Fire Diary

One year ago today I went to the pool. It was my first time swimming since before the holidays.

In late summer 2024, I had resumed swimming regularly for the first time since quitting the swim team at the end of eighth grade. My pool is the West Hollywood Aquatic Center, built in 2023, an incredibly glamorous and chill spot on the top of a five-story building next to the public library in West Hollywood Park. It’s so nice that I sometimes have the olfactory hallucination of hot dogs and hamburgers grilling while I’m swimming, as if I was at one of the country clubs of my childhood, with a full-service concessions stand, rather than a municipal pool.

The wind that day was very strong. It created a kind of current in the water. The mood was odd on deck, lifeguards chasing objects as they flew around, and it was odd on the streets as I drove to the sauna afterwards. Lots of honking. Menacing trees.

Over a decade earlier I had been a regular at these infrared saunas on a busy street in Hollywood. Weekly I would arrive, wrung out with sadness and amped up with adrenaline, to sit in a hot private box and meditate and cry. The saunas had been upgraded with Bluetooth since my last visit. It seemed anachronistic to remember that in 2015 I would be offered a book of CDs to choose a meditation or spa music album before I headed in, that I operated a dinged-up CD player inside the sauna, futzing with the much-scratched CD, the heat-assaulted player. Some things hadn’t changed. They still provide a glass bottle of cold water that will be refilled if you leave it outside your curtained entrance. Towels, a robe.

I disrobed and sat in the heat, cracking myself up by blasting the horny sleaze music I had recently discovered both Barack Obama and I enjoy.

I knew that the Santa Anas had arrived. My partner and I had heard them whistle in during our morning meditation, had heard the reports of fire risk. In the sauna, listening to my filth, I forgot outside, laughing, easy. As I left I bought a five-pack of sauna sessions. “They never expire,” the woman who sold them to me said.

But when I went back outside my body pleasure was cut by the weather. There was a banging noise from I don’t know where on the street. I drove carefully.

While I was in the sauna my partner took these pictures from our living room window.

At home we’d had all the windows shut since the night before. Or we shut them that morning.

That afternoon, I had an astrology chart reading I had been looking forward to, from one of my favorite musicians. I sat enraptured while she explained the transits of the year to come. What was in store. Since being diagnosed as high-risk for breast cancer the previous October, I had had many such appointments, with herbalists, nutritionists, psychics, and now the second of two astrologers.

It wasn’t about needing to know the future, I told myself. I was just curious. I just wanted information. To be prepared.

When it was time to pick up our kid, I proposed to my partner that we drive to the preschool, five blocks away, because it felt bad outside. He agreed. After we went to the grocery store next to the school to get a few items for dinner.

A week earlier, we had returned from visiting his family for the holidays. We’d spent those seven days carefully settling back into our apartment, provisioning ourselves for winter with trips to Costco and Trader Joe’s. We weren’t going anywhere for a long time.

I don’t remember the above picture, in which it seems the hill is already on fire. I don’t remember that night. Dinner, bedtime, reading on our phones in bed. A video of my son wrapped in his dinosaur blanket, saying, “Rawr.” I think we were woken in the night by the sound of banging on the roof, old satellite discs dragged around in the wind. I put in a ticket with our building management company please remove the damn satellite dishes.

When the sun came up, it looked like this out of our windows.

Fire on both sides now, east and west.

School was canceled. We kept the windows closed and turned on the air purifier. We’ve spent countless days inside since our child was born. Some days we just don’t make it outside. Some days the windows are closed all day. But those days never feel like this one did: edgy, frightened. Our son, in response, was difficult and unhinged. (Or was he? He looks like a baby angel in the pictures from that day.) He had only been back at school for one day after weeks without childcare. Now we were on our own again.

I don’t remember trying to work. When we managed to get our kid to take a nap, my partner and I went in our bedroom, got into bed, and had sex. It became a story I started telling people as soon as two months later, about the feeling of death and life in the same room. I remember pulling back the sheets on our recently-made bed and moving our bodies together as the only solution. I remember his face and the sound of our voices.

Then we fell asleep until our son woke up. We read books, drew pictures, made snacks, dressed up in costumes.

By the time dinner time rolled we were pent up and anxious. It was wonderful news when our friends called and asked if they could come and spend the night. Not only was their apartment in Echo Park much worse off, smokewise, than ours in West Hollywood, they had discovered a catastrophic black mold infestation in their home that every day, the third recurrence of a problem that had made them both ill and previously put one of them in the hospital.

Come over, we told them. I set about making an elaborate dinner. Our son was excited to see them.

It’ll be like a sleepover, my partner and I said to each other. A party.

Our friends arrived and we had a delicious dinner I have never cooked again. Kale and white beans with rigatoni. After dinner, my partner was making up our bed for them—we would sleep in the living room, on the futon—when from the kitchen I heard him say, “Oh no. Oh no.”

I called out and asked what was wrong, but he didn’t answer.

I went in the bedroom and saw the Sunset Fire crawling over the top of the hill ten blocks north of our apartment.

We found it on Watch Duty.

My partner went and got our neighbors, a mother and two daughters recently arrived from Russia, and showed them what we saw. Together we watched the flames advance down the hill.

Very quickly it was decided that we would leave that night. Our friends said they would stay.

In under an hour we packed: my son‘s clothes, my partner‘s clothes, my clothes. Turtlenecks, jackets, raincoats, boots, sneakers, toiletries, the cat food, the cat litter. Tarot cards, journals, notebooks, computers, books, cables, special rocks and jewelry. My partner packed his guitar. Everything that we’d bring with us on any trip up north. The only thing I thought to bring that was out of the ordinary was my mother‘s ashes.

While we packed, our friends took care of our son, playing with him until he was laughing so hard he couldn’t breathe. They helped us load up into the car, tucking toys into his pockets, making sure he had things to amuse him within arm’s reach of his carseat. I was crying. The fire burned down the hill.

We drove to the gas station a few blocks from our apartment. The mood was terrible, car trunks overflowing with belongings, buzzing in the air, like a disaster movie. I was afraid someone would shoot us, try to steal our car. But people were polite. No one was threatening. We drove into Hollywood, onto the 101 North, which was basically empty, and out of the city.

We should not have driven all the way to San Francisco that night. We should have stopped at Harris Ranch in Coalinga and slept there. We were dangerously exhausted. But we were terrified, not thinking clearly, and felt like we needed to get very far away from Los Angeles. Earlier that evening, our friend had texted to invite us stay with her in her house in Noe Valley and we drove there without stopping except for gas a few times. My partner and I traded off while the other one slept in the back with our son. We were too tired. At one point I was nearly at the point of dozing off while driving and my partner had a night terror in the backseat and woke me up by screaming.

We were lucky.

We arrived after three in the morning and let ourselves in with the key our friend had left. My partner heroically hauled all of our stuff all the way up all the stairs. We lay in bed with my son, who was still breastfeeding them. I felt burned. Melted. Made of dust. Thrilled to be alive.

We heard the sound of our cat going to her food bowl.

“Sybby eating her beans,” my son said, and that was how we learned that he considers her kibble to be beans.

We woke up after 10 o’clock the next morning and talked to our host. I was as disoriented as I’ve ever been. Giddy, weird, very frightened. Maybe I made an attempt to answer work emails, I’m not sure. We were in a lovely house, a house that I often remark is the only house from my childhood I can still visit. I felt dislodged from time. We must’ve eaten something, we must’ve had coffee. After a while, we went out on a long walk through the city.

We walked down into the Mission, looking at things, coming eventually to a coffee shop where a beautiful barista with lavish facial hair and extensive tattoos comped us drinks. He told us that he was from L.A. too, that his parents still lived there, near the Hollywood Bowl. I noticed his unique first name on our receipt—Snow—and for the next few days or even weeks I was hung up on him, on his kindness. I daydreamed that we would befriend him, go to his apartment, become somehow involved with him. That my partner and I would sleep with Snow together. It was a loony fantasy, the kind of thing you’d come up with if you wanted to be someone other than a forty-year-old climate refugee with a two-year-old child and a cat.¹  

Later that afternoon we went into our favorite bookstore in San Francisco. At this point, having been walking around drinking espresso and enjoying pleasant weather on a weekday afternoon, the day had taken on an otherworldly feeling of vacation. I recognized a woman in a bright orange turtleneck sweatshirt standing near the register. “Are you Rita Bullwinkel?” I asked her. She was. We had never met before, I explained, but she looked like her author photo.

Rita told me that she had seen my post, that she was sorry for what we were going through. And then she took us to the office of McSweeney’s and spent hours with us, letting my kid play on the dolly while we drank seltzer after seltzer. She gave us, conservatively, twenty-five books and magazines, for free. She took care of us, strangers she had never met. The day dovetailed into a different, more literary fantasy of kindness and friendship, one that came true.

We were in San Francisco for five days. We couldn’t seem to regulate. The very next day my partner was back at work. I kept trying to manage all the childcare, failing, getting impatient with our son and trying to hand him off. I heard my partner on Zoom calls explaining that, yeah, we were still in San Francisco. People texted to see if I was OK, if I needed help. I texted people with the same questions. People I knew had gone to San Diego, to Temecula, to Joshua Tree. Many had stayed.

Ten people I knew lost their homes in the fires.

We rode the train to the beach, ate dumplings with friends. We rode the bus to meet a friend in the Dogpatch and watched our sons play together. Then we walked up into Potrero Hill and over it, walked for hours. We bought groceries and made dinners. We were spent so much money on food in S.F. after having just spent so much money on food in L.A. We kept texting our friends who were staying in our apartment to eat the food we had left behind.

Late one night, after my partner and child had gone to bed, I crept back downstairs, wanting to hang out with our host. She was my mom‘s dear friend all almost all of my mother‘s life, and now she is mine. I found her watching a movie I had never heard of, The Return, a retelling of Odysseus‘s retaking of Ithaca, starring Ralph Fiennes.

“They just showed him naked,” my friend told me as I sat down. Onscreen, Fiennes scrabbled around, looking grody. “He must’ve been wearing a prosthetic. His penis was huge.”

It was the kind of thing she would have said to my mother. I watched the movie with her, missing my mom, crying in the dark, feeling grateful for the normalcy of her space and her kindness, for being able to sit beside her.

By Monday, my partner was at his wit’s end from trying to work, and I probably should’ve been too, but I was a fear zombie who said foreboding things like “We’ll see about that” when he suggested we return home to L.A.

I told him I’d take our son out all day. We left home before nine in the morning and drove to the San Francisco zoo, arriving to an apocalyptically quiet, cold, abandoned complex whipped with wind from the ocean. We looked for the animals, most of whom were not up yet, and finally found a koala behind wall of glass under a dark enclosure.

“Take him out,” My son said. “I want to cuddle him.”

We rode a tiny train. I saw a camel in the distance. I wondered if the world had ended. Eventually, in early afternoon, we found our way to a sunny part of the zoo where there were giraffes and zebras who seem to be doing all right. We drove to another neighborhood and I sat in the car while he slept. We went to a restaurant where I had a cheeseburger and he had a milkshake. Eventually, we went back to our friend’s house.

The next day we drove up to Mendocino. People who had left L.A. were already going back. Many of my friends hadn’t left at all. But now there were all sorts of conflicting reports about how dangerous the air and water was, and no clear sense of when they would be safe. I couldn’t believe that the fires were still burning. Could they not have been put out yet? I watched Instagram videos of incarcerated firefighters from Fort Bragg, where we were headed, carefully putting out a small patch of the Palisades Fire.

I felt ill equipped to evaluate the situation and make decisions to keep my family safe. When I was growing up in River Forest, Illinois, we did tornado drills where we went out in the hallways of our elementary school, curled up in balls on the floor with our faces pressed to the ground, and our arms crossed above our necks. Or if I was at home, we went down in the basement. That was the extent of my disaster preparedness.

I had tried to be California-level prepared. For years, I had stockpiled water in giant plastic tanks in the back of every closet in my apartment. I had two cases of sternos and plenty of dry goods. But if the air was unsafe to breathe, how could we return?

We moved into my angel mother-in-law’s house. Our son had childcare here. She and her partner helped us with everything. Our child played in their garden full of flowers, on the headlands above the ocean. I created a ritual of listening “Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head” while driving my son to his babysitter‘s house in the pouring rain each morning.

One night, we Facetimed with one of our friends back in L.A. They had moved back into their apartment, but she returned to our apartment that night so that we could direct her to fill up a box to ship us: my bathing suit, goggles, and cap, the Christmas cards my partner had made but not managed to send.

“I see my chair!” Our son said, noticing the edge of his high chair in the frame.

Did we go to the grocery store? Did we have dinner with my in-laws? I took walks by the beach. I did my jobs. I attended contradictory Zooms organized by the Clean air Coalition and KCRW about air quality in L.A. I wrote aggressive emails to my son‘s preschool, demanding to know what their air purification protocols were being put in place at the small family run establishment, where the windows don’t fully close. Another mom from the class called me crying. She didn’t think the school was taking it seriously enough, but she didn’t know what to do. She needed to work. She had to work, and her daughter had to go to preschool.

I talked to my therapist on Zoom. Sent her a link to the recording of one of the air quality Zooms. I found out David Lynch died qhwn my friend Alex texted me. I made a pie with frozen cherries and dyed my hair red with Manic Panic, wanting to be someone else.

I had spent the last five years of my life proud that I had succeeded in making a life for myself in Los Angeles, my favorite city, the place that was the thing I got to have after losing so much that I loved from my early life, but now I was ready to throw it away if it was dangerous, if it was bad, if it would hurt me and my family. In L.A., my friends mostly went about their lives, ran air purifiers, wore masks, or not, or not. A parent on the preschool class text chain answered anxious inquiries from those who had fled by proudly announcing they were taking their kids “On a long hike tomorrow morning in the hills! It’ll be sunny!”

By the time we did go back I still didn’t really want go back, but I didn’t want to abandon L.A., either. I had spent about a week sure we would leave the country, and I found the grief of that decision unbearably heavy. It took a while to feel like it was safe and maybe I still don’t feel like it is safe. But I am glad that we came back.

I tried writing this newsletter on every anniversary: a week after the fire started, a month, two months, six months. Eventually, I decided it would have to be today, a year later. There’s so much I have forgotten or neglected to include or don’t know how to record. This draft sent sat unfinished for a long time.

A week after we returned, I went back to the sauna and sat listening to my horny music again, trying to feel goofy, silly, easy trying to feel the good feeling in my body after swimming again. It had rained in L.A., a lot, to the point of flooding. My kid went back to the school with the windows that don’t fully close. In the summer and in the fall I swan in the ocean many times. I have driven through the west side burn scar. My son knows about the fire and talks about it. He says he remembers seeing it. I hope he doesn’t but I’m not surprised if he does.

I wanted to write this and also I didn’t. Last night I got a migraine, the first one I’ve had in a long time, after lying in bed trying to write this for a little while. I went to bed early and our son woke up in the middle of the night having thrown up on his pillow. I felt better today but this afternoon, when I finally had time to write, I felt hot, fevered. I had to go and lay down in bed again and write this mostly by voice dictation in order to get it out.

Tonight the winds are up again and ICE murdered a woman in Minneapolis, orphaning her child, and although things have felt better, for a little while maybe, with two recent weeks of beautiful rain here in Los Angeles, they are feeling bad once more. To me, anyway, in my limited little sliver of reality.

While we were in northern California at the beginning of the year, we visited a friend whose friend was staying with them, a poet who is a survivor of the genocide ISIS perpetuated against the Yazidi people in Kurdistan in 2014.

We sat in a backseat together and I told the poet the story of how we had left L.A., our experience of the fires. I said “So that’s my own minor experience of being a refugee.” I wasn’t thinking. I felt so stupid for saying that. Our lives were disrupted in a small, impermanent way. My family was lucky. We had so many places to go, so many people to help us. We had the privilege to leave, to stay away, to return.

I still feel stupid for saying it even though it is an accurate description of what happened to me.

Thank you for reading. I strongly recommend my friend Katya Apekina’s essay about her fire experience, “Escape from Los Angeles.”

Stay safe, everyone, and rest well.

1  Snow, if by some chance you ever read this, I’m sorry for being a creep, and thank you for the cappuccino.