Like a good Angeleno, I miss the fires entirely. I have a scheduled vacation in Mexico at the beginning of the year with friends. We are on a beach. My city burns.
One of the friends I’m traveling with gets caught up in the first waves of it. A new homeowner in Glassell Park, the Eaton fire erupts across the freeway from his place. He is on the phone all day with his partner, who is set to join us the next day. They talk precautions, coordinate with the neighbors, argue over the safety of taking in evacuees when they’re not there.
The next day, we fly to Mexico City and sample Mezcal in a room lit only by candles. I’m the one in the group who speaks Spanish, and I’d be lying if I didn’t say I enjoyed the power of playing translator with our waitress. I call it power, but maybe I just mean, “feeling useful.” Is that the same thing?
Before the octopus (skip in Mexico City, better on the coast) and chapulines (fried grasshoppers with lime and chili, like bug popcorn!), a friend texts me: “Do you and your partner need a place to stay?” Runyon Canyon, blocks from my little studio apartment, is in flames. My Instagram feed is full of the LA gays, who normally confine their content to shirtless thirst traps on the rooftops of their apartments, getting panoramic views of smoke as fire billows from the mountains.
“I’m in Mexico,” I reply, “but I’d love to send John.” My partner is famously the nervous type, the sort of person who got on City Council in his 30’s and loves nothing more than a lengthy policy meeting. Something to feel control over. His go-bag is already packed. In 30 minutes, he and the dog are at my friend Shawn’s place, settling in for a sleepover. I feel a bit like M in James Bond, orchestrating the movements of pawns in another country.
Control is always something we’re angling for, at least as a surrogate for safety. At the dawn of the second Trump presidency, so much feels uncertain. The talk of resistance is stale. Folks I know are tuning out the news, or going back to print. We are exhausted from action, and so we are taking back control of the one thing it feels is left to us: our attention.
I download the Watch Duty app, days later than I would have if I were in the country, and immediately have to silence the notifications. We follow the uncontrolled blaze’s arc as we walk the ancient pyramid grounds in Teotihuacán, the ancient civilization that preceded the Aztecs but fell centuries before, leaving their metropolis to be entombed by the centuries in dirt. Contemporary archeologists have painstakingly unearthed the ruins, but wear and tear from tourists mean you can no longer climb up the pyramid of the sun or moon. Only gardeners huff their way up the colossal structures, weed wackers in tow, fighting back the nature that even now seeks to reclaim a city that’s long since been empty of people.
“Why was the city abandoned?” we ask our guide. “The usual stuff,” he tells us. Infighting and disease and splintered tribes, who had united for common cause around commerce and religion, finding in the end that their differences were insurmountable. Oh. And they ran out of water.
Every 20 feet at the pyramids, a vendor with a blanket full of obsidian warriors, carved from the refuse of past volcanic eruptions, blows a jaguar whistle. It rends the air with a horrible roaring, and we jump, every time.
The fires at Runyon are controlled that same night. My place is safe. The others take weeks, reinforcement firefighters arriving from other states and even Mexico. As I write this, the Eaton Fire is 98% contained the Palisades Fire 94% contained, and LA this week got its first rain in months. Of course, that welcome news also comes with the terror of mudslides from the burn scars. Everything we need hurts, when we finally get it.
I’d been feeling uninspired, in a rut when I left for Mexico. It’s our second year doing this trip, with this little friend group. Coming back I’ve felt a renewed sense of energy, but so much of that has been giving myself permission to be selfish with my time. To decline invitations and get to work on what I want to do. On my fridge’s whiteboard before leaving, I jot down a quote in dry-erase all-caps: RITUAL OR RUT. How can intention transform one into the other?
Flying back from Mexico City, my friends and I fret severe wind warnings in LA, wonder if we’ll see the fires from the air, as so many friends had days before. But the landing is smooth, and the city looks normal. I’d bought KN95 masks to wear on my return, reading that the air was full of asbestos smoke and chemical detritus, but the strong wind seems to have blown most of it to be someone else’s problem by the time we arrive, and the next morning the air is bright and clear.
I coordinate with a friend to go volunteer for fire relief, and we wind up at Bernie’s Cafe on a Friday, an abandoned diner on Melrose that was used for organizing efforts during the Bernie Sanders campaign and now serves as a drop off and distribution point for aid to fire victims. We are given a list of what one family needs and told to pack a suitcase.
The abandoned cafe does not have running water or a restroom. There are tables with labels: toiletries. Paper towels. And then, further back, the clothing donations, in a state of organized chaos. There are “women’s tops” in a box, all sizes, some Gucci, some rave wear with graphic art of psychedelic mushrooms. My friend rages that all we have about these people is their sizes. “This would be a cute top for someone!” she says, “but I don’t know if this person will wear it. If only I had a sense of their style!”
I unearth a whole box of kid’s underwear, by the shoes, which is a welcome discovery for this family with three boys. We pack the suitcase with lots we think will be useful and a few items that we’re not sure about but they’re what we have. A woman with an adorable pit bull (“she’s deaf!”) shows up and whisks the suitcase away.
Volunteers start arriving up by the dozens. There’s pizza. We leave having assembled two suitcases (for the second family, we didn’t even have complete clothing sizes), and made a start at doing some organizing of the rest of the clothes.
The task seems daunting but it’s been beautiful watching the whole city come together to do it — with greater or lesser efficacy. The best story I hear is that, in Beverly Hills, the City Hall donations box is overflowing with people’s used skis and ski equipment.
A few artist friends have lost homes. I do my best to donate to their GoFundMe’s and otherwise not bother them. Just the constant communication hurts my head. My texts, during the fires, are full of concerned friends from out of town checking to see if I’m okay. Even now, when getting a request for a W9 or conveying conference information, every communique has to start in a whisper. “I’m okay. I hope you’re okay.”
It’s not a bad way to start the year, remembering that you are loved, even from afar.
LA is now rebuilding while simultaneously preparing for the Olympics in a few years, and all the hum and thrum of the City before then. AWP, the big writers conference, is in town this year (it rotates cities each year), and for a while certain writer friends on social media call for the conference to cancel. I find myself sympathetic to the cause but skeptical of the call. Capitalism and empathy always make for an awkward dance. As far as I’m concerned, bring it. We need the tourist dollars.
All of my events for the month cancel and reschedule for March. All of my classes move forward. People don’t have to celebrate, right now, but they still have to learn. For my class with older adults we write a poem on the prompt, “dare yourself to be beautiful.” For my class with kids, we decide on this semester’s theme: resilience.
The problem with writing about the fires, my editor cautions me, is that they are no sooner gone than they are forgotten. People’s attention shifts like the Santa Ana winds. A new ember takes hold. “I think the sooner the better on that topic,” she tells me. “It would seem politics has been on everyone’s mind in the past week or so.”
Think less news, more personal experience, she tells me.
The thing is, I missed the LA fires. I was in Mexico. I came in time for the rebuilding. There is a saying that artists are “second responders.” Fire crews and human services come first. Then, in the burn scar, we try to imagine new possibility.
