"The horror, the horror"

On a beautiful January day that exists only in California, snow-capped mountains to the east, sparkling Pacific Ocean to the west, I saw the flames starting on a hilltop to the north. This is not uncommon in California, and I thought it would soon be brought under control. Mother Nature had a different idea.

The aerial photo above shows Pacific Palisades, the scorched mountains above us and the burned community below. My house is circled in red.

Pacific Palisades has a strong identity, it’s a pretty close-knit community. We have our share of celebrities, but most people are working professionals: law, finance, writers, agents, etc. Nestled on a bluff between Santa Monica and Malibu, it is a bit isolated, which fosters a heightened sense of community. For as long as I can remember, 40 years or so, there was a T-shirt at the local skate shop that read, “If you’re rich you live in Beverly Hills, if you’re famous you live in Malibu, if you’re lucky you live in Pacific Palisades.” I think we all believed that: we were lucky to live where we did.

Fires in the mountains were expected, and we thought our emergency teams were prepared for that. Fire cutting through the town to the ocean was not, expected or prepared for. Linda, my wife, was prepared. She quickly gathered most of the family heirlooms and photos, some of which date to more than a century ago, and loaded the car while I returned to the house to collect what I could think of as I saw the flames approach down the hillside, still thinking the fire would never actually reach our home.

I missed some important items of personal value, and left behind some beautiful artwork. The house our children grew up in, with all the memories of birthday parties, sleepovers, concerts, dinner parties and holidays, is gone, subsumed in flames and left in ashes.

There is little time to grieve. With 10,000 families all suddenly looking for housing, and large parts of the city off-limits with fires still burning, our first priority was to secure a place to live. Many friends opened their homes to us, and there has been an outpouring, truly, of generosity across the city, but we knew we couldn’t stay in a guest room for long. We ran from one rental listing to another, encountering hundreds of families doing the same. Linda found a house that looked good, and the wonderful woman who owns it fell in love with our golden retriever and rented us her house. If not for Linda and Quinto, I would still be homeless. Not to mention hopeless.

There has not been time for deeper reflection of the past week. I’m not interested in how the fire started, or if anything could have been handled better by politicians or emergency personnel. I do know that the people on the front lines of the fires are heroes.

My thoughts turn toward the future, with so many unanswerable questions, from the mundane, if we rebuild will our house be insurable, to the existential, how will the community change in the coming years and will we still want to be a part of it. Some friends and neighbors have already said they do not plan to return, so the neighborhood will inevitably change. But how, and what should we do.

I want to come back to the generosity of the people here. So many friends offered to take us in, strangers across the city are giving free food and clothing to those displaced. Our new landlady opened her closet to Linda (but not to me) and said take whatever you want. Unbelievable. The community really has come together in order to heal together. That healing began even as the embers still burn.

In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Mr. Kurtz reflects on the destruction he has brought to Africa, and utters one of the most famous phrases in literature, “The horror, the horror.” Not coincidently, the exact same words are spoken at the end of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now by Colonel Kurtz as he surveys the devastation of Vietnam.  Those words, “the horror, the horror,” came to mind when I saw the first photos of my neighborhood.

But it is the outpouring of love that dominates my thoughts now, and toward the future of rebuilding our house and our community. This is the City of the Angels, Los Angeles, and I see angels all around me.

I’m not surprised that the extraordinary Amanda Gordon has captured perfectly our emotions with her exquisite poem, Smoldering Dawn, and I leave you with her beautiful words:

All our angels have gone.
In this smoldering dawn we soldier on.
We’ve proved ourselves strong.
Not by how badly we’ve burned.
But how bravely we bond.

Apocalypse does not mean ruin but revelation.
In devastation this infernus has injured us but it cannot endure us even in the surreal, We do not surrender.
We emerge from the embers.
The hardest part is not disaster, but the after.

Scorched earth is where the heart hurts.
What we restore first where we start the work.
Today we mourn.
Tomorrow we’re born.

We end the burning.
Befriend the hurting.
Mend those who face the flame.
We reclaim our city’s name.
A revelation that only this place tells;

To find our angels, all we need do is look within ourselves.