On Tuesday, as a series of aggressive wildfires began ripping through Southern California, I found myself having an unlikely reaction: the desire to be there. I mean this not as a thrill seeker or fire follower but rather as someone who wanted to go home.
I have lived in Los Angeles since 1991, when I moved from New York. My wife and I raised our family in Los Angeles, and in June my father entered an assisted-living facility in Pasadena, not far from what is now the Eaton fire evacuation zone. On Tuesday evening, I spoke with him by phone from Manhattan, where I have been this week. He was frightened and uncertain.
This is my father’s first go-round as a California resident, and he is right to be afraid. The state has a long history of wildfires, but the speed, size and cost of such fires have grown exponentially in recent years in large part because of climate change, with especially devastating results in the areas where undeveloped land meets homes and other structures.
January is an unusual time for wildfires in California. But last year’s wet winter led to an increase in plant growth, followed by a record hot summer, a fall and winter dry spell likely linked to warmer oceans and now an extreme wind event with gusts peaking at 80 to 100 miles per hour in some areas on Wednesday.
And so dry brush and grass have combusted in Altadena and Pacific Palisades, as well as along the Pacific Coast Highway, where several Malibu landmarks, including the Reel Inn, a popular seafood restaurant, have reportedly been destroyed.
Dangerous wildfires and other kinds of disasters have long been part of the vernacular in Southern California. It is impossible to live there without being aware of the vast forces, incendiary and otherwise, that continue to shape the landscape; in every way that matters, they make the place what it is.
The city’s infamous culture of reinvention is a direct outgrowth, I’d suggest, of the ongoing reinventions or erasures of the landscape. Los Angeles may have a reputation for being superficial, but it is in fact a territory that might, at any moment, upend (or even end) your life. I consider it the most elemental city in which I’ve ever lived.
I know more than one family that has lost everything this week — home, cars, photos, documents, personal effects. I know more than one family that will have to start over from scratch. It’s enough to break your heart, all this loss, so fast and irrevocable.
And yet, if some are tempted to wonder why people stay in Los Angeles in the face of such upheavals, it is also entirely beside the point. In 1989, the writer Joan Didion dismissed the idea that Angelenos are somehow in denial about living with wildfires by insisting in The New Yorker, “‘Denial’ is a word from a different narrative altogether.”
What Didion was describing, after all, is not denial but determination, or even more, the gritty edge of will. Such will is what defines Los Angeles as a city and Southern California as a region. You might say the same of the entire state. The will to persist, to hold the perimeter, to keep moving into a future that’s uncertain, in a physical environment that, out of nowhere, can become catastrophically harsh.
Many of the homegrown Californians I know recognize this, but it was one of the first, and most important, lessons I as a transplant had to learn. It came in research for a book about earthquakes I was writing at least in part to alleviate my fear of them. At the time, I had the impression that, if I had enough information, I could tame my anxiety about the state’s brittle geology. What I discovered, however, was the opposite: that to live in California meant to understand that disaster could strike at any instant, which is to say that there is nothing we can count on, nothing that will guarantee safe passage through the world.
The only solution is to assess your risks and keep on living. That is what Southern California teaches everyone. It’s not a trade-off that to live amid such beauty requires recompense. No, it is something like an acceptance, or even an embrace, of everything we cannot and will never know.
For me, such a dynamic is essential in connecting us to place, to landscape; it is a crucible in which belonging is forged. I became an Angeleno in the wake of the Northridge earthquake and the disruptions of the early 1990s: the Rodney King riots, the 1993 Malibu wildfires. I began to understand the stakes of living there. Such events resonate as a set of shared inflection points, bringing me together with my fellow Southern Californians and, as it must be, with the region itself.
I also remember the midsummer night in 2013, when my wife and I drove two hours from Los Angeles to Hemet, to retrieve our then-14-year-old daughter, who had been evacuated from camp because of an out-of-control wildfire. I felt a grim satisfaction that evening as we headed east; we were on a necessary mission.
Before long, I hope, this will all be over. Before long, I will be back home. In the meantime, it is tearing me up not to be there.
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