When California burns, I read Joan Didion. In a 1960s essay she described how Californians adopt the physical experience of Southern California during fire season:
It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself. Nathaniel West perceived that, in The Day of the Locust, and at the time of the 1965 Watts riots what struck the imagination most indelibly were the fires. For days one could drive the Harbor Freeway and see the city on fire, just as we had always known it would be in the end.
Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The winds shows us how close to the edge we are.
January is not fire season. But that’s California: a land of opportunity and hope, which at any moment, can be ravaged by fire or earthquake or its own citizens’ psychoses. Here is Didion again, interviewed by Barbara Isenberg for Isenberg’s book, State of the Arts: California Artists Talk About Their Work:
My family didn’t perceive California as an easy place to live, and it’s not a particularly easy place to live. A place like Sacramento that floods every year isn’t particularly easy. Los Angeles isn’t easy. It’s easy to get your clothes to the dry cleaners, and it’s got big supermarkets. But think about the fires. You don’t need winter clothes, but at the same time your house can go.
I think people who grew up in California have more tolerance for apocalyptic notions. However, mixed up with this tolerance for apocalyptic notions in which the world is going to end dramatically is this belief that the world can’t help but get better and better. It’s really hard for me to believe that everything doesn’t improve, because thinking like that was just so much a part of being in California.
Californians I know whose homes have been leveled by wildfires in the past have all chosen to stay in California and rebuild. One rebuilt only to have his house burn down in another fire years later. Again he stayed. Not everyone can afford to stay or rebuild and not everyone wants to. The losses some will incur as a result of the fire sweeping through L.A. right now are too great to imagine — so much of California history will burn, as well. I still find myself grateful during every tragedy to know that California fosters the optimism Didion speaks about. Things get better. We believe they will.