The morning the fires started, a Turkey Vulture carrying a big rat in its beak flew right by me almost hitting me. The rat was so heavy in the vulture’s mouth, the vulture was having trouble keeping altitude and that’s when it almost collided with me. It flew a little further past me and dropped the rat into the Sacramento River with a silent splash. I didn’t understand what had just happened. Turkey Vultures are scavengers, not hunters. Very, very, very rarely will they take an animal alive but then why drop it in the river? Maybe the vulture decided it was too heavy and not worth its trouble? Why take it at all, there’s plenty of roadkill and carrion here. Nothing about that moment made sense. I had just witnessed a random act of nature on that poor rat.
As that day went on, the news started coming in. The flames were spreading fast and the Getty Villa was in the line of fire. I texted my firefighter friend who was on his way to the fires, “Please save the Getty Villa!”
From that moment on, I was a mess. Fires make me crazy. And to see so much loss and destruction to the place and people I still consider home, was devastating. Of course I remembered Joan Didion’s “The Santa Ana” at that moment. What Angeleno, native or transplant, who has ever read Joan Didion does not think of her when the winds pick up. Or of Raymond Chandler. But I didn’t let myself revisit the essay. I didn’t think I needed it to, I have read it a hundred times, it’s etched in my subconscious like the Santa Ana winds are.
The days progressed and the destruction continued, I was no better. All I wanted to do was doom scroll and cry while I texted back an forth will all my friends and neighbors in LA. LA is the only place I have friends and family left. My friend, The Hurricane, told me the birds were acting real weird the day before the fires.
“They got real quiet.” She said.
Birds always know. I thought of that quote in Patti Smit’s book “M Train”:
” …like the birds of Iraq before shock and awe in the first day of spring. It was said that the sparrows and songbirds stopped singing, their silence heralding the dropping of bombs.”
Birds know.
Looking for the quote in Patti Smith’s book I remembered she even talks about the LA weather in a chapter called, “Tempest Air Demons.” Any writer who has ever lived in LA writes about the winds. I found that reading the “M Train” chapter made me feel at peace like I hadn’t felt since the fires started. So I found myself picking up “The Santa Ana” for the nteenth time in my life. And perhaps every other time in my life I had gone to it was to feel some sort of resignation about what the weather was doing, I can’t be sure. As I reread it, I was able to release some of the pain and anguish I had been carrying around all week. “The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself.” I also reread Nathanael West, Raymond Chandler, Octavia Butler. Having the luxury of not having had my home burn down to the ground, I was able to let go. Once again, literature had helped me process, grieve and heal. I even regretted not revisiting these writings earlier in the week for fear of being cliché.
Then a Los Angeles Times column piece titled, “Column: Literary types see L.A. as apocalypse hiding under shallowness and excess. Don’t let them define us — especially now” was published. It is criticizing us for always quoting the same quotes whenever a fire breaks out in LA because of the winds:
“For decades, I’ve seen journalists and other folks share those four works and more every time a fire starts or it’s Santa Ana season — “Gathering heat from the distant desert, enraged it invades the city, creating the season of heat and fire” (John Rechy), “Hills are filled with fire” (Jim Morrison in the Doors classic “L.A. Woman”). And then there’s “Beverly Hills 90210” — eh, you can go find the infamous Santa Anas episode on YouTube.”
Then he goes on to say about Didion and others:
“I don’t tire of reading them, because they’re well-crafted thoughts that few writers can ever hope to top. This time around, though, so many folks have posted the same quotes to the point that the brilliant is becoming banal.
In the face of so much suffering, why do so many regurgitate the regurgitated?”
‘He doesn’t get it one bit’, I thought. I like the writer, read his column pieces all the time, but he didn’t get it this time.
In the face of so much suffering, to regurgitate the regurgitated is prayer.
Comfort. Normalcy. Familiarity. Even resignation when reminded that LA is a city of fire after all. It has always been. The city wasn’t singled out in an out-of-character, random act of nature–like the live rat being taken by the turkey vulture. Apocalyptic weather and fires are something we know and understand living in LA, even playing into its mystique we love so much. Los Angeles, the city, demands to be a character of our LA stories. As Wildfires of another kind are the protagonist of all my stories here now that I live in rural Northern California in the ashes of the Carr Fire, having left LA during the pandemic.
Mr. Arellanos recognizes the need to read and re read these quotes when he quotes English Professor Liza Alvarez:
“She doesn’t mind seeing the canonical quotes passed around every time Santa Anas and fires flare up, “because I’m a Californian,” she joked. “There’s a comfort in sharing what we know. You want to be a part of a moment. Fire is an old story. Fire in California is a very old story.’”
The column finishes by suggesting we adopt Octavia Butler’s quote instead if we are going to adopt any:
“’In order to rise From its own ashes,” she wrote in the sentence I’m seeing bandied about the most, “A phoenix First Must Burn.”
With all respect to Didion, Davis and the other literary legends who have written about our devil winds and fires, that’s the quote Southern Californians should take to heart right now.”
And we will, we will take that quote from “Parable of the Sower” to heart, and like a phoenix LA will rise from its own ashes. But not yet, right now we are grieving, and healing and quoting those canonical phrases we know, in prayer.
