World on Fire
When the Golden State becomes a hellscape
From a Distance
By the time the rains come, the damage has already been done. Entire neighborhoods have been razed, trees blackened and left barren. Nightly news fills with images of the newly homeless picking through the rubble of their homes: This used to be our family room… We’ve lived here for thirty years… Oh, look, this ring, this family heirloom, is untouched… They often note that the chimney is the only thing left standing.
And then there’s the haunting image of a woman walking barefoot through an inferno, bearing a vague resemblance to Carrie at the prom. A fire truck stops to rescue her. She steps into the cab. She’s in desperate pain. Please help.
Right now, more than 100,000 acres of Southern California desert, foothill, and chaparral have gone up in flame. Firefighting resources are stretched thin. At least the weather has shifted, offering some hope for containing the blazes. We’ve gone from dry, 100+ degree days to 70+ degrees with coastal breezes and fogs in just a couple of days. As if an invisible “Weather” switch has been flipped. But across inland areas, the air has turned acrid. If you’re downwind of the fires, it can hurt to breathe. Sunset becomes apocalyptic—a pale sun smothered by smoke.
The first time I saw that hellfire sun slouching toward the horizon (or, at least, the first time it stuck in my memory), my maternal grandmother had just passed away. I was finishing my last year at USC and had taken some time off to attend her funeral in Indiana. When I returned to California, my friends and I decided to explore the Dia de los Muertos festival at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. I brought a video camera and experienced the festival through the lens—the bright colors and sugar skulls, the acres of tombstones, the silence of a mausoleum, the flare of dancers’ skirts as they twirled in time to syncopated Latin rhythms. The camera lens became my portal to the other side of grief. The landscape felt haunted and surreal. Too, the fires felt closer than I’d remembered them being in the past few years. That spooky sun wasn’t helping. Normally sprawling and spacious, Los Angeles suddenly contracted and collapsed in on itself, claustrophobic.
I gazed up at the San Gabriel Mountains and wondered how people did it—lived in the suburban-wildland interfaces, knowing that drought and destruction were imminent.
I was about to find out.
Couponing While the World Burns
Southern California doesn’t do autumn the way other, normal places do autumn. It often puts an over-the-top Hollywood spin on it, turning the Halloween season into a real-life hellscape. While other parts of the U.S. are becoming cooler and wetter, Southern California is becoming hotter and drier. Coastal breezes can evaporate in the wake of the dreaded Santa Ana winds out of the northeast, and the Santa Anas bring with them all the dust and duff of the Nevada deserts. This is when the Allergy aisles in local pharmacies go as barren as Covid-era grocery shelves. It’s when many of us start watching the news or our “X” feeds for weather and fire updates. We start packing “go bags” and emergency kits in case we need to evacuate. We try to keep our gas tanks at least half full, so we can flee toward the nearest shelter or a friend’s or relative’s place. All while preparing for the holidays and going about the business of daily life.
I was in Fillmore a few weeks ago for an appointment. Fillmore is located about 10 miles east of Santa Paula along Highway 126. In just that 10 miles, the climate changes dramatically. While Santa Paula is still close enough to the beaches to benefit from a coastal influence, Fillmore is its own heat island. Temperatures rise and humidity drops. In the last few weeks, several brush fires had popped up in the wildland areas surrounding the town. The day I was there for my appointment, water choppers rumbled overhead, tending to a fire down in the riverbed. As I perused the aisles of the local Vons, I noticed shoppers coming and going as if nothing were amiss. World on fire? Just another day at the office.
The Maria Fire: Fire as Irony
October 2019. California is still in a severe drought. The weather is predictably warm. By now, the power company, SoCal Edison, is implementing what they call “Public Safety Power Shutoffs.” When Santa Anas start to rage, Edison shuts off affected circuits to avoid having their lines spark a wildfire. As infuriating as this is—to have your AC shut off, your food rot in your refrigerator, your medical devices stop working, your garage door stuck shut—Edison has a good reason to implement these shutoffs. Their lines were implicated in one of the most devastating wildfires in Southern California history, the Thomas Fire, in 2017.
Even so, karma (or the fates or dumb luck) has a way of frustrating even the best of intentions. On Halloween night of 2019, around 6:00 or 6:30, my family and I were leaving a Santa Paula restaurant and heading home when I happened to glance up at South Mountain.
“Uh, there’s a fire.”
My boyfriend, Dale, and his mother followed my gaze.
“Oh shit.”
Sure enough, a brushfire was blossoming beneath an Edison transmission tower. The tower, which had been de-energized to minimize the risk of igniting a fire, was now being re-energized—and sparking perhaps the most ironic blaze in recent memory.
We drove home. Kids were still out trick-or-treating. Behind them, the fire raced down the mountainsides while fire trucks weaved their way up the old Edison roads, trying to find an access point. The fire was moving faster than they were. On some streets, parents took notice and started ushering their charges to waiting vehicles. Still others kept going, determined to let their kids finish the All-Hallows’ Eve ritual. With the mountain burning in the background, it looked like the town had been plunged into the Underworld, replete with children trick-or-treating along the lake of fire.
We had been planning to watch our favorite Halloween movies that night, but instead, we plunked down on the sofa in the family room to watch the unfolding disaster across the valley. The fire gained momentum and consumed the landscape, a bright blaze against the night sky. I was only two weeks out of elbow surgery and keeping my arm snug against my body in a sling. Still, I grabbed my DSLR camera and snapped pictures, ignoring the pain radiating out from my elbow.
It was going to be a long night.
A One-Armed Evacuation
We slept in fits and starts, listening to sirens blare through the witching hours. Occasionally, we got up to peek out the window. The fire, now called the Maria Fire, was cascading down the mountain in all directions, making a run toward the properties along the river bottom, spreading east and west, and down the backside of the mountain into Saticoy.
By the next morning, much of its forward progress was slowing. Long columns of blackish-gray smoke were twisting out over Santa Paula. After having taken time off to help me recuperate from surgery, my husband had to go back to work. Not exactly ideal timing. I would be off work for the next few months and stuck at home. I feared that drifting embers might spark more fires. I packed go bags for all of us, including our dog.
When it seemed that conditions might be calming down, I received an alert on my phone. Another fire had started roughly a mile upwind of our house, near the hospital.
Shit, shit, shit.
Our neighborhood could be right in its path. I went to work packing up my car, stuffing clothes, computers, and keepsakes into the trunk—all with my right arm still out of commission and wrapped in its sling. I wanted to feel as cool as Sarah Connor one-arming a shotgun. I was, after all, slowly training myself to become ambidextrous. I managed to get my dog into her harness with just my left hand. Still, driving would be a challenge. If we got the order to evacuate, how the hell was I going to work the gearshift?? Sarah Connor I was not.
I gathered my dog, and together we waited for the next alert.
The Thomas Fire: Fire as Juggernaut
December 2017 blew in on the hot breath of the Santa Anas. The late-autumn rains that everyone had been hoping for had failed to materialize. On the night of December 4, Dale was visiting his mother in Ventura. It was a quiet night. I had gone back to Pasadena after spending the weekend with him. His mother was watching TV, he was gaming on his laptop. Outside, the wind was thrashing the trees. Neither of them thought much of it. Just a windy night.
Sometime around 7:00, he received a text message from a friend:
“Hey, is that fire near your house?”
“What fire?”
His mother switched the TV to the local news. A fire had broken out near St. Thomas Aquinas College along Highway 150, which slices northward through the eastern fringe of the city toward Ojai. Wind gusts were being measured at over 80 miles an hour. It wouldn’t take long for the fire to reach Dale’s house.
His mother told him he’d better go home to grab his belongings. He bolted for the door.
By the time he arrived in Santa Paula, it was full dark and the power had been knocked out. The neighbors to the west were struggling to get their garage door open so they could get their car out. The neighbors to the east were just moving in. They weren’t thrilled at the prospect of having to pack up again. The fire was burning through the valleys and canyons less than a mile away.
Dale helped his neighbors to the west get their garage door open, hefting it up on its rails, a la The Hulk. Up and down the street, residents were packing their cars and hauling ass toward the freeway. A firefighter who had just moved in up the street—and had a front-row view of the flames barreling toward the neighborhood—called in a strike team. As yet, there were no crews in the area. Firefighters had little sense of the fire’s flanks. It was moving too fast.
Dale paced through the house, collecting clothes and toiletries, books and keepsakes he wanted to save. He shoved them into his car and joined the lines of cars fleeing through the dark. He noted some people taking a more leisurely approach, stopping to photograph the fire, and muttered curses at them for clogging the escape routes.
By the time Dale reached the highway, the fire was racing him toward Ventura. It didn’t matter how fast he drove, the fire was keeping pace. It was aimed straight at the upscale neighborhoods along Ventura’s hillsides. It would burn through them and continue its relentless march toward the ocean.
By the time the fire was contained 40 days later, it burned 440 acres, leveling entire neighborhoods, even fanning northward into Santa Barbara County. For days, thick smoke choked the air. Even if you were in a “safe” area, going out meant donning an N95 mask.
That holiday season, Dale’s mother held her traditional Christmas Eve dinner. One of her friends showed up wearing a new jacket. We complimented him on it. He had picked it, along with some other clothes, out of the donation box at one of the local evacuation centers. He didn’t have much else to wear. His house and everything in it had burned to the ground. He put on a brave face—he was humbled by how the people of Ventura County had supported each other and come to each other’s aid. He was grateful for the help he had received. We could only nod somberly.
Dale’s house, and all the houses around it, survived—due in large part to that retired firefighter. Had he not called in the strike team, this neighborhood might look very different today. On one of my daily walks a couple years ago, I had an opportunity to speak with him and thank him for what he did to save the neighborhood. His being there that night was one of those rare bits of serendipity, when the right person is there at the exact right moment.
Sometimes, Dale, our dog, and I walk to the little cul-de-sac at the end of our road, where you can look out over the canyon that the fire had claimed that night. It looks lush and verdant now, punctuated by citrus orchards. There’s a little farm with cattle. We can hear them lowing, even this far up. This lookout point is about a tenth of a mile from our house. The Thomas Fire had come that close. It had peered into the neighborhood, shrugged, and moved on.
November 1, 2019. I sat there with my dog, waiting for an evacuation order that, thankfully, was never issued. The fire that had started near the hospital turned out to be arson. Apparently, the accidental wildfires are not enough for some—they have to see how much more chaos they can sow. The fire was quickly snuffed out.
I breathed a sigh of relief and felt my body go heavy as the adrenaline ebbed. Once again, we had escaped the worst.
For weeks afterward, South Mountain stood bald and charred black. The Santa Anas refused to step aside and make way for winter. Our patience grew as brittle as the landscape. Would this never stop??
And then, just in time for Thanksgiving, the rains came. We listened to it pour, we stood out in it, let it soak us. We inhaled the scent of petrichor. And for a while, we let ourselves forget about fire.