The World We Once Knew Is Gone

I thought my neighborhood in Los Angeles was a haven. Last week obliterated that illusion.

Photo by JOSH EDELSON/AFP via Getty Images

I was really hoping to have something clear-headed and powerful by the time I wrote this, but more than anything, I just feel exhausted and weighed down by grief.

As I write, the fires in Los Angeles, where I live, have claimed at least 25 lives and more than 10,000 structures. Tens of thousands of acres across the city have gone up in flames, the Palisades fire is still growing, and we’re bracing for winds to pick up again and potentially exacerbate this already dire situation. Despite all the hard work and resources put forth over the last several days, only a fraction of both the Eaton and Palisades fires are contained.

I am one of the lucky Angelenos who is safe and unaffected in the material sense. My husband and I live in Eagle Rock. Our neighborhood is very close to an evacuation zone, but we never got the official order to leave and decided to stay put. On Wednesday morning, we woke up to the smell of smoke in our bedroom and a sky that made it look like it was 7 p.m. For a few days, the AQI in our neck of the woods sat somewhere between 180 and 200, so we sheltered indoors and ran air purifiers. We gathered our important belongings and bought a stupidly expensive cat carrier in a panic. We texted with all our local loved ones. We checked in with each other every hour or so, and we almost made a run for it about 20 different times. We watched this horror unfold on our devices just like many of you, with short trips outside to observe the gut-wrenching smoke cloud just over the hills, and take photos of the elusive sun.

The smoke clouds on Wednesday morning.

Most of my nightmares are a riff on the same format: I am stuck in one place, and I desperately need to get to another because something terrible is happening, but I cannot figure out how to leave or what to do. That’s how this last week has felt.

We spent our days in high alert mode, continuing to work (apologies to anyone I Zoomed with from Wednesday to Friday when I was half out of my mind) and reviewing the contents of our go bags. At night, I sat on the couch catching up, replying to texts, and crying.

Los Angeles is not my hometown, but it is my home. I have family members and friends who have lost their residences and everything they own. I hope anyone reading this blog would understand this very basic idea, but it bears repeating that while yes, Mandy Moore’s house is gone, so are the houses of hundreds of other very regular, hardworking, non-Hollywood types. The fires don’t discriminate. This disaster has leveled neighborhoods like Altadena, home to a diverse set of people including a historic Black community dating back to the Great Migration. Many of those affected were families, many were elderly, and many have been left with next to nothing.

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As Cros wrote quite well last week, we’re dealing with the fallout from decades of mismanagement and terrible choices, running the gamut from haphazard to negligent to outright evil. It can’t be sourced directly to any one thing. That all-encompassing nature is part of why I’m at a loss for words. It feels like so much of the world’s problems are wrapped up in this catastrophe.

There’s the fact that we’re in the middle of Los Angeles’ rainy season but haven’t seen a decent rainfall in eight months; there’s the billionaires hoarding water, there’s the oil and gas reliance that made this entire thing inevitable; and there’s the general misallocation of government funds (it’s always a good time to remember that most of our global horrors are connected by this particular fact). There’s the incarcerated people who are fighting the fires while working for slave wages, the destruction of property, the elimination of enormous swaths of the gorgeous landscapes that make Southern California what it is. There’s the displacement and harm of people and animals, the farmworkers who’ve continued to work as conditions have worsened, the migrant workers at the forefront of aid efforts, and the shortage of N95 masks because yes, Covid is still very much a thing. There’s the already vulnerable people even more at risk or actively afflicted now, the weaponization of this tragedy by batshit conspiracy theorists, the mutual aid groups doing more than our official social systems ever could, the countless GoFundMe efforts, and all the unbelievable loss that’s still unfolding before our eyes.

It’s frankly too much to process.

Rebuilding is an overwhelming thought, but it will happen, and with it will come inevitable change. I’m scared of what will become of many neighborhoods where working-class people have resided for decades. Already high insurance rates will continue to rise, and affordable housing will become even more scarce. The privatization and commercialization of climate protections will only ramp up. The city is forever altered, stretching all the way from the mountains in the east to the west coast. We are watching the livability of this place become incinerated in real time. We are watching the places we love become inhabitable.

My husband and I thought we were safe from fires in our neighborhood (though to be fair, not from the Big One, which is another issue entirely), but what’s happening now is changing our idea of what “safe” is in Los Angeles. This is an urban fire unlike anything we could have envisioned, and that sort of revaluation will continue to happen as climate change takes hold of the planet. The world we once knew is gone. It’s morphing at an alarming rate, and it will change our lives in ways that are both entirely predictable and utterly surprising.

I’m sure by now you’ve seen that viral post about how “climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you’re the one filming it.” While I do find myself ruminating and anxiety-spiraling on that idea during all of this, I also keep thinking about an idea Greta Thunberg presented in a 2019 speech:

Avoiding climate breakdown will require cathedral thinking. We must lay the foundation while we may not know exactly how to build the ceiling.

Sometimes we just simply have to find a way. The moment we decide to fulfill something, we can do anything. And I’m sure that the moment we start behaving as if we were in an emergency, we can avoid climate and ecological catastrophe. Humans are very adaptable: we can still fix this. But the opportunity to do so will not last for long. We must start today. We have no more excuses.

Cathedral thinking can apply to so much of the shit we’re up against right now, and I don’t know about you, but I find it to be a steadying mindset for grappling with the enormity and scale of the evil and rot at the center of it all. And sure, it fails to address that the opposition is armed with bulldozers while we’re laying bricks, but that is what it is. We have no choice but to keep fighting the fight.

Frankly, even this sort of zoomed out thinking is tough right now. People are suffering. The fires are still raging. The stories that continue to emerge are absolutely devastating. There are more important and more immediate issues to face before we get to everything else. This is a marathon, not a sprint. For now, please give if you can and don’t forget that recovery will take time, and the need will continue long after the blazes are extinguished.

Los Angeles is at work. It’s in mourning for what it’s lost, and for the many problems and mistakes that got us here in the first place. On a personal level, we’re grateful and grief-stricken. We’ll keep staring at our go bags, sitting in a pile in the middle of the living room, ready to be deployed if necessary. Hoping for the best, ready for the worst. Helping how we can. Toggling between sitting with the existential dread, and putting it into motion.

I’m in a group chat with a bunch of local women (some friends, some strangers) who’ve been sharing ideas and intel on how to help during these last few days. While much of it is practical, there have also been moments of tenderness, openhearted expressions of all kinds, and heartbreak over what’s happening. In the thick of things last week when everything felt so utterly uncertain, one person wrote:

“You hear so often about how folks in LA are isolated from each other, etc, and the response right now is showing me how wrong that is.”

The foundation is already here. The catastrophe is still unfolding, but we’re already in motion, deciding what we’ll build next. Can we force some meaningful change from this nightmare, or will it be a mere footnote in a much bigger story? Even in the depths of my despair, I want to believe the former is possible. We’re just going to have to set some metaphorical fires to get there.