Burn, Memory

On the Los Angeles Wildfires

There are little patches of dryland chaparral and shrubs flanking many of the ramps that lead up to and down from the highways that crisscross Los Angeles. They’re sad, blown out little creatures. The color of the desert mixed with a century of smog and asphalt dust. In a city blooming with palm trees and emerald green lawns and manicured flower beds, the pale patches living on landfilled slopes are the ones I identify with California the most. They are home to me.

I remember the first time I felt the heat of a wildfire. Two decades ago, my brother and I were driving from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara, and a small area of brush on the side of the 101 had ignited. Traffic moved slowly; they closed the lane closest to the flames but kept traffic moving. I rolled down my window as we crawled by. The heat hit me immediately. When you’re that close, you can feel the heaviness of combustion. It can make it feel like the air has a blazing heft pushing onto your skin. There was something instinctually terrifying about the encroaching sensation of a heat you can’t escape. I felt anxious; I wanted my brother to get out of there as quickly as possible while the heat licked at my face.

I remember the first time I had to prepare to evacuate. My tiny boarding school was nestled in the Ojai Valley, where, we were always told as if it was some earth-divine intervention, was one of the only regions in the world where the topographic grade ran east-west instead of north-south. It’s why the sunsets are so breathtaking. It’s also why cults love it so much. The dry brush was like a fuel deposit for wildfires, the Santa Ana winds showing the fires which direction to go. Every year, the fire line would move closer to the school. Some years, we would delay going back for fall classes because of how close the burn was to campus. Other years, we would be asked to ready ourselves to leave at a moment’s notice if the winds changed or the fire jumped.

From far enough away, smoke smells like dust. The Pacific Palisades were always just on the other side of risk from the wildfires that would tear apart Malibu every so often. If you understand how fires move, then it makes sense. The canyons that drop into the ocean when you get past Topanga Canyon Blvd. are like massive flues, giving fires fuel and velocity when the winds move the right way. Part of the Palisades—such as where the fire started up in the highlands—share that shape, but most of the community doesn’t. It’s a wealthy suburb, tightly packed on the cliffs above the Pacific. Fires don’t happen there. Not like this.

The smoke from wildfires can blot out the sun even in southern California so that when you see the scenes from burnt out houses and abandoned cars being pushed aside by bulldozers to clear paths for firefighters, you can be disoriented in time and place. There is a part of me that has never wanted to run back home to California and those roadside shrubberies more than I do right now. There is a part of me that still remembers the feeling of flames on my face.