This Is Not The Post I Intended To Write

I planned to write my first post of the new year on how my fractional editing role has expanded to part-time hours, replacing my take-home teaching salary, and therefore officially making me a fully transitioned teacher.

I was going to share tips and insights on how I did it and what I’ve learned.

I was going to write about the challenges of trying to work from home during winter break, having given up the chief (and perhaps only) benefit of being a teacher-parent: sharing school breaks with your children.

I was going to write about what I discovered through taking a two-week pause on new posts—new plans and directions for this newsletter, as I now balance its writing with greater work responsibilities and a renewed commitment to my novel-in-progress.

Instead, I’m writing about ash and soot and smoke.

I’m writing about wildfires.

My city is burning. Ash is raining from the sky, covering the plants and furniture outside. It looks like bits of snow in the Christmas movies we just finished watching. The sky is an ominous gray hue, the sun smoldering somewhere behind the blanket of smoke. The moments it shines through, everything is lit in an eerie orange: orange coming through the window, a burning square on the wall.

“Look, Mommy,” my daughter says, pointing.

Everything feels wrong.

The dry Santa Ana winds charge the air with a restless, electric energy that you can feel through the windows. Helicopters pant in the sky. Every animal instinct tells you to run, yet you think of it logically: the air is safer in the house than in the car. Traffic is snarled, road conditions dangerous, AirBNBs booking quickly. My husband still has to work. “Just hunker down,” he says over FaceTime.

So we do. The windows are locked, the air purifier pumping, a wet towel shoved under the crack beneath the backdoor.

Schools across the city are closed through the weekend. Yesterday I watched the Air Quality Index climb: 151, 274, 337, 438. I packed in an emergency bag, which remains on the counter. I keep pulling the toothbrushes and medications in and out, in and out.

I try to work. My boss is understanding, my coworkers kind when my kids interrupt our Google Meet. I have moments of focus, grateful to sink into a task that removes me from the current reality, but the reprieve is short-lived. I get a Watch Duty notification, open my social media, sink into doomscrolling. GoFundMe’s populate my feeds, post after post of, “We lost everything,” “Our home is gone,” “We are stunned.”

Most of Altadena is gone. It’s the social and geographic opposite of Pacific Palisades: a quaint mountain town about eight miles from our house with a historic black community, a rare commutable pocket where the American Dream is still attainable for less than $1 million. Was. Many working and middle-class families purchased homes there, and a lot couldn’t get fire insurance due to companies pulling out of the state (looks like someone believes in climate change!). I wonder how and if people will rebuild, where they will go, what all this is going to do to the already impossible housing market.

The kids are bickering. The house is strewn with toys, the coffee table scribbled on. These are luxury problems. My daughter whines, wants to go to the park, wants to go outside. I explain to her that we can’t; I explain to her that this is a luxury problem.

My son fusses, gets frustrated, throws a toy across the room. I turn on the TV, click through the YouTube ads, count the hours until bedtime.

We are safe. Both my father and brother were/are firefighters, and I lived through the 1991 wildfires in the Oakland Hills, so I have some understanding of how such fires work. Embers from the current burns can’t reach us; they have too much asphalt and urban space to traverse. This is what I keep telling myself as the smell of smoke seeps in and my phone continues to ping.

On Wednesday night, the Sunset Fire ignites, quickly consuming homes in the Hollywood Hills. It’s a sobering reminder that with the strong winds and dry grasses, new fires are easily sparking. Our house abuts a steep incline of undeveloped hillside. We diligently abide by the annual fire abatement, but there’s still plenty to burn. January is supposed to be the wettest month in Southern California, but it hasn’t rained since May.

This is our new reality.

I think of Parable Of The Sower, which I read every year with my tenth graders as part of our dystopia unit. The novel takes place in 2025, in the parched terrain outside of Los Angeles. Fires raged; looters looted; the adults clung to the idea that the good old days would somehow come back. Pasadena, the city its author Octavia Butler called home, is under evacuation and buried in smoke, its hills engulfed in flames.

I think of the firefighters, 30% of whom are incarcerated, earning $5-10 a day to work in life-threatening conditions. I think about how for many, these conditions are still preferable to being in prison. (If you click any link here, make it that one.)

I think of how the city’s fire budget was cut by millions (though not as much as is being reported on social media, or maybe not at all; does anyone fact-check during an emergency?), while the police budget increased. I think about the reports of looters in Pacific Palisades. I think of Keith in Parable Of The Sower. Online, there are pictures of police officers standing guard at smoldering burn sites. “Maybe they’ll shoot the flames,” one person comments. Such gallows humor seems both grossly inappropriate and the only logical response to our circumstances.

By some small grace, the local play gym is open on Thursday. We don KN95 masks (at least, my daughter and I do; my son screams and refuses) and drive over. The streets are quiet and oddly normal, despite the ash and soot and haze. Utility workers drill into the concrete. People wait at bus stops. Street stalls are open, selling carnitas and papusas. A al pastor trompo still turns in an absurdly accurate metaphor. Everyone who could get out of town has. Most of the Teslas are gone; it’s all mail trucks and Amazon delivery vans and old Toyotas.

At the end of the world, I think, this is who will be left.

I’m comforted by that.

This is not the post I intended to write this week. But here we are. We are safe. We are lucky. We are counting the hours of the day and checking our phones and wondering what the hell kind of planet we are leaving our kids—what charred and broken city will be left after all this, when the embers finally die and the smoke all dissipates and we attempt to resume life as usual, when nothing is in fact usual—when so much has been burned and is gone—when the next disaster is waiting, in the parched earth and empty fire hydrants, the rumbling fault lines and tent cities of this pretty town, this sad flower in the sand, this pretty town burning.