#28 - California Love ❤️🔥
The last time I felt so far pushed to the emotional brink was the week school closed because of the pandemic.
The cultural epicenter of America is on fire. I willingly open myself up to all sorts of (dumb) arguments by making that claim, but I don’t care. LA has shaped our national, if not global, imagination. Try and extricate yourself from the influence of Hollywood. Gah ahead.
I think we're about halfway through this nightmare with some wind relief as of late yesterday, and I hope the tide will turn today for our brave firefighters in LA.
The Santa Ana winds are going to kick up in Orange County and the IE though, which is where I live, but we’re more built for catastrophic wildfires. Unlike urban LA, we have wide open streets and access points to regularly scorched burn zones.
This fight has only just begun. It is going to take gobs of time, creativity, resources, and community resolve to rebuild homes, neighborhoods, and businesses that have been lost.
I'm ready. I've already decided not to travel this spring and summer, and join local rebuilding efforts instead. And that is what is most inspiring about how we're internalizing this as a region — there is this restless urge to drop everything and go help, to quit everything we know and rewire our commitments, even if that means running into flames.
Along with smoke, the palpable energy of a colossal homecoming is hanging in the air.
David Ulin, in his rousing essay in the NYT this morning, called this impulse Californians have to stay, reinvent, and forever outlive erasure “the gritty edge of will.”
“The only solution is to assess your risks and keep on living. That is what Southern California teaches everyone. It’s not a trade-off that to live amid such beauty requires recompense. No, it is something like an acceptance, or even an embrace, of everything we cannot and will never know.”
Being a Californian has always been an endurance sport, riddled with the obstacles of urban chaos and unpredictability set against a stunning backdrop.
On days when we’re not contending with a singular catastrophe such as this, we’re seething in traffic over sunshine taxes, celebrity antics, and some form of collective exhaustion we unfortunately often experience in grim isolation.
What this disaster will necessarily do once its immediate horror subsides is clear space for us to drift out of our lanes to gather once again for the sake of this complex identity, this fierce and lush inner landscape and way of being we all cherish as Californians, that right now is smoldering.