Watching my former city get decimated by unabating, indiscriminate flames as I sat in relative safety over 2,500 miles away summoned a kind of disconnected helplessness I hadn’t felt in a long time.
The warning whistles were deafening. We all knew and accepted that we hadn’t moved to the most stable place on the planet. But even during my last few years in LA, I was shaken to see such a radical increase in wildfire activity, air quality warnings, and a general sense that the precarious balance of life in a desert masquerading as a metropolis was inching toward unsustainable…or, at the very least, unwise.
However, I never dreamed that this degree of destruction was conceivable, let alone possible. It was a perfect storm of bone-dry vegetation, those brutal Santa Ana winds, and multiple, concurrent blazes straining an already-stretched and exhausted collection of firefighters and first responders who didn’t sleep or stop for days.
The results have been catastrophic. Lives and memories snuffed out in a matter of hours. Homes built on the backs of decades of tireless work and savings reduced to unrecognizable rubble and ash. People fleeing in a panic, grabbing the three or four items that registered as “irreplaceable” in the mere minutes they had to make those decisions.
I can’t comprehend the level of utter hysteria and helplessness they had to endure.
Where do you start when everything is gone? What’s the first step toward some semblance of normalcy when nothing but roadblocks and barricades are littering the path? It’s an unimaginable, Herculean climb back to ordinary.
The “thoughts and prayers” will be sent. Donations will come flooding into the organizations doing their best to stop the bleeding. Unscrupulous real estate sharks will steal the scorched land for pennies on the dollar. The houses will be rebuilt. The neighborhoods will return.
Everything will burn again.
This is not simply another wildfire affecting the region in a history of wildfires. It was Mother Gaia’s siren song. Stop this behavior and your blatant disregard for the perilous disruption of Earth’s delicate harmony or you will continue to suffer under the weight of her wrathful hand.
My heart breaks for the city. The friends, colleagues, and people I met along the way are understandably scared and gutted right now. But there has to be a line drawn at some point. As the climate continues to rage, some incredibly tough decisions need to be made.
Rebuilding the same kinds of houses in the exact same place and simply hoping it might be better next time should not be one of them.
Solitary Alignment 