sky blue sky
Two weeks ago, just before noon, a text from a friend who was teaching on the westside. fire spreading rapidly on north side of campus. Ten minutes later, a check in from E in Chicago. sorry to be “I don’t really understand LA geography” but I hope y’all are okay. In Eagle Rock the wind was picking up but the day so far had been empty. Normal.
Wednesday morning, not yet 7am, this, from L: it seems like my entire neighborhood caught fire. So I’m assuming that my house is gone and probably my parents’ too.
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Friends kept saying that they wished there were here but there was nothing to do here, or not much, anyway. The power was out at my house so I took the cat to my parents’. I downloaded Watch Duty and refreshed it with earnest vigilance. I saw dozens of reposts of the quote about how climate change is something you watch through your phone until it’s something you record on your phone as it engulfs you.
Friends also apologized for distracting me with their check-ins but there was nothing to distract me from. On Thursday I did maybe ninety minutes of work and by the end I was trembling with the effort of holding my concentration steady.
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That first morning, L came over with the dog. We stood in the backyard, tossing his treats, his ball. The sky was dark, the light orange. It sounds like a metaphor but you could, in fact, taste the ash in the air.
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I have written my way through so many things but I can’t write about the Sunset fire yet. Maybe ever. I had said, about Eaton, if it crosses the freeway, my house will be the least of anyone’s worries. This is the geography you learn growing up in LA: what is likely to burn and what isn’t. How the climate catastrophe of a freeway is also a useful firebreak. The idea that we might have to evacuate from where I had evacuated to— from my parents’ house, from the flats—
Too many impossible things had become possible. Someone posted a video of a helicopter dropping water, blanking out a whole section of flaming hillside. I watched it over, and over, and over, until on BlueSky they were saying that the radio chatter was that things were under control.
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We keep talking about the air quality but it’s the soil that will carry this burn approximately forever.
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I can’t even think about the water. The beach where T and I swim every summer: everything above it burned. Will it be safe to go back by July? And if it is, what will it feel like to immerse ourselves in cool, sweet blue, and look up at the hillside, now scorch, now scar?
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On his song Dodger Blue, Kendrick Lamar sings, bitch I’m from the land / don’t say you hate LA when you don’t travel past the 10. It’s the kind of line a lot of people— a lot of white people— myself included— will nod along to when, like, honestly, how often do we go that far south. But I found myself there over the weekend, picking up a table in Inglewood, near Crenshaw and Florence. It’s a gate-leg table, painted sunshine yellow and mint green. The perfect size for the kitchen nook in my new apartment.
Oh, right, I moved on Saturday. Same neighborhood, new address.
I paid in cash and then headed north to Beverly Hills for a lamp. The sky was crisp, searing blue. I knew perfectly well that the AQI was bad and that AQI doesn’t even tell the full story of how bad the air was, but still. Palm trees lined the streets, both south and north. Winter in California. My favorite luxury.
The drive home took me over Mulholland. This route may be affected by the Palisades fire, my GPS told me. I looked up the canyon— god, I love driving in LA’s canyons. I thought about the friend who’d texted me about the campus fire, the first moment I knew the city was burning. She spent hours trying to escape the Palisades. She’s okay. My throat, my chest still went tight with fear.
Once I got onto the 101, a new message: this route may be affected by the Eaton fire. But it wasn’t. The flames didn’t cross the 134 this time. This time.
Anyway, it was Sunday, and the city still felt quiet. It didn’t take too long to get home.