Burning at Both Ends: Surviving a Week in Wildfire-Torn Los Angeles


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Businesses along Lake Avenue destroyed by the Eaton Fire in Altadena, California, on January 9, 2025.by ZOE MEYERS/AFP/Getty Images.

It’s a lesson you gradually learn, a reality you adjust to—or perhaps, to quote Jim Morrison, “learn to forget.” Occasional tremors remind you that the ground is not trustworthy: you compare earthquake notes on social media and then go about your business, or roll over in bed and go back to sleep. In our old wooden house, the vibrations travel straight up to the roof where they have nowhere else to go: a quake registers as a loud bang, or sometimes as a frantic rattling of the door frames, like an intruder is already in the house and trying to enter the living room. Sometimes, you think it’s a passing truck, or even a gun. I dutifully restock my earthquake kit every five years while becoming adept at ignoring the subliminal anxiety lurking inside my body.

Mostly it’s remarkable how little you think about earthquakes or wildfires, even though both are frequent occurrences. It’s easy to see this sprawling archipelago of neighborhoods and micro-climates that we call LA as a treasure hunt, full of fascinating nooks and diverse vibes. I spent our first years here exploring a new park, hiking trail or neighborhood every weekend. Veteran Angelenos hipped us to the hidden spots and secret history; newbies that poured in injected the place with renewed energy and excitement. Living in LA means living under threat. It’s a bargain we make, just as New York City residents agree to cram themselves into tiny apartments, suffer lousy subway service, and skip around scuttling rodents during evening strolls, because it’s New York fucking City, still the most kinetic place on Earth. We wear it like a badge of honor.

Leaving LA had become a favorite party topic among Hollywood types in recent months, as the entertainment industry has stuttered and shrunk. But by days three and four of the fires, the idea of getting out takes on a stark reality. Friends flee the city temporarily, not knowing what they will return to. Those of us who stay watch the fire map obsessively, texting each other frantically when the orange blobs begin to move in a new direction. Suddenly everyone is spouting fire lingo—containment, ember-casting, Phos-chek—as if it’s our second language. “I just think it’s worse than they are telling us,” a friend texts, sending me an image taken off social media of a giant red mushroom-shaped plume of smoke rising up over the west side of Los Angeles. Those warnings about climate change causing mass disruption and displacement we’ve been hearing for years—is this what it looks like? Are we going to be the climate refugees that we’ve read about?

By day five, more than 100,000 Angelenos have evacuated their homes. We’re still on orange alert, external hard drives and asthma medicine stuffed into go-bags in a corner of the room, even though the Eaton fire is largely contained now. Today the sky is blue for the first time in what feels like forever and the air smells discernibly less toxic. I try to go about my normal business, grocery shopping and going out to a restaurant. Then I remember what’s happening and check the fire app to make sure nothing new has been decimated.

Everyone has their own personal map of the city, and we’re all grieving for different people and places. One friend mourns the Bunny Museum in Altadena, an archive of eccentricity; another is shocked by the loss of the Reel Inn, a beachside seafood shack in Malibu. I know that many of my favorite nature spots, like Temescal and Topanga Canyon parks, will eventually recover, shaking off the ash and growing new life, as they did after previous fires.

One of my regular trails in Altadena actually leads to the ruins of a Victorian hotel which was gutted 125 years ago. All that survived that inferno were remnants of the Mount Lowe Railway, a scenic train that took pleasure-seekers up to the top of the mountain. It’s a pointed reminder that we never know what will be left of Los Angeles in a week, a month, or a century. It’s a city built on literally shaky foundations. We can only hope to rebuild and reinvent it one more time.



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