Silver Linings: An L.A. Fire Story
A dark cloud is rolling in. It stretches all the way across the morning sky. No thunder, no rain, just ash and smoke sitting heavy above the palm trees and the roof of the house. By 11 a.m., the sun is glowing through the clouds like an electric-orange moon. A few hours later, I pack up my car. I’ve seen this before. High winds carrying embers over rooftops, eucalyptus trees exploding, palm trees bursting into flames.
It moves fast. There’s no time to get out.
This is how it happens in my home state of Western Australia, and now it is happening here in my adopted home of Los Angeles. And with hurricane-force winds and fire tornadoes, it’s about to get worse than I could ever have imagined.
It’s Wednesday, January 8th. There are fires to the north, east, and west of me. I haven’t been told to evacuate, but my gut is screaming at me to move. I know that soon the smoke will be too much for my lungs, scarred from two bouts of pneumonia in the damp Irish countryside and asthma that has only increased since moving to L.A.
When I came here, a manager told me to expect nothing and prepare for everything. But nobody could have prepared for this.
On Tuesday morning, as sparks jumped the highway in the Palisades, a friend-of-a-friend got his family out, then rode back in on a scooter with a shotgun to defend against looters. The flames swept in so quickly he was trapped. On Tuesday night, as fire ravaged Altadena, I cooked a Thai curry by candlelight, hovering over the gas stove for warmth. The power had been out for two days. One suburb over, a whole hillside was engulfed in ten minutes. This morning, the pumps are down and the stores are offline, no way to get gas or food. I leave anyway, finding a gas station not too far away.
The orange sun still burns like Monet’s Fire of London.
I head south, driving on the back roads in case the highway is jammed or closed. I cover my mask with a sleeve as I navigate the path between two fires. In my trunk are a few items of clothing, a gathering of my life’s work—poems, songs, screenplays, films, the beginnings of a novel—and a pillow. I have brought food, bottled water, a flashlight, batteries, and a blanket. I’ve seen enough disaster movies to know you always take a can opener. I am ready for the zombie apocalypse, I joke.
I don’t have much of a plan. It’s been a rough few years in creative industries, and I am not flush but I listen to the inner voice telling me to head for Newport Beach. A friend contemplates parking her car next to mine in a beach parking lot so we can sleep safer, but she decides to stay in Santa Monica.
I find a cheap motel room to drag my belongings into. A hot shower. Relief. The local restaurant is full of fire refugees. A waitress slips me her phone number in case I need anything. I don’t call. Even in an emergency, there is some kind of ingrained shame in asking for help. I feel silly. I don’t know if I’ve overreacted. But the next day, the air quality around the house is at toxic levels. I check in with friends, and they are struggling to breathe.
In Newport Beach, the ocean offers refuge. Calm water, clean air. I find oysters and a string of seaweed that has curled around itself. There are flecks of gold in the sand and on the tops of shells. I walk barefoot and drink coffee, looking out to sea. I feel grateful, relieved. Guilty. My friends are struggling, and I just left. I tried to convince some of them to come with me, but I am traveling solo on nothing but instinct and trust.
The smoke from L.A. has made its way down the coast and my lungs are tight. In the parking lot of my motel, volunteers are gathering. They lead me to boxes of donations. I leave with a care package of toothpaste, shampoo, energy bars, and a warm cardigan. They offer me so much more, but I refuse. So many people have lost everything.
My feeling is to travel further south to San Diego, so when a woman offers me a room there, I don’t hesitate. I assure her I will only be there for a couple of days, until they get the fires under control. She tells me it will be weeks, and she is right.
I buy an air filter and underwear and sleep in my clothes. I am grateful for the bed, which I spend several days unable to get out of. When a fire breaks out a few blocks from me, I ignore the evacuation warning. I am emergency-fatigued. Despondent. Racked with grief. I immigrated to America at the tail end of Covid. I have freelanced, worked for major Hollywood studios, been laid off during the strikes, been injured, feared for my life more than once, released music, directed a music video and a film, and survived.
There were many times I considered driving out to some little town to look for work and take a break from the rollercoaster life I was living. My belongings have been in storage for a month while I stayed with a friend, grappling to regain footing on the industry’s uneven ground. The point is, I stayed. I persevered. But with ten thousand people displaced, I won’t find housing now. Among the condos and couches, my L.A. dream, too, is up in flames.
I weep in a downtown cafe, in a park across from the naval base, in a circle of Eucalyptus trees overlooking the clean lines of San Diego, until my nervous system starts to recalibrate. I meditate on Pacific Beach, and my body relaxes with my breath.
Everything feels so normal here. After a few years in L.A., I’d forgotten what normal feels like.
I laugh with a group of Brazilian women. We eat tacos as the sun sets and talk about love and bad movies and life in America. We look for constellations in the night sky. I drive the cove of La Jolla, home to the Seven Sea Caves. I watch a seal slink under the moonlit water like a selkie, and I am sure she will return at midnight to shed her skin. I trawl ornate gothic buildings and listen to Mexican hip-hop. My brain relaxes into creativity. I sit in a hotel lobby and write the bones of a TV pilot. I drive down to the border and look across, to the colorful clutter of Tijuana. The border wall snakes over the hills.
A friend in Altadena lost everything but the clothes on her back. I am lost for words. What can I possibly say? She tells me to trust in the process. I offer her a deep chakra meditation. It’s all I have. Like so many, I am riding the line between fear and hope for what comes next. I tell myself that Los Angeles doesn’t own my dreams. That one city couldn’t possibly contain them.
So many of my ancestors boarded ships with nothing but a small suitcase and found passage to a new life. Maybe this will be the cracking open of some new experience. A step I would not otherwise have taken. A shift from survival to intentional living. It might even bring new joy.
The truth is, nestled in the depths of my heart is a desire that has waited patiently for years. I want to head north towards the redwood trees. To drive slowly up the coast smelling the wildness of the sea, traverse the rocky ground parallel to the nine grey wolf packs making their way through forests and over mountains, to where the bears are lying dormant until the spring.
The truth is, I felt stuck in L.A.
We are all told it’s where we’re supposed to be. But the call of the north has now grown to a roar. To move forward, I must go back. Battle the air as I pack up the rest of my things. It feels like a quest. And now there are rains and mudslides and warnings about toxic ash and the Santa Ana winds that will return again and again.
I drive into L.A. County through an Army checkpoint, armed with N95s, boxes, and tape. I return to the people I had said goodbye to without knowing if I would see them again. Ash coats my belongings in a sinister silt. I buy gloves and hire an out-of-work camera assistant to help me move my furniture from one storage unit to another.
After weeks of being on the road, living out of my car, out of suitcases, I feel like I am on the run. Exhaustion hits and I crawl into the cave of my bed for five days, unable to move. A friend asks how it feels here after the rain. The petrichor is putrid, I say.
This is the city where I picnicked on the same ground as James Dean. Where Einstein taught, famous musicians lived and died, and the Hollywood sign got closer with every turn. Where I looked up at the night sky and saw my dreams in the stars and in the two beams of light crisscrossing above the Hollywood hills.
They call it the city of sin, but I believe you find the L.A. you’re looking for. The L.A. that was always in you.
Japanese tea gardens, meditation centers, film crew, new songs, beaches, rolling hills, salt-of-the-earth friends. This was the L.A. I believed in. And now, under the weight of illness, I feel like I am wading through molasses trying to get out.
I am one of the lucky ones. I didn’t have a house to lose, a lease to break, a boss demanding I stay in one place to continue working under a cloud of dark smoke. I have never felt so grateful to be poor. I have no idea what is coming next but George Addair said that everything we’ve ever wanted is on the other side of fear, and I am ready to cross that line. All I can do is place one foot in front of the other.
Chop wood, carry water. One mindful step at a time.
I gain strength, pack boxes, stack my new storage unit to the ceiling. The fires are still burning. The day is overcast with a smoky pallor. I drop an exercise ball trying to jam it into my car. I watch it bounce down the hill and around the corner, and laugh uncontrollably at the surrealness of this smokescreen neighborhood, with its orange sun and large purple ball bouncing down the mountainside towards trees that have cracked and fallen in the wind.
My friend Claudia gives me two mandarins fresh off the vine, their leaves still intact. On my way back up the mountain, the moon burns bright. I stop for a pack of four coyotes moving silently through the night. I had seen two young ones crossing the yard the morning I was heading out to Joshua Tree to direct my first film in California. It was a good omen. Now, the mama turns to face me and we lock eyes for a few breaths.
Coyote magic and Claudia’s mandarins—both blessings for a fruitful new beginning.
I deliver my plants into the hands of friends and grab the guitar I bought on Ventura Boulevard. I drive north, out of L.A. county, through the desert town of Ojai, through fields of cows that smell like the fresh, damp earth of the Irish countryside. I skirt around mountains and through the crooked hills of Carmel-by-the-sea, past the wharfs of Monterey, to the wild seafoam of Pacific Grove. Water sprays the rocks in Lover’s Point, where the sky is pink, the fir trees are still, and the night is full of stars that have been hidden these last few years. On the beaches of Pacifica, I inhale salt air as aromatic as oysters. My hair softens in the northern water.
In San Francisco, I lie next to the grave of a great-uncle from Belfast, looking up at a clear blue sky. I feel the calming presence of bison, their silhouettes still and sturdy. I sail over the Golden Gate Bridge. It sends shivers down my spine. I enter the fairy village of Mill Valley, where lanterns are laced through tall dark trees, and step, finally, into the Muir Woods. Home of both the Miwok and Ewok peoples. I place a hand on a towering, thousand-year-old redwood tree, and my heart melts.
The day I left L.A., I sent a voice message to my friends. No words, just me singing a line of a song from The Sound of Music. I sing it again, in the shadows of the tallest living beings on earth.
Climb every mountain, swim every stream. Follow every rainbow until you find your dream.
*Feature photo by Aminah Hughes
