need? Who would complain about her smoke? Her toxic ash? An extractor and a capitalist. I feel slick and slippery for the ease with which I can depart a place. I grew up in Boston, but I wasn’t from there either. I came there as a refugee, and then I left when I was 18, and moved and moved, going farther and farther west until there was nowhere left to go.

In L.A., it finally rains, the ash was less airborne now, and we need to go back, my husband and daughter say. So, we do. But Cal Fire releases a fire-hazard severity-zone map and our house is located in the highest hazard category. It seems a matter of time before we’re back again on the East Coast. But also a matter of time before there’s smoke and bad air there too—the forests in Canada will burn, as they already have begun to; there will be floods and hurricanes. You can’t escape climate disaster. There is no safe place, really, and home for me will always have to be internal.•

Join us on Tuesday, June 17, at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Manjula Martin will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and special guest Susan Orlean to discuss The Last Fire Season. Register for the Zoom conversation here.

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