The only way I could leave California was to trick myself with a promise to return.
I made my vow in Tuolumne Meadows, part of Yosemite National Park, where the bald Sierra Nevada mountains gave way to a high-altitude green oasis. I’d been in the west so long that it surprised me, green grass in late summer.
It was 2009. I was leaving because I’d lost my job in the recession. Years of low-wage restaurant industry work had left me without a safety net. I was leaving because rent was forty per cent of my income, because I’d driven up my credit cards to subsidise the steep cost of living in the Bay Area, because I’d done the math, and I couldn’t afford to stay, and I couldn’t lie to myself any longer.
I’d grown up around granite cliffs and quarries, mica glittering in weathered grey stone. Out west, the scale was different. Yosemite was a lunar landscape: bowling balls tossed by angry gods, trees twisted by the wind, dry waterfalls.
I lay back in the grass and listened to the slow flow of the Tuolumne River. The water was a deep blue hue except where the river ran so shallow you could see grey-brown rocks resting on the bottom. This place felt peaceful, far removed from the busy National Park. Alone at the meadow’s edge sat a tan-colored tent.
I wasn’t ready to go. I didn’t know how to stay. I tried to memorise the shape and shade of the bald peaks against the rich blue sky.
When it was time to leave, I leaned my head against the window and closed my eyes, kept them shut until we’d crossed the state line. I refused to bear witness to the fact of my leaving.
*****
My roommate, Ace, left San Francisco a couple of years after I did. She and her husband initially looked from Marin to Mendocino for affordable land where they could start a small farm. Priced out of the market, they moved to the Finger Lakes of New York. A couple years ago, Ace told me every California town they’d considered moving to has been devastated by fire.
Had they stayed, she would’ve had to evacuate in the middle of the night, towing a horse trailer and a menagerie of pets. Or stay and fight the blaze with a hose. She would’ve lost the crops before harvest. She would’ve had to start over again.
Ace does not miss San Francisco the way I do. She made the choice to leave. I tried my hardest to stay and could not make it work. I blamed myself for this for years, finding fault with my chosen career, my queerness and my white suburban middle-class upbringing, where money was rarely spoken about, except to warn me against the perils of becoming a starving artist and the necessity of having a backup career.
At a writing conference I attended in 2018, the writer Pico Iyer read an essay about the first time wildfires threatened his home in the Santa Barbara hills.
It was 1990. Temperatures were 106 degrees, with gale force winds: century weather, as we called it when we still thought such ‘perfect’ weather conditions were one-in-one-hundred-year events. At 6:02 p.m. an arsonist set a fire half a mile from his house. Friends arrived moments later, pointing out jagged lines of orange racing downhill. Before Iyer could report the blaze, the phone went dead. By 6:10 p.m. the fire had reached the ridge, feet from his house. Iyer grabbed his manuscript and his cat and fled to the car. Fifty yards from Iyer’s house, seventy-foot flames encroached on the road, blocking their escape. The writer and his friends stayed in his car for hours, watching the fire claim cars and homes, including his. Eventually, conditions cleared enough for them to evacuate.
Eighteen years later, nearly to the day, another fire broke out in the Santa Barbara hills where Iyer rebuilt his home. For the second time, he had to flee. His second telling ends in ambiguity, with the fire not yet contained.
Homeowner’s insurance likely paid for Iyer to rebuild his home. In response to the rise in wildfires, many insurance companies have stopped covering homes in high-fire areas and decline to renew existing policies. California has created a ‘last-resort option’ available to homeowners at extreme risk for fire damage, who find themselves unable to insure their home on the private market. The ‘last-resort’ plans cover less and cost more.
Homeowners want to keep their existing coverage or obtain an affordable replacement. They sink savings or borrow against home equity for mitigation measures like a fire-rated roof, new windows, or fire-resistant landscaping, which by some estimates can decrease fire risk by as much as 75%. But like me, those homeowners are living on borrowed time.
California’s population dropped for the first time in its recorded history in 2020 and kept dropping through 2023. With the median price of a single-family home now over $900,000, many others find California as unaffordable as I once did. They leave for a better quality of life and more opportunity, for air quality, for mental health—reasons both personal and universal.
*****
In 2019, fire broke out near the Getty Center in Los Angeles. A branch fell on power lines, igniting a spark. The Getty Center was never threatened—it was built to withstand fire—but 50-mile-an-hour winds fanned flames along the 405, closing the highway.
The surrounding communities were under a mandatory evacuation order, but no one told the housekeepers and gardeners not to show up for work. These domestic workers, majority Latine, clipped hedges and cleaned homes while smoke plumes rose in the background.
I learned about the domestic labourers in the wake of the Getty fire, sifting through images of charred hills and remembering a long afternoon spent at the museum, photographing its travertine limestone against a sea of greens and blues: sky, ocean, grass. This is how I process the destruction that has touched over 15 million acres of my former home in the years since I left. It is my way of honoring my love for California, and the promise I haven’t been able to keep.
During the Getty fire, the city of Los Angeles sent emergency alerts to smartphones in the evacuation area, but those alerts were in English. Spanish-language media broadcast mandatory evacuations on social media and morning television, but it’s unclear how many workers saw the alerts prior to their commute.
It enraged me that wealthy homeowners who employed those workers never thought to send a text from the safety of their hotel rooms, but it didn’t surprise me. I knew why those domestic labourers had trudged uphill, ignoring the scent of charred land and the ominous clouds on the horizon. Before I left California, I worked two jobs, sometimes three, to afford rent.
At one bakery job, in an unlicensed kitchen on a grim block of West Oakland, the kitchen faucet came apart while I washed the dishes. Water sprayed all over the floor, the eight-burner gas range, the plywood counter the building’s previous occupant had hacked apart with a cleaver.
I sprang into action, moving pink bakery boxes out of the danger zone, calling my boss, meeting the plumber he sent over, who pried loose the water shutoff valve I hadn’t known to look for. I stayed late pushing water toward the floor drain with a filthy mop. When I left, I took off my pants and drove across the Bay Bridge in boxers, soaked, starved, and ready for a drink.
There were other red flags before the sink broke. Two teenagers came to the door one day asking for a spoon so they could cook drugs in the alley behind the bakery; I told them we had no spoons, which was true. The city health inspector came for a surprise visit. I sent the health inspector away, locked the door, and phoned my boss, who told me to stay inside with the door locked from then on. I got a fungal infection on my hand that wouldn’t clear up; I didn’t see a doctor because I didn’t have health insurance. When I quit the bakery job without other work lined up, it was because the job had beat me down, not because I thought I deserved better.
From there, it was a slow slide into inevitable departure.
My best friend Chris, a gay Puerto Rican, lives in West Hollywood, a historic gay neighbourhood of Los Angeles. Particulate matter from wildfire smoke regularly seeps through his poorly insulated apartment. He wasn’t directly threatened by the Getty fire, but I can’t stop thinking about the fire next time.
Chris lives paycheck to paycheck, juggling freelance gigs and performing at open mics, hoping to be discovered. He is constantly in debt, chronically late to file his taxes, easily caught off guard by an unexpected bill or medical expense. Chris doesn’t have money to start over in a new city. He never learned to drive and relies on the city bus to get around.
Every fire season I ache with worry over what will happen if he has to flee.
My fears are irrational, tied up with buried shame over being young and broke and foolish. Leaving California was the catalyst I needed to face my money problems—credit card debt, student loans in forbearance, unpaid parking tickets—and find financial stability. Leaving taught me to prepare for the next time my life was rocked by unforeseen calamity, so that I would have the luxury of options.
In becoming financially responsible, I realised the relationship between my subsistence wages and my queerness. My financial problems weren’t all my fault, they were a reflection of structural inequalities and cultural stereotypes around the value of art, and the worth of artists.
Kitchens were my refuge, offering connection and community with queer people, immigrants, and people of color. They nourished my creativity and gave me pride in working with my hands. They reaffirmed that I had intrinsic value, something office work had made me doubt, even as they kept me dependent on dysfunctional and unsafe work environments.
Paying off my student loans took ten years. I made the last payment on my birthday, a present to past versions of myself. I have a partner with a stable income. We own a house. We pay off our credit cards in full and save for retirement. Our emergency fund is fully stocked. We met with a financial advisor who told us to be proud of ourselves, who acknowledged that our money dysphoria comes from the financial discrimination we experience as queer women, these intersecting identities limiting our earning power.
I am safe now, relatively speaking, because I have money.
Some days this breaks my heart.
Watching from the opposite coast while California burns, it becomes harder for me to see my place in the landscape I love. A life there will be more precarious than one lived elsewhere, for financial and environmental reasons. I bargain with my old dream by returning to my favorite spaces every couple of years, writing new memories over the old ones. Some days I fantasise about buying a plot of land—my own little piece of California—and a camper van. My home will come with me; it can never be taken. When fire comes for me, there’ll be nothing to claim.
*****
So far in 2024, 4,800 wildfires and counting have blazes across three-quarters of a million acres of land. More than a thousand buildings have burned.
The Park fire started on July 24 and is thirty-four per cent contained, as of this writing. The fire was caused by arson, and has destroyed 636 buildings and counting. The internet cannot tell me how many families were displaced, how many of those homes were insured against wildfires, who will fight to stay and who will be forced to move on, as I was, because they can’t afford to stay.
The Nixon fire in Riverside and San Diego counties began on July 29 and is eighty-two per cent contained, as of this writing. Local residents were forced to evacuate. Were their housekeepers and gardeners told? Or did they show up for a shift with bandanas wrapped around their mouths or KN-95 masks across their faces? Did they go because they needed the money? Did they go because they weren’t told to stay away? Were the announcements only in English this time around? Did we learn something?
The Boise fire started August 9, covers over 10,000 acres, and is zero per cent contained.
Fire season comes every year; these numbers are out of date as soon as they are written.
What is constant is the necessity of adaptation.
Burn morels are a type of morel mushroom found only in conifer forests in the Western U.S. The mycelium of burn morels are incredibly patient, capable of waiting underground for decades until a burn triggers the conditions for the fruiting bodies—the part we see above ground and recognise as mushrooms—to appear.
Unlike the morels that appear in my Eastern backyard, under the dripline of the dying elm tree we cut down, burn morels are resplendent. Savvy foragers can find hordes of them in any Western state hit by fires, which is to say in every Western state.
Amid the devastation fire brings, burn morels offer a counterpoint to the stories we tell ourselves about disaster and loss. While morels may emerge on disturbed lands for several years, the biggest flush comes the year after a fire. Rising up from blackened earth, these mushrooms are a sign of healing. Ferns, mosses, native wildflowers, and other plants whose rhizomatous roots survived the blaze join them. Grasses and wildflowers follow, providing forage for wildlife. Saplings take root. Over the years, the bare earth fills.
Morel mushrooms cannot be readily cultivated, like shiitake or oyster mushrooms. They are highly prized, a valuable commodity if you know where to look and how to tell the true morel from its false lookalikes. Morels can sell for forty dollars a pound, depending on demand.
I had them first, as one does, at Chez Panisse. Before that meal, I didn’t think I liked mushrooms. Their slimy texture was off-putting. Those morels were nutty and sweet, with a woodland-rich umami and a crispier texture; as soon as I finished my meal, I missed them.
In Western culture, mushrooms are weird, nuisance species on our beloved lawns. Mushrooms can kill you. They can take you on a life-altering psychedelic journey, one that might force you to confront the shadows lurking in your mind’s eye. Westerners learn early not to go into the woods, those dark and liminal places where mushrooms are found.
As a kingdom, fungi are considered to be nonbinary. Some mushrooms possess multiple sexualities while others reproduce asexually. The split gill mushroom (Schizophyllum commune), has 23,000 sexes, and has become something of a nonbinary icon.
Like mushrooms, queer people hide underground emerging in our own time to blossom. We sometimes make people afraid. We stick to the fringes, are a bit extra, have as many labels as the split gill mushroom does sexes.
Like the burn morel, we are masters of adaptation. We straddle thresholds and occupy margins. We’ve lived multiple identities, borne out in the changing labels we use to identify ourselves. We find ways to thrive in a world that makes us feel small; we create joy from the pain of not belonging. Nobody has ever come to save us, so we have learned to save ourselves.
*****
Collectively, we are living on borrowed time. The warming climate leaves California hotter and drier. Urban sprawl has pushed development from city centres to wooded edgelands, where homes are at increased risk of burning. With insufficient housing to meet demand, officials continue to green-light developments in areas that have burned repeatedly. One of these days, a managed retreat from high-risk areas will be necessary.
As someone who left a beloved home, and was forever changed, I keep thinking about the choices those on the front lines of climate change will be forced to make, and how different those options are when you’re queer.
Cultural stereotypes portray queer people as affluent and white, so it’s assumed we are well-resourced to survive life’s emergencies. In truth, over one-fifth of us live in poverty. Forty-two per cent of us identify as people of colour and experience racial discrimination and bias. As I was in 2009, many queer people are one calamity away from being forced out of our homes, without a safety net or family support to fall back on.
Queer people are as much of an afterthought to disaster preparedness and emergency relief systems as those domestic labourers outside of Los Angeles. The faith-based organisations that frequently provide emergency relief alienate those of us forced to endure sermons that demonised and bullied us. Emergency shelters are often sex-segregated; trans and nonbinary people may avoid these spaces because they lack documentation that affirms their identity, or they worry about being discriminated against for not ‘passing’ along binary gender norms.
Yet queer people are masters of reinvention. Our self-acceptance journeys require deep questioning, reflection, and re-envisioning. We show up for one another and When biological families cannot love our truest expressions, we build chosen families who cherish our uniqueness. We practice community care and mutual aid, sharing when we have more than enough and asking for help when we need it. In a world increasingly on fire, we are the helpers.
Perhaps our history has prepared us to meet this moment, to not merely adapt but to thrive and flourish in ways I can’t envision because it is not yet time to leave.
On the days my heart breaks, trust in our collective resilience mends it.
