Live in the fire, and cover them

The Push and Pull of Los Angeles: Beauty and Danger

Often when you visit Los Angeles, you take the 282 steps to Baldwin Hills. You pass sagebrush and primrose. A high-rise in the center of the city can be seen. Then, as you stand under the live oak trees and drink water, you notice the oil wells, the moving donkeys pumping oil from the ground, symbols of the oil-hungry economy that gave birth to this vast city and makes it will be flammable. .

You don’t stop at an oil well. You know they are there. They were always there. You focus your eyes elsewhere. The Santa Monica Mountains show their crowns as the sea level rises. You see a glimpse of the Pacific. You are obsessed with monarch butterflies.

This seeing and not seeing – this knowing and not knowing – for me, is the essence of living in Los Angeles. You believe in its golden story, but if not, how can you live here? Maybe that’s the key to bouncing back from this latest disaster.

I am a child of Los Angeles. I ran away from it. I ran back there. My family refuses to leave Los Angeles, which makes it a part of me forever.

It’s not that we don’t know the dangers. The road rage, the heat rising from the pavement, the crazy house prices, the kids folding on the Metro, the tent of misery you go to when you drop your kids off at school. It’s not that we don’t understand that if there’s a burning hill, there are only straight and winding roads to safety.

My friend bought a house on one of these slopes in Hollywood in 2022. He moved in last week. He knows all too well how climate change raises the stakes. He didn’t think it would be so harsh, it was so fast. “It’s happening faster than I thought,” he wrote. “I knew you had a point.”

I really didn’t. I was afraid of him.

Los Angeles is no stranger to ash and wind. A fire in 1961 destroyed Bel Air; Zsa Zsa Gabor surveyed the ruins of her home in a fur coat. Watts burned in 1965. More Los Angeles burned in 1992, after the televised beating of Rodney King. Santa Ana winds fueled the Woolsey Fire in 2018, which burned through Ventura County. After that, the “Ventura strong” yard sign went up, as if we all have fire powers, especially those of us who live in the dry forest.

You will hear a lot of bromides about patience in the coming days.

Every great city prides itself on its ability to bounce back from destruction. Mumbai after the terrorist attacks in 2006. New York after Sandy. Paris after the Notre Dame fire.

And every great city sinks into its history to come back again. In the case of Los Angeles, there are many beautiful places.

The fire this time, however, will likely force us to consider the lessons we should have learned from the past about living in hotter, drier, and more flammable cities. Even if Pacific Palisades homeowners want to rebuild, should they be close to the fire zone? Should you build buildings without a single access road to them? What should we do with the trees that shade the house in the summer but become blown in the fire season?

Scientists who study resilience in nature say that the memory of a trauma helps build strength against the next trauma. Some coral species are resistant to bleaching after experiencing one or two bleaching events during their lifetime, according to a recent study. Corn that has been exposed to drought early in life is better equipped to deal with it later.

Living things carry memory. What matters is what we do with it.

Psychologists say that people who recover after a disaster share certain habits. One of them is hope. It is not a false positive, but the ability to focus on a problem that can be solved.

Los Angeles must focus on the problems it can solve in order to save itself. There are limits to how things look.

Those of us who carry Los Angeles within us know that our survival on a warmer planet sometimes requires ignoring the dangers and focusing hard on the beautiful things. This is how Los Angeles tricks us and supports us. The beautiful. The cherimoas in December. The tube-light taco stands on Centinela. The yucca blossoms that bloom on the Santa Monica mountains in April, as if to say, “Look at me, look at me.” And turn your eyes away from the burning sores on the hills.