The city of smoke and mirrors is ablaze, and I mourn for it and pray to a God I no longer believe in.
Words by Meka Boyle.
Los Angeles is on fire. Across the country, my ears are ringing with the howls of coyotes. One of the most destructive firestorms to hit in memory. Historic. Devastating. 100 mph winds. Over 28,000 acres gone. 28,000 football fields worth of land. Over 200,000 ordered to evacuate. Horses braying on a hill, their black silhouettes cast against a bloodorange sky. Nowhere to go. There was no sunset tonight. LA is on pause with so sign of end in sight. We wait, holding our breath for the rain.
Fire transforms immediately and indifferently. I think of the fires in Octavia Butler’s dystopian world (a looking glass). “God is change,” she wrote.
I remember the fires of my childhood in California. There were few. (First time I saw destruction was when my house burnt down at 5 years old.) My formative years in San Francisco, fires started to bubble. In Napa the smoke raced down the highway, and the city cradled it like a bowl. I remember the scent, the color, the way the light refracted in the dense and murky red sky. When I moved to New York, I caught my breath and jokingly remarked that I was free from earthquakes and fires (mostly). Now I watch the city burn from my phone, and impatiently await calls from friends to answer me: Are you safe? Is your house okay? Their responses lodge a peach pit in my stomach.
Is your house okay? “It burned down.”
Fleeing on foot. Cars bulldozed. Juvenile hall forced to evacuate, children with nowhere to go. Beaches turned refuges. Fire camps in Malibu housing incarcerated firefighters. Zero containment. Santa Ana winds. WeHo, DTLA. Altadena gone. Ambulances non stop whirring. The Palisades fire, bigger than Manhattan. Progressions filmed from windows. Piles of abandoned cars. Santa Ana winds. Praying for the best case scenario in what feels like a worst case scenario.
The natural landscape, dotted with sagebrush and tall grass, is bone dry. The residential neighborhoods and commercial streets pocketed between and running up hills: sitting ducks.
“Altadena is burning, Pasadena is burning,” 11am. “everything I know and love in Altadena has burnt down… it’s crazy,” 12pm. Too soon to feel the cataclysmic breadth of grief, we try to make sense of this in-between moment.
How are you doing post break up… and the fires? “I am taking it day by day but it’s definitely been a huge struggle. Just so many emotions to sift through it’s overwhelming. And the fucking fires!!!!” Well, like a phoenix rising from the ashes. You’ll get through it, and the fire will run its course. “it’s giving phoenix… Fire is also such an extremely symbolic thing in my life so I’m just like whoa … but in general also extremely sad for everyone who has been affected — truly insane”
Are you safe?
“i’m safe”
Are you safe?
“Yes we evacuated last night… We just photographed the house. There might not be a house.”
There might not be a house, instead ashes: fire, the most destructive element with a generative force indifferent to human development.
A fire: Isabelle tells me it was her siren call to sculpture. When her and Lita‘s family Malibu home burnt down in the 2018 Woolsey Fire, the latter lost her life’s archive of art—while her daughter saw the power of artifacts, found a calling to make physical works. At first, metal to withstand fire. In one, a witch straddles a broomstick; her stomach is lined with soot as if she were crawling in the aftermath of: a fire.
A fire 60 miles east of Los Angeles, years ago, one that burnt down the farm that Octavia Butler’s grandmother Estella built after escaping Louisiana’s sugar plantations in the 1930s. A chicken coop, lost in flames and revived by American Artist as a sculpture that holds writing from the late sci-fi writer’s archive. A beacon of resilience.
The aftermath. I remember the 2016 Ghost Ship Fire in San Francisco: the DIY wooden warehouse with ramshackle and out-of-code rooms went ablaze and trapped partygoers inside, killing 36. A shock ran through the Bay Area’s underground scene and beyond. The aftershock was felt around the world. Fire blazed sharp and painful on our minds. It still does. I remember interviewing Dominique for this magazine two summers ago in New York while the skies were rusted over in a haze from a fire upstate, full of orange-tinged wildfire smoke so heavy it broke records.
Safety is a precarious thing: here one day and gone the next. I can’t stop thinking about the 2,000-and-counting buildings burnt down in the last two days, the five lives lost, the many unaccounted for. The wildlife, the pets, the elderly, those living on the streets lungs full of smoke, the undocumented and those without renter’s insurance. Economic stability will determine who makes it out okay, and who doesn’t. Last year, the LA city council defunded the fire department by $23 million, and redirected $138 million to LAPD. Some people shrug off the doom with their best foot forward: We have insurance. But, for those who don’t? (I don’t.)
“Trigger warning on reality.” I am pressing my thumb on my screen to pause the ceaseless feed of images and read Julie’s post. “trigger warning on reality: historic storms are pounding the u.s.” True. “global climate conditions are supercharging droughts, flooding, hurricanes, tornadoes, fire, and heat. more of this is expected to come – and will be exasperated by human activity and priorities. my soul aches that we collectively had the time, ability, and resources to do more than pray and think. every time politics and profit are chosen over people and the planet, we lose. these things are easy to ignore when they’re taking place in another part of the world – but what happens when it knocks on your door?”
It’s here. On the phone, friends are frantic, numb, sentimental, in disbelief, beside themselves, dealing with fate or kissing the feet of luck. Checking in on loop. Are you coming back to New York? “No, I’m going to Joshua Tree… Girl, it smells like a campfire here…” He says he’s staying. (Later: he doesn’t go to Joshua Tree, I presume because the city cut its power in preparation for the Santa Ana winds’ proclivity for damaging electrical equipment and starting fires, among other things. He’s heading north.)
When Nick is packing and asks me what I had of value, I tell him, “basically nothing.” An hour later, I call him to ask him to grab all my clothes from the closet and shove them into the backseat. It’s too late, he had already left. He’s meeting Julia and Ruby, who went east with her dog, leaving everything to chance. She has security cameras facing her Pasadena bungalow. The small house is her own kaleidoscopic folk art museum, covered floor to ceiling with photographs, found objects, and mannequins wearing sculptures made of fake food. She can record the footage of her house burning and do something with it later in her art, the thought comes out of nowhere and disappears into shame. I must not think bad thoughts. I return to the loss. Immediate and all consuming. It is hard to fathom, but the time to write about it is now, when the sentiment is still pulsing. When all we have is commiseration.
As I write this, numbers are ballooning, bursting, and spreading. Griffith Park is surrounded by fire. As I edit this, the Sunset Fire menaces around my apartment. (“This is a lawful order to leave now,” and alert flashes.) A swath of red flags cover the entire city map, bleeding into evacuation zones. Lidia Fire, Eaton Fire, Sunset Fire, Brown Fire, Palisades Fire, Hurst Fire. Their names ring out like an incantation to a pagan goddess coming to deal us our hand. Anything could happen. The days are prolonged and rapid at the same time, a bombardment of excruciating moments in a hot glow so blinding that the rest of the word disappears.
I watch, eyes glued to my screen as blocks shrink around until the whole city is highlighted pale pink and the words “Go” pop up as I hover around my neighborhood. I am racing the clock, racing dated statistics, racing emotions that feel too corny the longer I sit with them. Los Angeles: I mourn for you, with you, safely away from you—you the city of angels, whose holy bodies were singed from this earth and reborn incandescent. The city of smoke and mirrors.
I left our Hollywood apartment the day before, and was in New York when I heard the news. Los Angeles is burning red and yellow and orange…sharp and dull, indiscriminately eviscerating everything in its path. I can see it when I close my eyes, nearly feel the heat. Yet I am one of the lucky ones, who by good fate happened to depart right before the fire engulfed my fledgling metropolitan girlfriend, barely a year into our relationship; Nick and I moved there in February last year.
What will I come home to? What will remain? How will we rebuild? We’re not out of the woods enough to see a silver lining. Feels futile. What do we need? Government resources. What will we get? Community support. We’re receiving all of our information from the nonprofit app Watch Duty, which sends out real time updates, evacuation statuses, and locations of shelters and animal sanctuaries. GoFundMe’s put faces to the tragedy. We send our hope, our money, our thoughts and prayers.
On some low level, don’t we all want to imbue our thoughts with a higher power? Who would turn their nose at some capacity to heal, to will the universe to good and safety and fortune? Today we mourn this loss of our beloved city streets and wild parks—next we must dig through the rubble, swallow the bitter pill of hope and wash it down with action.
Los Angeles will rebuild, regenerate, and be reborn from the ashes. It always does. Pasadena is in my prayers. Altadena is in my prayers. The Palisades. The Hollywood Hills. Los Feliz. Eagle rock. All of Los Angeles is in my prayers. I turned my back on religion as a child when I could not accept the notion of damning anyone to Hell: I refuse to believe that, I firmly decided. Now, I watch flames devour the city and pray.
FIRE RESOURCES HERE. Watch Duty: fire tracking app with real time updates, here.
