“No, not that drawer – the one to the right. Do you see a tiny blue-and-pink knitted hat?” It’s past midnight in the UK and I’m on FaceTime, trying to get a friend in Los Angeles to dig out the few things I would want saved from our home, should the worst happen.
The worst is no longer unimaginable. It’s been a week since the first of the fires started, with one – the Palisades fire, which has scorched more than 23,654 acres, destroyed entire neighbourhoods and killed at least eight – steadily getting closer. That’s plenty of time to imagine it ripping through our house. Plenty of time to thank whoever is running this nightmarish show for keeping my friends out of physical danger, yes – every second – but also time to ask yourself the surreal but necessary question: what couldn’t I bear to lose? What would I spend the rest of my life mourning? What do I need to get out of there asap?
How quickly my answers changed from a frantic, craven “anything, everything” to a suitcase-full, to an envelope-full – to these four things: the little hat the nurses at Cedars-Sinai put on my daughter when she was first born and her hospital name tag, the “Happy 60th!” poem she wrote for my husband on his 53rd birthday and the old black-and-white family photo on the side in the kitchen.
You can’t start asking people to pack up much more than that for you, for one thing. Two of my friends have had their houses razed to the ground, and most are still living under the threat of evacuation (often getting erroneous warnings through on the Watch Duty app they’re all hooked to). Every square inch you take up in a car that might be stuffed to the hilt with the contents of their lives is something they can’t take with them. But there’s also an impotence everyone out there has attested to feeling when faced with a natural force as unstoppable as fire; a sense that it’ll take everything it wants, anyway.
All this astonishing bravery we’re witnessing daily, all these heroic images, and then you read the words of fire chiefs telling us that today’s high winds could trigger “explosive fire growth” and “erratic directional changes”, and you realise how powerless we really are.
One of the friends who has lost everything – and this is the most serene, undemonstrative man you’ll ever meet – reduced me to tears in three hastily emailed sentences the other day, less than 48 hours after his home was razed to the ground. “We lived there for 34 years and raised both of our children there. The memories will now need to be in our memories as opposed to anything physical. We will rebuild and recover.”
“No, not that drawer – the one to the right. Do you see a tiny blue-and-pink knitted hat?” It’s past midnight in the UK and I’m on FaceTime, trying to get a friend in Los Angeles to dig out the few things I would want saved from our home, should the worst happen.
The worst is no longer unimaginable. It’s been a week since the first of the fires started, with one – the Palisades fire, which has scorched more than 23,654 acres, destroyed entire neighbourhoods and killed at least eight – steadily getting closer. That’s plenty of time to imagine it ripping through our house. Plenty of time to thank whoever is running this nightmarish show for keeping my friends out of physical danger, yes – every second – but also time to ask yourself the surreal but necessary question: what couldn’t I bear to lose? What would I spend the rest of my life mourning? What do I need to get out of there asap?
How quickly my answers changed from a frantic, craven “anything, everything” to a suitcase-full, to an envelope-full – to these four things: the little hat the nurses at Cedars-Sinai put on my daughter when she was first born and her hospital name tag, the “Happy 60th!” poem she wrote for my husband on his 53rd birthday and the old black-and-white family photo on the side in the kitchen.
You can’t start asking people to pack up much more than that for you, for one thing. Two of my friends have had their houses razed to the ground, and most are still living under the threat of evacuation (often getting erroneous warnings through on the Watch Duty app they’re all hooked to). Every square inch you take up in a car that might be stuffed to the hilt with the contents of their lives is something they can’t take with them. But there’s also an impotence everyone out there has attested to feeling when faced with a natural force as unstoppable as fire; a sense that it’ll take everything it wants, anyway.
All this astonishing bravery we’re witnessing daily, all these heroic images, and then you read the words of fire chiefs telling us that today’s high winds could trigger “explosive fire growth” and “erratic directional changes”, and you realise how powerless we really are.
One of the friends who has lost everything – and this is the most serene, undemonstrative man you’ll ever meet – reduced me to tears in three hastily emailed sentences the other day, less than 48 hours after his home was razed to the ground. “We lived there for 34 years and raised both of our children there. The memories will now need to be in our memories as opposed to anything physical. We will rebuild and recover.”