A few weeks before I flew for the holidays from my home in New York to Australia, there are fires in parks in and around New York City, including one just a few blocks from my sister-in-law’s apartment. The autumn had been unseasonably warm and dry, and for the first time that I can remember serious fires seem an actual possibility for the city at some point in the future.
But then, as is the case in New York, something else becomes the big story that we’re all talking about. A stabbing on the subway. Congestion pricing. U.S. politics. What are the real chances of fire becoming a real issue in New York, anyway?
The day I arrive in Melbourne, the temperature is 41 degrees. The next day it’s something like 27. Every American I text about it has the same reaction as my own: ‘It’s climate change.’ Every Melburnian gives the same response: ‘Nope. It’s Melbourne.’
From the moment I arrive, I hear talk of the fires happening elsewhere in the state, the friends who won’t be able to have the holidays they planned, the strangers that have lost their homes. Dazzled just to be back in Australia, and to have stumbled out of the American winter into the glorious golden light of summer, I barely register any of it.
I’ve been in Melbourne plenty of times before, but I’ve never previously experienced its uniquely searing summer heat. I find it has a way of sneaking up on you, the dryness of the climate somehow masking the occasional ferocity of its temperatures. The ever-shifting centigrade, too: in New York when summer settles in it stays for weeks, like a bully sitting on you. But over the course of the weeks that I spend in Melbourne the heat never lasts more than a day (and is often deliciously alleviated by a single step into the shade). Still, Christmas Day is the hottest Christmas I’ve ever experienced. I’m advised to definitely bring a hat to my friend’s sister’s house, and a wide-brimmed one on that. But in the end it’s so hot we never even venture out.
And back in Sydney, where I spend my final few days in the country before returning to the States, I soak its more temperate heat into every pore, as though I can store it up and release it in the coming icy days of the New York winter.
'Los Angeles is less one community shared by millions than a fragmented terrain of separate neighborhoods, bridged by the highways you take to get there.'
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There’s something subterranean about overseas travel between the States and Australia. After the first few hours the world falls away, and there is nothing but the dark tunnel and its shaking walls. At journey’s end you stumble back into the light and a bigger world, dazed at the opportunity but also unsure what you’ll find.
One thing I definitely didn’t expect upon landing in Los Angeles last Wednesday morning was a text from someone asking me to pray for a mutual friend who had just had to evacuate his family from their home in the Los Angeles suburb of Altadena. It turns out, in the 14 hours that my plane had been in the air, Los Angeles has exploded into flame. To the west and to the east, massive fires spurred on by 100 mph winds roar out of control. Already tens of thousands of people have lost their homes or been forced to flee them.
Like Victoria, California does a yearly dance with drought and wind and fire. I lived in Los Angeles from 2010-2021; each year there seemed to be more fires up and down the state, and in our region. In November of 2018 the Malibu area caught fire and stayed that way for weeks. The year before footage of fire burning like lava on a hill along one side of a major Los Angeles highway down which cars were driving had made news around the world. I happened once again to be in Australia at the time. I talked to friends, fearful for their safety. Most scoffed at the footage. Yes, there had been a fire, but it was nothing like the apocalypse the press was creating.
Until now, that seemed to be the normal reaction. Yes, California has horrible fires. Sometimes they get close to Los Angeles. But they never attack the city proper. There was a shared confidence that seemed to come with that, a feeling that they never could.
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The bus that takes me from the airport to my hotel is empty at 9am on a Wednesday morning but for one other passenger, who tells me and the bus driver without prompting that he has a family staying with him. ‘They lost everything.’ As we drive down Lincoln Boulevard you can see the black smoke pouring horizontally across the sky on the horizon. Even at a distance, you can smell the fires. I taste the smoke in the back of my throat for days.
As I wait for my room at the hotel a young man enters the lobby. ‘Are your rooms selling out?’ he asks the clerk. ‘Not really,’ she says, casually, like this is just a bit of trivia they’re sharing. ‘A couple people are staying longer.’
Every few hours I check the Los Angeles Times’ maps of the fires. I swore off both the Times and the Washington Post after their publishers interfered with editors to prevent the papers from endorsing a candidate in the recent presidential election. But it turns out information overcomes righteousness in the rock paper scissors of disaster.
But no matter how deep I try to go into those maps, I can’t get my head around the scale of what is happening or the danger that anyone I know might be in. My friend Erika’s apartment is within two miles of the massive Pacific Palisades fire zone. But when we talk about getting together she suggests we eat at our favorite Mexican place near her house. The idea of driving toward an out-of-control fire baffles me. Yet when I arrive the place is as packed as ever, and the general energy of the room is like Lygon Street on a Saturday night. There’s none of the fear or mournfulness you might expect, and no sign of the inferno happening within a 10-15 minute drive.
In some ways that’s in keeping of the nature of Los Angeles, this city without a center. Though it is the second biggest city in the United States, Los Angeles is in fact less one community shared by millions of people, as I might describe New York or Sydney, than a fragmented terrain of separate neighborhoods out of which those millions of people each construct their own unique experience of community. L.A. is an amalgamation of the places you love and work and the friends you frequently visit, bridged by the highways you take to get there.
My friend Ellie texts me to say the Hollywood Hills are now on fire. People are being asked to flee from the Sunset part of Hollywood where tourists go to see the stars in the pavement. She mentions that everyone is using a crowd-sourced fire watch app called ‘Watch Duty’ to keep track of the fires, because the information being sent out by the city is almost totally incoherent. Friends of hers have spent hours trying to decipher whether they are in evacuation zones or not.
We eat at a tiny Thai place near my hotel. On the way to meet her I run into a middle-aged man standing by a laundry pushcart. ‘Good morning,’ I say. ‘Well, not so much,’ he tells me. ‘We lost our house.’
Walking to the restaurant, I’m aware of everyone I see as potentially just like him, their personal lives in freefall. But once again inside the restaurant everything seems fine. Ellie and I talk about my trip, her boyfriend, our jobs.
Then an alert blares out from everyone’s phone. The city has issued an evacuation warning. We look outside; there’s no sign of fire or smoke. Ellie’s friends start texting her. They all got the same alert, no matter where they live. It’s clearly some kind of glitch.
It turns out the city accidentally sent an alert to all 10 million people living in the city. Minutes later they follow up with a second text confirming it was a mistake, using the same scary alert sounds. You can’t help but wonder what the hell is going on. And it rends the seeming equanimity of the vibe in the restaurant. Ellie and I quickly part ways.
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At home I go on Facebook to see what I can learn about my friends. My feed is strange, posts from people I love talking about fleeing or losing their homes beside posts from others elsewhere about what they had for dinner, or someone’s birthday, or how they have finally had it with Mark Zuckerberg. It seems almost scandalous for anyone who is not in Los Angeles to be posting right now. Like being at the bedside of a friend who is dying while someone else in the room won’t stopping going on about their sweet new ride.
But even amongst my friends in Los Angeles there is such a wide disparity of experience. One friend texts me simply that he has lost everything. Meanwhile a mate in a part of the city far from the fires texts me he’d still rather deal with fires than snow any day.
A Jewish friend with a lot of interest in Christianity, whose family is thankfully safe so far, asks me somewhat tongue in cheek whether I couldn’t pull some strings to get God to put an end to all this. I find myself wondering which member of the Trinity might have some consolation to offer this situation. God the Father has a terrible history when it comes to natural disasters. More often than not he is the initiator of catastrophe, and he only relents when begged, or after the Israelites admit their sinfulness.
For his part Jesus deals almost exclusively with individuals and their spiritual and physical ailments. He does calm the storm at sea, in a sort of meta-textual reply to the Hebrew Scriptures’ storm-bringer God. But on the whole Jesus seems much more likely to walk with those grieving the loss of their homes and loved ones than to be the one to whom we should look to stop the flames.
And with its frequent depiction as fire, the Holy Spirit seems the least helpful image, even if its flames are meant to connote the kind of courage and faith the people of Los Angeles need right now. It’s a strange thing about us and fire: We experience it as a force of sudden and seemingly infinite destructive power, and yet for some reason we draw upon it for positive metaphors, as well. How many times have you heard people talk about the seeds of the eucalyptus tree, how they require fire in order to crack open and grow? So often fire is used like this to represent renewal, whether in the Christian, phoenix-like sense of death and resurrection, or in the more sober vision of a winnowing purge that creates space for something new.
But in the videos a fleeing friend sends of his neighborhood, every house on his block a ruin decimated to its foundations, there are no hopeful futures to be found. Maybe on some level our instinct to turn fire into metaphor is like Dylan Thomas raging against the dying of the light, a way of insisting that the inferno’s furious destructive power does not get the last word over us. Genesis 1, the 7 days of creation, has a similar origin story. Written at a time when Israel had been invaded and its people sent into exile, describing the orderly creation of the universe was a way of reassuring the people that no matter the evidence before them, God was still god of the universe, and ultimately evil would be contained (though not erased).
Maybe that’s the best that I can offer my friend, not a hopeful image of God but the knowledge that he and his family and everyone else in Los Angeles are not alone. The Bible is filled with stories of communities who have experienced catastrophe. But how is that any comfort?
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At 3:57am the next morning, another alarm blasts from my phone, telling me to evacuate. It’s another city-wide error, but it does get me up and packing.
When I arrive at the airport everything once again seems completely normal. The line at Starbucks is twenty deep. Football clips are playing on the TVs. The bartender at the bar near my gate is dancing to salsa music.
Waiting for the plane I come across a New York Times headline: ‘Los Angeles is Starring in an All-Too-Real Disaster Movie.’ It’s such a New York Times take on Los Angeles. No matter whether the topic is national politics, escaped zoo animals, or a children’s sport tournament, New York Times stories about the city seem almost always to involve references to movies, celebrities, natural disasters, and traffic.
Los Angeles is indeed the home of the disaster movie, both in the sense that so many of those stories are dreamt up here and many also take place here. It’s weird, the degree to which Hollywood seems to delight in stories about its own destruction. Maybe it’s another example of the coping mechanisms you need to live in a state known for its natural disasters.
But while I understand the impulse, the disaster movie seems like the wrong metaphor for what’s happening here. Disaster films are by nature reassuring. We watch them safely tucked away at home or in a theater where we might sit in faux leather seats and be waited on by attendants. And normally the engine driving such films is the drive and ingenuity by which the virtuous people make it out alive. They’re about what we’re capable of more than they are about the catastrophes we face.
No doubt the aftermath of the Los Angeles fires will include tales of heroism or generosity. But more than anything they will be stories of grief and loss, of people who went from having Christmas and New Year’s in these homes with their loved ones to having absolutely nothing at all.
Onboard our plane, another false alarm shrieks from someone’s phone. As we pull up into the air from the tarmac, the person next to me curls up next to the window, intent on getting a good shot of the fires, for what purpose, who can say.
In the days since I see my friends repeatedly marking themselves safe on Facebook. I thought at first they were the same initial posts recirculated to me via Facebook’s ever-present algorithm. But it turns out no, people are in fact marking themselves safe more than once. Because the fires still aren’t out or controlled. And the winds keep shifting. New communities suddenly find themselves in danger. So nothing is truly settled.
And that, more than anything else, seems to be the real metaphor for the present.
Jim McDermott is an American culture critic and screenwriter.
Main image: urned trees from the Palisades Fire and dust blown by winds are seen from Will Rogers State Park, with the City of Los Angeles in the background, in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood on January 15, 2025 in Los Angeles, California. Multiple wildfires fueled by intense Santa Ana Winds continue to burn across Los Angeles County, with some containment achieved. At least 25 people have died, more than 12,000 structures have been destroyed or damaged, and 40,000 acres burned. More dangerously high winds are in the forecast. (Photo by Apu Gomes/Getty Images)