Burning at Both Ends: Surviving a Week in Wildfire-Torn Los Angeles

The soot sneaks in through the crevices, under the door, through the walls of our uninsulated craftsman house. It is one of the older houses in our smallish Los Angeles town, nestled at the bottom of a hill that rises steadily until it meets the mountains in Altadena. I’ve always taken comfort in its age: This home has withstood more than a century of earthquakes. It’s still standing.

But the first night of the LA fires shakes that confidence. As I watch footage of the fire engulfing the beautiful neighborhood of Pacific Palisades on the far side of town, Santa Ana winds pound at our dwelling with such violence that it feels like it might lift off and spin in the air, Wizard of Oz–style. Debris pelts the walls (the next morning we find the lawn littered with tree branches and roof tiles from other neighbors’ houses). The power keeps sputtering, the lights blinking off and on again with a spasmodic judder somehow more unnerving than a straightforward blackout.

It could easily be the beginning of a disaster movie—a genre that Angelenos did not necessarily invent but definitely perfected. Hollywood movies created a visual vocabulary for disaster, born out of an unstable landscape and a pragmatic fatalism. Writers often framed LA experiences with chilly detachment. “Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse,” Joan Didion famously wrote. Then there’s Gore Vidal’s anecdote about the last time he saw Dorothy Parker. “Los Angeles had been on fire for three days,” he wrote. “I found Dorothy standing in front of her house, gazing at the smoky sky; in one hand she held a drink, in the other a comb which absently she was passing through her short straight hair. As I came toward her, she gave me a secret smile. ‘I am combing,’ she whispered, ‘Los Angeles out of my hair.’”

A comb won’t be enough this time, Dorothy. Every hour brings fresh hellish news of friends and acquaintances forced to frantically evacuate the Pacific Palisades, of beloved houses turned to ash. The mountains near Malibu have long been synonymous with natural catastrophe. “Fire here has a relentless staccato rhythm, syncopated by landslides and floods,” Mike Davis wrote in a 1995 essay polemically titled “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn.”

Despite the ever-present risks, this area—stretching from Brentwood through the Palisades to Malibu—has always drawn Hollywood stars to make their homes here. These days it’s probably most familiar to the rest of the country as Larry David’s playground in Curb Your Enthusiasm. Now instead of leisurely brunching al fresco or strolling across verdant golf courses, upscale residents are abandoning their Teslas and Land Rovers in the middle of traffic and fleeing the neighborhood on foot. If a place this affluent can be consumed, what hope do the rest of us have?

By the end of that first night, the Eaton fire up the hill from us in Altadena is exploding, and it’s moving fast enough that evacuation becomes a conversation. Friends elsewhere in LA begin offering us shelter. I point out that the fire would have to eat through all of the city of Pasadena to get to us. Suddenly that doesn’t seem impossible.

As we start packing go-bags, I remember when I first heard that term. It was 9/11, when my family and I lived in Manhattan, a mile from the World Trade Center. In the immediate aftermath, I watched ash-covered people walking up the Bowery like something out of a zombie movie. I remember taking my toddler to the park the day after and then quickly dragging him home when I noticed flakes of ash landing on us like fake movie snow. For months afterwards, we kept a go-bag sitting by the door full of clothes and medicine and diapers. Another attack seemed inevitable. The jitteriness took a long time to settle; when a manhole cover blew up down our street the next year, my husband and I leapt out of bed, ready to run into the street with our go-bags and our toddler.

Day two of the fires, the news is grim. Los Angeles is still burning at both ends. Friends in both the Palisades and Altadena fled and now they fear their houses are gone. The sky is gravestone gray; no sunlight can squeeze through the smoke. When I drive up to do some food shopping in Pasadena, I return to the car with chunks of ash in my hair. I wonder what these burned residues used to be. Someone’s front door? A kid’s stuffed animal? A lovingly tended hedge?

Spots once associated with happy times get repurposed for disaster relief. The Rose Bowl, where I once took my youngest child to a One Direction concert, turns into an impromptu donation center for victims of the fires. A recreation center in a midcity park where my kids used to play becomes a mass shelter, as does the Pasadena Convention Center, formerly host to American Idol auditions. As the crisis escalates, new residential areas are flagged as potential evacuation zones. So by the second night, some of the friends who so kindly offered me shelter are themselves looking for places to stay, or at least piling up their go-bags by the front door. Flames flare up in the densely inhabited San Fernando Valley and in Runyon Canyon, a popular hiking spot tucked between Hollywood Boulevard and Mulholland Drive—two street names imprinted in cinephile memory. Rumors slink across social media that the Hollywood sign is ablaze and there’s a palpable panic in my text chains. We’d all assumed the Big One would be an earthquake, never imagined that Mother Nature might have a different apocalypse scripted for this city.

Not that Los Angeles ever felt like solid ground. The night I arrived here from New York to start a whole new chapter of my life, a series of small earthquakes rocked the bed, plunging me into doubt about the decision. When I experienced my first medium-sized quake, I was sitting in my new office cubicle. The entire floor swayed like a kiddie ride at an amusement park. My colleagues just exchanged glances and continued their work. What kind of crazy place is this, I thought? Of course I knew all about the fault lines that cut across Greater Los Angeles. I had read Mike Davis’s classic books City of Quartz and Ecology of Fear, which essentially argue that a city should never have been built in such a dry, seismically unstable environment in the first place. I recognized 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,” as my friend and former colleague David Ulin recently wrote. “The only solution is to assess your risks and keep on living. That is what Southern California teaches everyone.”

It’s a lesson you gradually learn, a reality you adjust to—or perhaps, to quote Jim Morrison, “learn to forget.” Occasional tremors remind you that the ground is not trustworthy: you compare earthquake notes on social media and then go about your business, or roll over in bed and go back to sleep. In our old wooden house, the vibrations travel straight up to the roof where they have nowhere else to go: a quake registers as a loud bang, or sometimes as a frantic rattling of the door frames, like an intruder is already in the house and trying to enter the living room. Sometimes, you think it’s a passing truck, or even a gun. I dutifully restock my earthquake kit every five years while becoming adept at ignoring the subliminal anxiety lurking inside my body.

Mostly it’s remarkable how little you think about earthquakes or wildfires, even though both are frequent occurrences. It’s easy to see this sprawling archipelago of neighborhoods and micro-climates that we call LA as a treasure hunt, full of fascinating nooks and diverse vibes. I spent our first years here exploring a new park, hiking trail or neighborhood every weekend. Veteran Angelenos hipped us to the hidden spots and secret history; newbies that poured in injected the place with renewed energy and excitement. Living in LA means living under threat. It’s a bargain we make, just as New York City residents agree to cram themselves into tiny apartments, suffer lousy subway service, and skip around scuttling rodents during evening strolls, because it’s New York fucking City, still the most kinetic place on Earth. We wear it like a badge of honor.

Leaving LA had become a favorite party topic among Hollywood types in recent months, as the entertainment industry has stuttered and shrunk. But by days three and four of the fires, the idea of getting out takes on a stark reality. Friends flee the city temporarily, not knowing what they will return to. Those of us who stay watch the fire map obsessively, texting each other frantically when the orange blobs begin to move in a new direction. Suddenly everyone is spouting fire lingo—containment, ember-casting, Phos-chek—as if it’s our second language. “I just think it’s worse than they are telling us,” a friend texts, sending me an image taken off social media of a giant red mushroom-shaped plume of smoke rising up over the west side of Los Angeles. Those warnings about climate change causing mass disruption and displacement we’ve been hearing for years—is this what it looks like? Are we going to be the climate refugees that we’ve read about?

By day five, more than 100,000 Angelenos have evacuated their homes. We’re still on orange alert, external hard drives and asthma medicine stuffed into go-bags in a corner of the room, even though the Eaton fire is largely contained now. Today the sky is blue for the first time in what feels like forever and the air smells discernibly less toxic. I try to go about my normal business, grocery shopping and going out to a restaurant. Then I remember what’s happening and check the fire app to make sure nothing new has been decimated.

Everyone has their own personal map of the city, and we’re all grieving for different people and places. One friend mourns the Bunny Museum in Altadena, an archive of eccentricity; another is shocked by the loss of the Reel Inn, a beachside seafood shack in Malibu. I know that many of my favorite nature spots, like Temescal and Topanga Canyon parks, will eventually recover, shaking off the ash and growing new life, as they did after previous fires.

One of my regular trails in Altadena actually leads to the ruins of a Victorian hotel which was gutted 125 years ago. All that survived that inferno were remnants of the Mount Lowe Railway, a scenic train that took pleasure-seekers up to the top of the mountain. It’s a pointed reminder that we never know what will be left of Los Angeles in a week, a month, or a century. It’s a city built on literally shaky foundations. We can only hope to rebuild and reinvent it one more time.