The Reality Of Packing Up Your Life As Wildfires Rage
When I moved to Los Angeles from New York three and a half years ago, everyone wanted to tell me the following: New York is fun hell, and L.A. is crappy heaven. And while I can concede that New York City—where I lived for nearly 15 years—is absolutely fun hell, L.A. to me has just felt like heaven.
It's famously a place of reinvention. You can, for example, move here to work in media and later decide you want to become a science fiction author, as I did. I even bought my own home, a tiny but perfect little mid-century modern dollop of a house, in the verdant hills of Silver Lake. L.A. has the kind of beauty that stops you in your tracks: the way the mountains shine pink at sunset, the sight of a hummingbird darting through a yellow hibiscus tree. Living in such close proximity to nature has transformed my life. It’s made me more present, more grounded, more aware of my place in the world. But it’s also made me more acutely aware of how fragile it all is—and how quickly it can go up in flames.
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Over the past few days the city of L.A. tried to tell us that something bad was coming. Or, rather, for several days last week I was plagued by incessant high wind alerts on my phone. These alerts said that the dangerous conditions could cause downed trees and power lines. But it's been very windy before. My wife and I took our outside furniture in. I cancelled plans to walk the reservoir with a friend. The usual precautions.
Santa Ana winds are not uncommon for this time of year. Nor is our current drought. But we've also seen an increase in whiplash conditions; alternating periods of extreme dryness with extreme wetness, thanks to climate change. This means LA has become stuffed with dry brush, dead grass and shrubs that the city in turn hasn't dealt with. Plus, it's hotter than normal. The earth is warming, in danger of passing the 1.5 degree tipping point scientists have been warning of. Despite the fact that it's not even fire season, climate change—which has been allowed to worsen thanks to an over-reliance on fossil fuels and governments who don't prioritise green energy—turned L.A. into a fireplace, just waiting to be lit.
On Tuesday night Wallace and I lay awake listening to the sound of branches and other debris hitting the house. It sounded like a hurricane, minus rain.
When I woke up Wednesday morning, the sky was the colour of old vomit, thick with smoke, and dark. We're used to foggy mornings in LA ('It'll burn off,' as locals like to say) but this was something different. This was the city I've come to love, going up in flames. The deathly scent reminded me of the burning air we could smell on Long Island wafting in from Manhattan on 9/11. We frantically texted loved ones and friends, trying to figure out who was okay and who wasn't, what resources they needed and which apps would be the most reliable. In Silver Lake, the fire map showed us in a pink zone with red flags, which meant: prepare to evacuate, but you don't have to yet. The fires were closer to the coast, west of us, and further towards the mountains, east of us. Sandwiched between them, we were getting their smoke but not their flames.
We spent the rest of the day glued to the news and our phones, two air purifiers whirling, while elsewhere, homes, businesses, and schools burned to the ground. Outside, the clouds glowed orange, the fires creeping closer.
Eventually we started getting texts that read: Are you leaving?
At first, I didn't want to. Not because of any attachment to material things or even to the house I love with all my heart but because I didn't know if leaving before we were told to would be safe. The news was showing footage of gridlock, of people abandoning their cars to get out and walk or run with their belongings in tow. I also worried if we left preemptively, we would be taking up space on the road, space that belonged to people who actually needed to flee. On TV, we saw whole neighborhoods levelled. On social media, I saw friends posting the empty, burnt out lots where their houses had been.
When a fire popped up in the Hollywood Hills, just a few miles away, we started to pack.
We had the luxury of time to figure out what mattered, but in the moment I felt myself drawing a blank. Packing for the potential of losing everything you own is the ultimate exercise in trying to have empathy for your future self. I wondered: What will I want if everything else is gone? Will I laugh at the choices I’m making now or will I feel grateful I remembered my leather jacket? (Please do not direct me to Joan Didion’s packing list, I’m begging you.) In the end I tried to think about what I wear and use every day, plus the important documents. Still, after I had filled a few bags, I had the feeling that if I left it all behind, it would be okay. Stuff is just stuff. Beyond clothes on my back and antidepressants down my gullet, I only need my wife and my dog.
Wallace decided to stay up all night and watch the news alerts, because she does better on no sleep than me and is in general exactly who you want around in a disaster.
In the morning, ash started falling from the sky, thick and white as snow. The air quality in our neighborhood was getting worse than surrounding areas. I am predisposed to a genetic lung disease that is triggered by lung infection, and we decided it was time to leave the city. Once we decided to leave, I felt an enormous sense of relief. At least we had a plan.
This is not the first time we've had to leave our houses in an extreme weather event. In September when the temperature hit 112 degrees Fahrenheit, we lost power and it became unsafe to stay inside without air conditioning. We checked into a hotel. Money doesn't buy happiness, but it can keep you alive.
I would like to have hope for our future, but at this moment, I'm struggling. The man about to assume the presidency—a climate change denier with a cabinet full of oil barons—is promising to gut what little environmental protections we have left. The billionaires will have completed their bunkers long before they consider investing in a future that everyone can survive. I would love to be proven wrong about that.
I cannot believe how many people I know who have lost everything. It is impossible to wrap my head around. I feel heartbroken and angry. It’s hard to overstate the rage I feel. Rage at the fossil fuel companies that knew decades ago this was coming and lied to protect their profits. Rage at the politicians who take their money and ignore the scientists. Rage at the capitalist death cult that insists we continue business as usual, even as those businesses burn to the ground.
If some of us can't survive climate change, none of us can. The fires will come for you regardless of whether you believe in climate change or not. And if it happened here, it will happen elsewhere—whether it's a fire or a hurricane or a flood or a freeze. It's just a matter of when. The wildfires aren’t a warning. They’re a reckoning. They’re telling us, in no uncertain terms, that the way we live is unsustainable. That the systems we’ve built will collapse under the weight of their own greed. That the time for incremental change is over.
I hope that my home is still standing when we return. And if it's not, we can rebuild, there or somewhere else. But unless we confront the root causes of this destruction—climate change, capitalism, and the political cowardice that enables both—we’re just planting flowers in a pile of ash.
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