The sky in Los Angeles is an unrelenting gray today. It’s not fog caused by the marine layer, and it’s not the smog of yesteryear. It’s soot and it’s ash, and it’s everywhere. Media images show the out-of-control wildfires, infernos that are engulfing whole neighborhoods. They are an immediate and terrifying reality for many, but for most residents of the greater Los Angeles area, gray is the medium of the moment. Not on television or social media but everywhere around us; it is an olfactory and visual reminder throughout the Los Angeles basin of the catastrophe facing 180,000 residents who have been evacuated or have already lost their homes.
That gray smoke rubbing its muzzle on the window panes is a backdrop to the ethereal orange glow on the horizons from the three—for now—wildfires still burning. Schools and businesses are closed; emergency services are all directed toward the flashpoints; my own alma mater, Loyola High School, is serving as one of many donation reception areas and as a place of refuge for those who have lost their homes. Pacific Palisades, Pasadena, the Hollywood Hills—these are Los Angeles neighborhoods we know, occupied by people we know, people now in need of aid and shelter.
I am in Los Angeles these days as a visitor, not a resident, though I was born here and this was my home for most of the first three decades of my life, and much of my family still lives here. The last two decades in New York have given me a certain cynicism toward the way East Coasters view California—as a fairy tale, as a playground, as a source of endless disaster.
That last reality is reflected in more than just the news cycle. As the prescient scholar Mike Davis noted in his 1998 book Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, the city had at that point been demolished in fictional portrayals—movies, books, television—138 times. I am sure that 27 years later, that number has at least doubled. Americans love seeing Los Angeles on the brink of obliteration. At the same time, Davis noted, Angelenos themselves are remarkably blithe about the reality of living on an ecological knife-edge between paradise and apocalypse.
Flood, fire, earthquake, civil unrest, mudslide, drought: They are all present in the minds of the residents of Los Angeles, and I am convinced they actually give the city some of its energy, some of its shocking (and often dismaying) willingness to erase the past and start all over again. One sees this elsewhere in the world, in any metropolis whose existence is at the mercy of a physical environment that will surely one day destroy it: Tokyo, Naples, Mexico City. But none captures that precarity like Los Angeles, that sense that the Sword of Damocles is dangling.
Even the gale-force winds that precipitated today’s fires, the Santa Anas, are part of the Los Angeles legend, described in ominous terms by Joan Didion in “Los Angeles Notebook” from her 1964 collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem:
There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension. What it means is that tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow, a hot wind from the northeast whining down through the Cajon and San Gorgonio Passes, blowing up sand storms out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to flashpoint. For a few days now we will see smoke back in the canyons, and hear sirens in the night. I have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I know it, and almost everyone I have seen today knows it too. We know it because we feel it.
What gets lost in those creative images, these portents of disaster, is the people. Celebrities and mansions and famous place-names and narratives of apocalypse might dominate the news cycle, but they don’t capture the experiences of those whose lives are being upended by these fires, who are losing their homes, their churches, their livelihoods, their histories.
Did climate change cause these fires? Yes. Did mismanagement of public resources cause these fires? Yes. Did runaway suburban development cause these fires? Yes. Did the reality of California itself cause these fires? Yes. Are these fires at heart a symbol of something else? No. They are not. Not for those suffering from them.
There are almost 10 million humans in Los Angeles County. It is not only the most populous county in the United States, it is twice the size of its nearest competitor. And Angelenos are from everywhere: A third are foreign-born; more than half speak a language other than English at home. In my teenage years in Burbank, our street included families hailing from Armenia, Guatemala, the Philippines and from all over the United States. I played on a softball team in my 20s on which two of the 14 players had grown up here. None of our parents had.
In that sense, Los Angeles is the land of second chances, but also the land of first chances. It is also a microcosm—or the canary in the coal mine—for the rest of the nation and the world. A people on the move, seeking a new home, making a go of it in precarious circumstances: That is all of us in the United States, that is hundreds of millions of people elsewhere around the globe. We need to see the people of Los Angeles not as the denizens of a Disneyland-turned-Gomorrah but of a home just like ours, no matter where we are.
Two images are stuck in my head today. The first is of the ruins of Corpus Christi, a venerable Catholic community in Pacific Palisades. The church burned to the ground yesterday along with everything around it. For some reason, it seems even more shocking to see that church in ashes than to read or see of people losing their homes, perhaps because Corpus Christi is a collective home for the community, an essential part of the connective tissue that makes a geographic place a home. But it raises the question so many victims must be asking God right now: Where are you in all of this? Where is the meaning in this suffering? And in a land built on optimism, where is hope?
The second image is from a moment I experienced in a local movie theater last month, one that reminded me why I will always love Los Angeles. When the movie ended, plenty of folks got up and walked out right away. But plenty more stayed in the seats for the credits. Why? Credits are boring and endless, and they often scroll so fast that one can barely make out the names or titles in time.
But you stay for the credits. You stay because those aren’t just anonymous names on the screen (even when they are); those are your neighbors, your friends, your fellow participants in an industry that is all but synonymous with this city. You stay because what you saw on the screen was the work of human hands, the art of people proud of what they built. It’s part of you, too.
After the awful images of these fires are gone, Los Angeles will be like that, too. The people will stay, the city will rebuild, the optimism and the hope will perdure. And may God, who began this good work in the City of Angels, bring it through to completion.
