Before the Flood
The meaning of the Los Angeles fires
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 show us how close to the edge we are.
Joan Didion, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” 1969
It’s a sick perversity of the human condition, another modern delusion masquerading as a vestige of evolutionary biology (or perhaps it’s the other way around?): we do not understand time. It’s what supposedly separates us from the pack, a certain existential self-awareness, placement outside of self and into the fabric of the universe. Context is what separates us from the squirrel. An understanding of death justifies our supersession of the California Redwood.
In the realm of narrative analysis—territory entirely separate from the business of engulfed picnic tables, bulldozed Bentleys, and scorched teddy bears—the temptation to organize chaos into something resembling order is irresistible. So it is that one can look upon the scene in Southern California today and think of a thing as trite as irony. That one can observe the lunar remnants smoldering over the sparkling Pacific and think, rather coldly, about that resounding paradox of our age: our grandest delusion—that we have mastered time—is the heaviest chain linking us to our evolutionary history. Our stubborn insistence that we understand time, in the face of the overwhelming evidence that we do not, is in itself the strongest bond tying us to our now-anachronistic shared evolution, the most unequivocal rejoinder that we are, in fact, the pack. Thousand-degree heat does that: blurs the lines between us and them, plant and animal, rich and poor. You, me, them; we’re all caught in the fire raging very much in the present.
The action in Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2020 speculative novel “The Ministry For the Future” begins in January 2025 with a heat wave in northern India. In Uttar Pradesh, temperatures near 110 degrees Fahrenheit at 60 percent humidity, triggering a mass “wet bulb” effect—a condition whereby high heat and humidity combine to prevent the evaporation of sweat on the human body, foiling homo sapiens’ primary mechanism of cooling down. The scene in India, one of the many Robinson portrays in his speculative preview of the world’s relationship with climate change from 2025 to 2050 (cli-fi, short for “climate fiction,” is the genre), gets ugly in a hurry. Looters hold a humanitarian worker at gunpoint as they rip an air conditioner off the wall; hundreds of millions are cut off from electricity; vultures circle as bodies rot on the roofs of dusty buildings. In the end, something like 20 million people are dead, killed by the heat. Many of them are found rotting in the water of a town lake “as hot as bath water, clearly hotter than body temperature; hotter than the last time he had tested it. It only made sense. He had read that if all the sun’s energy that hit Earth were captured by it rather than some bouncing away, temperatures would rise until the seas boiled. He could well imagine what that would be like. The lake felt only a few degrees from boiling” (Robinson 11).
This is what I mean about time: I know, somewhere, that there’s no practical difference, really, between 2023, 2024, 2025, or any of the years which are to shortly succeed them. Twenty-five is just a round number, the arbitrary date at which Robinson chose, almost certainly for simplicity’s sake, to begin his speculative narrative. But after I read “Ministry for the Future,” at the beginning of 2022, the first thing my brain did was say, “Well, at least we’re still three years away…” as if I hadn’t already lived through Katrina and Sandy and Camp, as if three years was the difference between me being a strong young and weak old man, enough time for my children to be born, grow up, and die. But that’s where I went, based on the most senseless logic imaginable: those are their problems.
Now, it’s 2025 and they’re ours. It’d be rich if this were the event that did it. If, after the hurricanes in the Caribbean, blazes in Lahaina, twisters in Iowa, it was the great fire of the Pacific Palisades which sparked America, easily the world’s leading all-time emitter of carbon, to action on climate. Perhaps the most sadistic aspect of this crisis, one which will wrench you into truly debauched knots the more you uncover about it, is that those living between the Tropics of Capricorn and Cancer, the poorest parts of the world, are set to bear the brunt of the weather effects they are both the least responsible for perpetuating and the least capable of defending against. The same can’t be said about the owners of the Rolls Royces and screening rooms torched over the last few days in the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains. Yet, for all the perverted optics, it’d be even richer if this leads to nothing at all, a preservation of the status quo, on the twisted logic that these wealthy Angelenos “had it coming.”
No. This is a wickedly complicated crisis which we’re far from understanding in its totality. Part of the problem of addressing it is that it’s practically impossible to diagnose with certainty; there have always been fires in LA, and maybe this one would have broken out, too, regardless of the vulnerable conditions—drought, wind, heat—undoubtedly exacerbated by climate change. It’s essential not to oversimplify this, to assume there’s some easy out, or to cower out of fear that the big, bad thing will suddenly strike all at once. Positive, simple, collective messaging will almost certainly be the key to stoking societal principles more aligned with what’s known as the Leopoldian land ethic: “What’s good is what’s good for the land.”
“In our current situation, the phrase can be usefully reworded as ‘what’s good is what’s good for the biosphere,’” Robinson writes in “Ministry for the Future.” “In light of that principle, many efficiencies are quickly seen to be profoundly destructive, and many inefficiencies can now be understood as unintentionally salvational.”
But—at the risk of oversimplifying, overemotionalizing, catastrophizing—this is coming. It will likely arrive in piecemeal, peculiar, perhaps even unsatisfying forms, through means which might defy our contemporary efforts to categorize them. But it will be impossible to avoid. I don’t care where you live, what you do, or how little you care. It could be an ice storm in Chicago tomorrow, a tsunami in Seattle in the spring, a hurricane in New York in the fall. Yes, LA is particularly prone to fires. But it’d have challenged even the most satanic of minds to envision the scene residents of the Palisades woke up to yesterday on a walk through the neighborhood a week ago. A new fire just broke out off Sunset Boulevard. It’s begun spreading into the flats. You are not immune. My parents live in the West LA basin, sandwiched about dead in the middle between the Hollywood Hills and the Santa Monica Mountains. Based on their location, an evacuation order would signal a truly apocalyptic situation in Los Angeles. The howling Santa Anas are rattling the windows as we speak. Their bags are packed.
My relationship with Los Angeles today can roughly be summarized by the title of my favorite Didion book: “Where I Was From.” In her work, Didion eviscerates the California Dream by meticulously pulling back the veneers upholding the state’s Wild West mythology; it was all engineered, she argues, the product of shady backroom handshakes between unfathomably powerful men, the whims of the global economy, employment patterns of the world’s largest corporations. Her case is unassailable; the folklore is a ruse. When I introduce myself today, I de-emphasize my LA upbringing (my poor, Valley Boy father), pivoting instead as quickly as I can to my maternal side’s deep New York City roots.
Still, it’s impossible for me to dispose of the thing, no matter how much I understand its folly, its fragility; the California promise is too great (I suspect Didion, who died in New York City, never quite let go, either). Strangely, it requires looking upon a topographic map to see it—to understand Los Angeles’ potential and limits in the face of nature. Once you do, you’ll notice what Didion might call the “mechanistic” accumulation of people in the region’s flat basins, a developmental concession urban planners in gridlocked New York, Philadelphia, or Washington, D.C. refused to make. In California, the nature was too big, the populations too small, to do anything but concede defeat to the land. So the people pooled in the “flats.”
Which left the hills. In many global cities, the poor gather at altitude; the slums of Bogotà, favelas of Rio, Manshiyat Nasser (the “Trash City”) of Cairo, all overlook the city from above. Not so in Los Angeles. While the masses pooled into the valleys, the rich carved their way into the hills. They sought the great promise of California: to live in concert with rather than opposition to the environment, to find an equilibrium between the built and natural worlds. From the start, striking such a balance was a tenuous proposition. Fires in 1933, 1966, 1968, 2018, the Northridge earthquake in 1994, served as constant reminders of “how close to the edge we are.” Still, the Platonic ripples remain tantalizing, and, if caught at the right time (see, outside rush hour), they represent the LA experience at its best: snaking down the sloping contours of Mulhoulland and Sunset Drives in the dead of night; Graham Nash crooning alongside Joni Mitchell over a piano in Laurel Canyon; slipping off for a sunset surf under the vertiginous cliffs at Point Dume.
The “Apocalypse LA” genre is far from original—“Contemplating Hell, that it/Must be even more like Los Angeles,” wrote Bertolt Brecht in 1941—and California is notorious for its vulnerability to natural disaster, but on my last few visits I’d noticed that its signature balance had tipped further and further out of whack. Coyotes have always been a fact of life in the city’s outskirts, but they increasingly were appearing (and devouring pets) in the flats, where nature had supposedly been tamed. A pair of towering skyscrapers downtown was left abandoned mid-construction after its mysterious Chinese developer ran out of money 30 stories into completion, the carcasses near-supertall sitting ducks for daring graffiti artists and BASE jumpers provided clear-shot views to Skid Row a few blocks east from the precarious perches. In the aftermath of 2020, a startling number of my parents’ friends purchased (and began defense training with) guns. A discerning family member started storing a baseball bat in the trunk.
LA will not die in the coming weeks. It’s too stubborn, its allure still, amidst the haze and ash, too great. In “Ministry for the Future,” Robinson foresees a superflood drowning the city sometime near the middle of the century. Kayakers paddle through Los Feliz on frenzied rescue missions, sailboats race down the Sepulveda Pass for kicks. Robinson may have gotten the disaster wrong, but who can fault the literary author, really, for reaching for the only Biblical parallel capable of destroying such a peculiar, emblematic place? He foretold the wrong calamity in the right city. A great flood may yet wash through the Los Angeles Basin. For now, it burns. ■