The Free Press
LOS ANGELES—Last night, our synagogue burned to the ground. I haven’t seen the wreckage. I can’t get there. The synagogue is—was—nestled near the base of the San Gabriel Mountains, the epicenter of the Eaton Canyon fire, one of the three fires pressing down on the city.
At the time—this was a little before 10 p.m.—the Palisades fire, 25 miles west of us, was the worst, the biggest, devouring the big, sun-dappled houses overlooking the Pacific, the red, Spanish-tile roofs and infinity pools and tennis courts.
We had been debating for a few hours whether to leave, and then things started to happen: The kids’ schools emailed us to say there would be no school tomorrow; a few people we knew evacuated; other people posted videos of the fire taken from their balconies or decks, peering out at the mountains and the tree line, the orange-red-black plumes pushing in. Finally, I wandered out into our little street, and it was smoky, and you could see the embers flickering through the dark, and I went inside and said, “Let’s go.”
My wife and our six-year-old and 10-year-old jumped in the car, and I drove maybe a little too fast through our little neighborhood in Pasadena, around the trees and garbage cans that the winds had strewn across the streets. To the freeway. Southbound. Away from the smoke and embers and the violent, churning winds, the downed power lines, the fire trucks, the sirens. Toward the city, the ocean.
We thought there would be traffic on the 110. There’s always traffic. We expected evacuees. Frantic families. Other unshaven, unkempt fathers whisking their children and spouses to less flammable ground. But the freeway was quiet. People were hunkered down. This had never happened before—at least, not like this—not so many houses, so many abandoned cars and displaced Angelenos, and now it was happening, and everyone was hoping they could ride it out.
We drifted through downtown, past the high-rises. The construction cranes, the neon billboards, the convention center, the new soccer stadium. Through the old, sprawling barrio that stretches south and east. The air became less smoky. We breathed easier. The kids wondered what would happen if our house burned down. My son, who’s in the first grade, decided we would build a new one. And a pool. He seemed fine with that.
This morning, we are waking up to the horror of what happened: two dead, more than 80,000 evacuated, the Rose Bowl in danger, hollowed-out blocks, flattened churches, images of other people’s charred houses floating around social media. The embers still floating across the city, carried by winds swooshing around at 100-plus miles per hour. Random miniature fires starting, going out, starting again.
On the synagogue WhatsApp channel, people are posting images of it burning, emojis, words, grief. “The Torah scrolls have been saved!” someone texted me, which is a good thing. “But buildings gone.”
Our daughter’s school has burned down, and our son’s school is okay but closed, like all the schools. There are images of aging movie stars helping the firefighters, or being forced out of their homes.
The poorest among us have mostly been spared. They tend to live in the swollen innards of the city, in the flatlands encircled by skyscrapers and freeways and homeless encampments.
But everywhere, you can taste the fires in the back of your throat. Right now, we’re thirty miles south of our home, at my mother’s condominium, five minutes from where I grew up. When you go outside, it’s smoky.
The recriminations have already started. Lots of posts and articles about the climate and the insurance companies and the mayor, Karen Bass, and her many discontents. The owner of the Los Angeles Times blasted Bass for cutting the city’s fire department budget by $23 million (it was actually $17.6 million), and he repeated a claim made by Bass’s former rival, Rick Caruso, the billionaire developer, who said there was no water coming out of the fire hydrants in the Palisades. When this is over, the politics of this place, which were already migrating in weird directions, will be upended. A paradigm will have shifted.
Most people we know have evacuated south, to Newport or San Diego. A friend in Los Feliz, who was loading up the car, texted: “I’m making like the guy in Life is Beautiful, making it like a game so the kids don’t panic!”
There is, in the city, shock, discombobulation, rage.
But also: a sadness. A wondering.
Of course, there have been wildfires before. We’re accustomed to images of the Sepulveda Pass engulfed by flames. The specter of natural disaster has always lent Los Angeles an air of risk, a kind of sexiness.
There’s nothing sexy about right now. This is about the end of a place. In the future, the fires will be a demarcation. There will be the times before and after the disaster, and the one will be remembered as this happy, gauzy surreality that never was.
So far, the fires appear to have spared our house and all the things inside: photographs of my wife and me, bowls and pieces of jewelry that my wife has collected from around the world, the two knockoff paintings I bought in an alley in Shanghai, our children’s bedroom, documents, screens, kitchen appliances, books, lots of books filled with notes and scribblings from graduate school. All the unimportant things. If things get worse, I expect we’ll get a text from one of our neighbors.
No one knows what comes next. What Los Angeles will be. This is the city of unreality, and the city has always been comfortable in that unreal state—it has always felt at home in it. But now?
Now, everything feels dark and overwhelming. Los Angeles is cold and overcast and rainless. Everyone is asking where they’re supposed to go, and whether it’s safe to go home, and whether this street or building they used to know is still there. We are floating.
For more coverage of the LA fires, click here.