To My City of Angels
To live in and love Los Angeles is to know the Santa Anas in your bones.
Even to the deeply unspiritual, there is a mystic quality to these winds—our winds. The Angel of Death, slithering down our winding, uneven streets, striking down our trees, our trash cans, our civility. Joan Didion once wrote that we can sense the wind’s arrival before we read or hear about it. That is true. Well before the hot air licks its way through our hair and fingers, we feel them coming - like fish throwing themselves to shore before a tsunami. Or a dog’s relentless barking just before the earth rattles. It is a unique dialect we Angelenos understand on a cellular level - the Santa Anas are coming. Hold your breath. Stand still. Try not to yell. Bring in the kids.
Angelenos understand in a primal, metaphysical way that the Santa Anas carry destruction on their wings. My whole life, I’ve bowed my head in reverence as she passes, eyes downcast, hoping she’ll spare my city from her notorious, erratic temper.
This week, she did not.
My city has always burned. LA is a Phoenix, and her children know the consistency of ash much more than we know snow. We are used to living under the hue of an orange sky… But even the eldest, most experienced members of our community are breathless at how fiercely this fire has raged. The staggering, unyielding pace it has devoured brush and iron and steel. The destruction feels incomprehensible. Homes and livelihoods and memories ravaged and charred, reduced to dust. Photographs and marriage licenses and coffee cups and favorite books…The necklace from your great-grandma. The piano. Your favorite sweater that has a hole in the wrist because you’ve worn it so much. The box with eclectic memories that you swear you’ll look through when you have a free moment. Your sanctuary - all gone. Ruined. Thousands of people and families displaced, mourning, terrified at what the coming months will bring - or, just as terrifying, what they won’t bring. This week, the Santa Anas screamed and thrashed and consumed this city with the fury of the Erinyes that gave us their name, and somehow, it is still not over.
My city has always burned.
But she does not burn like this.
And for many of us, the unspeakable fear is that this is only the beginning.
Though the winds have died down, as I write this, the fires are still spreading. The situation is volatile and highly unpredictable - there’s not a person I’ve spoken with who doesn’t have a bag packed, if they’re lucky enough to have anything left at all. We now all know with aching precision what we consider our “most important” - what we’ll carry with us, if asked. What we’ll leave to burn. When the dust settles and smoke literally clears, even those untouched by flames will feel the weight of this disaster. Our hearts are shattered; our lungs scorched. A part of me is grateful Ms. Didion is not here to see our beloved city ravaged by our darkest angel.
But I wish she could see the way our better ones are rising.
LA has long been accused of being a superficial city filled with fair-weather people. “Ten miles wide and an inch deep”, as my father was warned when he first moved here. A flimsy place built on ice-thin dreams - a fish bowl people love to tap with thick fingernails, waiting for entertainment, only to turn around and say it’s not a real place. Not a good place. Not a resilient place with reliable, resilient people.
As though we are not a place that’s been forged in fire.
Through haze and black smoke, I have watched as Angelenos rallied and organized - clothes and blankets and supplies packed into cars and distributed; WhatsApp groups ablaze with places to donate and volunteer. People opening their homes and guest beds and couches to uprooted strangers. Our businesses, big and small, rushing to deliver hot meals and cool drinks, despite rolling power outages and unsafe water. Dogs and cats and rabbits being scooped into cars and brought to safety. First responders and firefighters combating this beast with Herculean efforts… I am in awe of every single one of them. My city - so physically spread out - has knitted tightly together like chainmail, even as it continues to burn around us. Even as the Santa Anas breathe fresh life into dying embers.
As it turns out, Angelenos are far from “fair-weather”. They show up in droves while the sky is raining ash.
It is evident that our city will never be the same. How we even begin to rebuild and recover feels as elusive as the fire itself. Like with any disaster of this magnitude, the implications are vast and unknowable - a million little tragedies yet to be unearthed. Hope feels distant; almost insensitive to speak of, and yet - if I can find any in all this rubble, it is in the people. If there’s any group that knows how to create worlds from nothing - who has the audacity and intrepidity and downright chutzpah to imagine the impossible and then build it – it is the dreamers of Los Angeles. Natives and transplants alike, there is an exceptional level of determination and endurance and passion required to live here. After all, only the fearless can live on a fault line. Only the bold can chase their ambitions to a far-off city. Only those of us who grew up in the backseats of cars on the 405 or 101 or 5 have seen hillsides turn green, then black, then – miraculously - green again. Perhaps, in a way, we are uniquely qualified to find a way through this… to grieve, to transform, to rise against the odds.
The Angel of Death may be strong.
But our City of Angels is stronger.