FIRE and FIRE and FIRE and FIRE and Fi..........
Palisades Fire, Topanga Fire, January 2025
From Summer Movies in Central Park, by Czeslaw Milosz as published in the New Yorker, January 2025
I remember a field where the radiance
Of the burning city colors the dry wormwood
And crickets play, red from the glow,
Through which an army of smoke marches.
The water rushing along the road flutters
The dress on the corpse of a woman,
As the city descends long days and nights
Into legend, which won’t compensate for its disasters.
This memory contains a warning for those
Who spend their nights on soft couches:
An errant fire will often burn right through
The rosy stains on bedsheets.
Whoever enters the human microcosmos
Where marvels are performed should know
That it delivers, serenely, on a daily basis,
The retributions of a malignant fate.
****
In my essay, The Red Line, 11/9/2024 I wrote, “At midnight of Election night, after the Council, when the trends were becoming clear, I spent two hours packing my car as great winds were predicted, with gusts of 80 to perhaps 100 miles an hour. The last time something similar occurred, I sat in the living room listening to the wind, which sounded like a great god, and so I prayed to it, beginning, as one must, with praise, as it slowly and carefully lifted the roof from my house and folded it down on the other side.”
The morning after the election, I taught a writing class while listening to alerts for the Broad fire, fairly close to me in Malibu, which was contained to 50 acres and the Mountain fire burning toward Ventura which tonight on November 9th after burning 20,650 acres is 17% contained.
The Mountain Fire ultimately burned 22 days and 19,004 acres.
Today, January 13, 2025, the Palisades fire which burned very close to our home, which has been a sanctuary for so many since 1981, has at this moment, 1/13/2025 at 1:11pm, burned 23,713 acres and is 14% contained. This does not account for the Eaton, Kenneth, Hurst fires currently burning, contained and not contained in Los Angeles county and all the others torches being raised in recognition of our emotional and spiritual inflammations.
Warnings just posted:
A long duration Red Flag Warning remains in effect across much of Los Angeles and Ventura counties through Wednesday, expanding into the mountains of San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara counties, as well as Ojai/Lake Casitas by tonight. THERE WILL LIKELY BE DAMAGING WINDS GUSTING BETWEEN 55 AND 70 MPH ACROSS PORTIONS OF THE RED FLAG WARNING AREA FROM EARLY TUESDAY MORNING THROUGH WEDNESDAY MORNING, LEADING TO THE PDS RED FLAG WARNING UPGRADE. AREAS IN THE RED FLAG WARNING (ESPECIALLY DURING THE PDS TIME FRAME) WILL HAVE A HIGH RISK FOR LARGE FIRES WITH VERY RAPID FIRE SPREAD, EXTREME FIRE BEHAVIOR, AND LONG RANGE SPOTTING. WHILE DANGEROUS PDS RED FLAG FIRE WEATHER CONDITIONS ARE LIKELY WITH THIS EVENT EARLY TUESDAY MORNING INTO WEDNESDAY MORNING, THIS WIND EVENT IS NOT EXPECTED TO BE AS STRONG AND DESTRUCTIVE AS LAST WEEK`S WINDSTORM.
Obviously, this is not being written to comfort you or me. These words emerge from my first moments of silence since Tuesday, January 7th, when I and Gentle Boy evacuated. I cannot keep track of all the friends and community members who have lost their homes and the places we gathered and where we were nurtured and sustained.Several friends have had to evacuate several times as safe houses become endangered. We do not know if this, now assumed, very safe urban area will remain so if the wild winds manifest.
Those who have lost their houses will have to begin again. But, if we do not all agree to consider and act on how we must all begin again, any reconstruction will ultimately be useless.
Two words accurately described what many saw and experienced these last weeks: Inferno and Apocalypse.
My dear dear human relatives, all my dear dear human relatives – we are responsible: Climate collapse, inordinate and insatiable greed and War! All our wars are also the sources of these fires. Additionally, being prevented from extracting ourselves from life styles based on money money money which are also driving so many people mad. You know this. The madness has its dire consequences. All our actions indicate a significant inability to consider the others, the other beings, the other peoples, the more than humans, as we consider only ourselves.
However, a sane response has a simple infrastructure: WE not I.
I do not know how I will begin to rebuild my life when I return to Two Wolf Hill. I do not know how we will rebuild, how we will rebuild each other’s lives, how our rebuilding will equally consider all, we, the animals, the Earth.
My house is standing at this moment. As it happened the firefighters staged their remarkable response to the near fires from the firebreak turned meadow alongside the Eucalyptus and Oak sentinels that many of you know.
But still I must, we must entirely and willingly reimagine, revision, restructure, rebuild. We cannot restore. We must find new ways to continue. We must make amends. Each of us. Each of us.
What will we do to be in accord with all those who are suffering so greatly as is our Mother, Earth, from whom all things come and from whom we take through terrible surgeries what cannot be restored and what cannot heal? Let us heartstorm this.
This is the little, if anything, that I know at the moment.
If I continue to write this to you, I may finally be able to weep.
I have been freely offering my writing to the community for 60 years and posting essays on Substack since January 2022. If you can support the work with a paid subscription or an intermittent donation and / or recommend it to your friends and colleagues, it will be greatly appreciated. (It helps the work circulate if you share or leave a comment and check ‘like,’ when you do.)
"Footage from NBC LA showed a fawn with singed fur running down the middle of a deserted street in Altadena with no doe in sight as the Eaton Fire burned. Later that night, camera crews from ABC 7 spotted a mountain lion and two cubs running across Topanga Canyon Boulevard away from the Palisades Fire." High Country News. The toll on the individual animals is so much more than we even begin to understand.
I, many of us, have been waiting to hear from you as we watch the fire contort and incinerate. May your words fly across the land like embers that embed in our hearts and minds. There's no turning back. We must be brave as we move together. Take care please.