Joan Didion Said It Best

Checking in from Los Angeles, a city on fire

(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

Hello to all newsletter subscribers,

I’m not nearly self-indulgent enough to think that my personal situation warrants any special attention amongst the abject devastation wrought by this week’s wildfires in Los Angeles.

Still, I can’t express how moved I was yesterday, and today, by the number of people checking in from out-of-state (even out of the country!) who saw the news and thought of me.

I am safe. My apartment is just far enough away to not be in any danger. I lost power for about 24 hours (as did 1.2 million Angelenos) but it’s back now. The air quality is horrendous, full of smoke, and will probably remain that way for several days. But nobody should be worrying about me.

Meanwhile, a not insignificant portion of the city that I love and have called home for 5+ years has been reduced to rubble. People’s homes. Schools. Grocery stores. When it’s this close to home, these aren’t just “people,” they’re in many cases friends.

This is a massive city but often our personal bubbles within it become quite small, and we spend most of our times in these little self-contained neighborhood communities. So when I saw one estimate saying that 75% of all structures in Pacific Palisades are gone — I thought of the loss the entire little world for thousands of people.

I think of the lost memories of my time there. My favorite hike in all of L.A.? Ashes. The venue where I went to the launch party of Tiger Woods’ brand? Flattened. That mall/village with the theater where I saw Hit Man, had a first date once and always saw kids running or skateboarding around? Gone.

That’s not to mention the fire in Pasadena. The one in Santa Clarita. The one that broke out last night above Hollywood. It feels apocalyptic.

So many people are evacuating, and the ones who stay are living with an uneasy feeling hanging over the city — in the form of a literal, visible, enormous smoke cloud. I can see it from my window as I type this. Focusing on anything else is difficult.

Recovery from this fire will take years, and making sense of it could take even longer.

But I found comfort in the words of probably my all-time favorite writer, Joan Didion. Long-time newsletter readers know I have turned to her in times of personal crisis before. Somehow, she is able to find the exact combination of words to express the thoughts you’ve had deep inside.

As it turns out, she wrote an essay in 1968 about the Santa Ana winds and the fires they bring with them, which today rings with eerie resonance.

Here’s a portion of what she said:

Easterners commonly complain that there is no "weather" at all in Southern California, that the days and the seasons slip by relentlessly, numbingly bland. That is quite misleading. In fact the climate is characterized by infrequent but violent extremes: two periods of torrential subtropical rains which continue for weeks and wash out the hills and send subdivisions sliding toward the sea; about twenty scattered days a year of the Santa Ana, which, with its incendiary dryness, invariably means fire. At the first prediction of a Santa Ana, the Forest Service flies men and equipment from northern California into the southern forests, and the Los Angeles Fire Department cancels its ordinary non-firefighting routines. The Santa Ana caused Malibu to burn as it did in 1956, and Bel Air in 1961, and Santa Barbara in 1964. In the winter of 1966-67 eleven men were killed fighting a Santa Ana fire that spread through the San Gabriel Mountains.

— Joan Didion, 1968

It reminded me that these fires, though they seem like the end of the world, are nothing that this city has not faced many times before. She wrote that almost 60 (!!) years ago! Fires are in fact a yearly occurrence, and though they are almost never this devastating, they periodically are — my mind recalls what happened to Paradise and Malibu in 2018. Each time, the city has recovered and rebuilt.

Didion does not stop with the history lesson, though. She extracts from the winds an almost spiritual philosophy of the city. Just as these are not the first fires the city has faced, this is also not the first time that its residents have felt this way — helpless, overwhelmed, fatalistic.

In fact in may be our default setting. I’ll give her the final word:

It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. The city burning is Los Angeles's deepest image of itself. Nathaniel West perceived that, in The Day of the Locust, and at the time of the 1965 Watts riots what struck the imagination most indelibly were the fires. For days one could drive the Harbor Freeway and see the city on fire, just as we had always known it would be in the end.

Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The winds shows us how close to the edge we are.

— Joan Didion, 1968

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Stay safe everyone and please continue to show love and care for one another the way you have for me this week!!

At the bottom here I wanted to list a couple of resources if you’re looking for the best place to support firefighting and relief efforts:

The California Fire Foundation is helping emergency personnel on the ground right now.

The American Red Cross is providing shelter and resources for those affected.

World Central Kitchen is providing sandwiches and water to evacuated people.