Reflections on burning
A warm (too warm) welcome to 2025.
A big part of my job is to be on the internet all day. It’s the way that I find news and see what people are talking about, which is required for my day job but also inseparable from my daily life. It has been absolutely devastating watching friends’ videos on Instagram of their streets in the Palisades completely burned to rubble. Others are offering resources for mutual aid, or their homes as a place to stay whilst neighbors go without water and electricity. I am horrified by videos of flames taken through large glass windows, and moved to tears by the stories of firefighters just barely saving someone’s very thirsty cat. I am hugging my dog a little extra today, thankful that I am not there. But I am worried about my friends and family members in Los Angeles. I wonder if the home my parents used to live in is still standing. The one they live in now, at least, has a cement safe under the floorboards where they keep our birth certificates and passports, just in case everything else burns to the ground.
I am comfortable being part of the cliche of those who turn back to inspiring writers and their writing during times of crisis. Sure, it may not aid catastrophe, but it can help lighten the load, or at least help some find comfort and understanding amid disaster. It can also remind us of how history repeats itself. Looking at photos of homes, or rather the skeletons of homes, on the Pacific Coast Highway, I decided to turn back to Mike Davis’s essay in Ecology of Fear, “the case for letting Malibu burn.”
The total fire suppression policy that Southern California instituted in 1919 was a “tragic error,” Davis says. The older the brush—the “fuel”—the stronger the fire, and so if small, controlled burns never happen, due to policy instituted in order to protect beachfront homes, brush stays untouched, grows older and dryer, and meanwhile becomes stronger fuel for the fire that will eventually break out. “Fuel, not ignitions, causes fire. You can send an arsonist to Death Valley and he’ll never be arrested,” Richard Minnich once wrote, as quoted by Davis. People keep asking how such fires have started. Right-wing talking heads and their parrots keep making the unnerving assertion that unhoused people must be starting the fires in Santa Monica. But even if a brush fire ignites from a cigarette butt, it’s the land’s geography and how we have chosen to use it that keeps it going.
It can certainly be strange on the eye to see homes burn along the water line. The water is right there, we tell ourselves as the flames curl closer to the shore, how is the fire not sunk in this battle of rock, paper, scissors? But as Davis reminded me, fires have always been part of Malibu's history; in fact they are vital. What is more confounding is that the 1930 Decker Canyon fire, which tore through the area just two years after the PCH opened up for traffic, never “provoked a historic debate on the wisdom of opening Malibu to further development.” It has burned many times since then. Kanye West bought a Tadao Ando house there that he destroyed, by choice. The magical hillside summer camp there, where I spent some of the most important weeks of my adolescence, incinerated in the 2018 Camp Fire.
What is perhaps almost more affecting about the current catastrophe however is not even the smoldering of the places themselves, but the jolt of having to flee them. Growing up north of San Diego, in an inland suburb, fire evacuation was as rare but always as threatening as an earthquake. My family was lucky. In middle school, our home did not burn down, and we had a place to go when flames threatened to take it. We left our home for a week, my mom’s minivan full of her jewelry and all of my grandfather’s watercolor paintings that once covered our walls. We went north, to a hotel we were able to stay in because my parents’ longtime friend owned it. (I am hoping, though I am unsure, if it was free for everyone at that time.)
All I could think about then were the animals. My best friend was the granddaughter of a woman who owned horses and a property where they lived. She called me on the phone while we were at the dismal greige hotel asking if I could help; the horses needed to be evacuated.
My parents and I got into a fight. I needed to go save the horses. My parents needed me to stay alive. Ultimately, I cried, forbidden from saving them. Luckily, they were safely evacuated anyway. The most vivid memory I have from that time is returning to the barn once the major destruction had settled. I patted the fur of a dark horse, and my hand left a big five star on its coat, which was otherwise covered in a thick layer of ash.
I am thinking about the animals now, but also about the people who are not going to make it out of this alive. As Davis aptly wrote in “the case for letting Malibu burn,” “the existential differences between the tenement district and the gilded coast are enormous at any time,” but during wildfires in Southern California, “Westlake and Malibu suffer a common lot.” He goes on to explain what remains true now, that while all suffer, not all can save themselves the same way. Most people cannot, as one Palisades resident did, go on Twitter to ask if anyone knows of a private fire department who can save his house, and that he can “pay anything” for it.
I am not going to try to make conjectures about what sort of policies could improve the situation next time. I’d rather leave that to those who know more than I do about the city of Los Angeles. (Happy to point out those people to those interested.) But I will ask that rather than looking for someone to blame, we think about how we might help, or at least keep in mind, those who are suffering now and will suffer again.
Well said