It’s September 7, 2020. The red, the red, the red. Here. Everywhere. Late summer into early autumn is fire season here. The heat. The wind. Fire exposes priorities: what to take, what’s important. Fire forces choices. The status quo is being changed. Again. You stare at the red sun and think about the choices ahead of you.
Like Southern California, like Los Angeles, you will be forged by loss—as we all are—and rise from something—as we all hope to do—though when you’re in it, it’s never quite clear where things are going. What are you rising from? The past? Heartbreak? Disappointment? Ash? Everything? It’s the not-knowing that sucks. Right now, everything is too hot and hazy and the air hurts. That’s all you know. The way forward hasn’t revealed itself yet, and maybe it won’t.
Eighty-two miles away in Bobcat Canyon in the Los Angeles Forest, another wildfire chars anything in its path, eventually destroying 115,997 acres, but is destroy the right word? After the 2018 Woolsey Fire that ripped through Malibu, you went hiking and saw green buds next to blackened tree stubs. Southern California holds tight to its reputation for reinvention. That’s why you’re here: to reinvent yourself, and this painful regeneration isn’t a singular experience. It’s as cyclical and reliable as witnessing the tulips bloom back east. Regeneration by fire is a season here. Renewal will happen—for both you and California—but not yet.
First, you and California must let go of what was.
Like storms, the fires have names, and maybe they have personalities, too, some described as possessing Herculean resistance to every tool built to suppress and control destruction while others are described as more mild-mannered, like capricious gods. You learn how September burns here, how the ending of summer and the arrival of autumn herald a different kind of death in Southern California, a different kind of orange on the horizon, not the one of pretty leaves changing but of heat and wind raging. Forget pumpkin spice this and that, or that sign you saw for pumpkin tacos (what the??). Orange means something different in Southern California, and the orange grows so hot it becomes a red you don’t recognize.
Inside, on this Malibu hotel bed beneath a red hot confused sun, a man with curly red hair snores. His moods are unpredictable, inflammatory. It’s the waning days of a waning relationship and the waning hours of a fun weekend with a man you need to leave if you are going to be true to yourself. In the past 48 hours while Southern California burned, you were drinking, eating sushi, having sex, zipping around on the backseat of his Triumph motorcycle, caught up in your own life, and isn’t that easier than remembering a world that fights itself all the time?
It’s the end of September, 2024, the Malibu hotel, that man, a memory that gains distance every day. Three huge wildfires scorch Southern California in three weeks, burning more than 117,000 acres, causing injuries, destroying 242 structures, blackening favourite hiking trails. The month isn’t even over yet. The news channels and social media show a woman walking in flames towards firefighters, the wind deafening. She is alone, wearing a dress. This is in Orange County, south of Los Angeles, where the Airport Fire thickens for weeks before forgiving weather conditions allow firefighters to catch up. The earth catches its breath. We all do.
Why does fire take and take and take?
The man with the red hair lives in Orange County. It’s where he took you on motorcycle rides, across canyons that dipped and curved, where so much changed. Endings and beginnings, and then endings again before unexpected beginnings or the long-awaited beginnings or the beginnings that are so amazing you pray to whoever is listening that there won’t be any more endings. Yet, fire reminds you that nothing stays as it was. Every fucking September there always seems to be too much changing at once. You want it to be October. Or March. Or May. A breezy June afternoon on the beach or that Sunday night where you ate lemon tarts and snuck wine. You want the orange of sunsets from the Ferris wheel on the Santa Monica Pier. You want the red of that wine.
You see our memories. Age may be linear but memory is not. Fire steals so much but not this. Somehow, memory stays buried, safe from the elements.
You see endings and beginnings blur into one another, as smoke and fire blur the horizon.
You’re 33 and sit across from a therapist, a large man with a heavy Brooklyn accent who owns a very comfortable couch where you want to fall asleep and dream deeply about being somewhere warm with turquoise water. He asks about your parents. You tell him. There’s a long pause. You wait. You don’t know what more to say. Then finally, he says, “You escaped a burning house.”
You’re 19 and sit in an unadorned room giving a deposition to your father’s lawyer. Your father is bipolar, vindictive. A man with money. He is taking you to court so that he can stop paying child support for you while he continues to pay for your brother. Your father’s lawyer asks you about your homework habits, your dating habits. He wants to create a profile of you for the judge.
You’re 31 with an oxygen mask over your face because the daughter you’re about to give birth to is stuck, is in fetal distress, and after pushing for an hour, the doctor calls for a Cesarean. You’re relieved. You’re ready to be gutted like a fish. You’re ready to meet the girl who will change your life.
You’re 46 and with another lawyer. Your future ex-husband sits next to you and cracks jokes. Humor helps him when he’s nervous. Humour helps you, too, but you stay quiet in this room filled with L.A. sunshine on a bright October Friday. A divorce agreement is being worked out. You feel relieved. That night, you meet the red-haired man for dinner and a Ferris wheel ride. Your ex-husband texts his future wife.
You’re 20 and arriving in London for the first time. You’ll come back to this city again and again. This city will become the boyfriend you always wanted. When you return from London, you daydream about living in California after you graduate.
You’re 8 or 9 or maybe 10, and your father keeps the living room wood-burning stove going at night. He can’t just throw a log on, close the door, and go back to watching TV like you see other dads do when you sleep over at your friends’ houses. Your dad likes to constantly poke the fire, sometimes making it too big. Sometimes, the stove pipe leading to the chimney turns bright orange. This scares you. One night, you’re asleep and the fire alarm in your house goes off. This happens a lot. You grab your teddy bear and run straight out into the snow. You hear your father shout “It’s alright!” but nothing is alright. Your feet freeze as you walk back inside your house that has not yet burned to the ground.
You’re 45 and a neighbour texts you a photo of your house in New Jersey being demolished by developers, the 1926 Colonial you tried to save, the one with two clawfoot bathtubs original to the house, one which you dragged out to California with you. The house is half-standing, half knocked down, your daughter’s pink bedroom exposed to the December wind. An unfinished pile of rubble, the place where you decorated Christmas trees, hosted dinner parties and sleepovers, attempted to make macaroons, took in a stray kitten.
You’re 16, making out with a boy on a golf cart at the golf course where you clear plates and pour coffee for people who make way more money than either of your parents.
You’re 28, wearing ivory chiffon. It’s your wedding day. You didn’t want bridesmaids. Your mother wears a purple dress that’s identical to the dress one of the guests wears. You find this funny. Your mother doesn’t say a word to you the entire day. You’re grateful for her silence, it’s the perfect wedding gift. You’re free to enjoy yourself, and you do. Seventeen years later when you decide to move to California, you don’t tell her.
You’re 49, walking through Joshua Tree National Park, the starkness of the California desert a quiet relief. The trees mesmerize you.
You’re 24 and you drive across the border from Arizona to California. You’ve been road-tripping for days. It’s your first time in the state where you believe your future waits for you, but you can’t stop because the man who will become your husband waits for you in an apartment in Seattle. It’s a few days after the new year but January in Southern California doesn’t look like the blustery January you know. You don’t know wildfire yet. You only see groves heavy with oranges and snow on the mountains. Oranges growing in January! You want to stop but can’t.
You’re 8 or 9 or maybe 10, and your father trims roses in the garden. He plays Blondie and ABBA records on the big turntable console in your den. You have his green eyes. He tells you the correct way to pronounce Quebec, as the French do, because the nuns taught him French when he attended school. You live 170 miles from the Canadian border.
You’re 31 pushing a stroller along the Hudson River, springtime blooms everywhere. You sit on a bench, a little tired, your body still a gelatinous mess after childbirth. The newborn asleep in the stroller is unaware that the giant, jagged city across from her is where she’ll want to pursue an art career after college. You gaze at her chubby pink face, her body tucked in pastels. You worry it’ll go by too fast. Eighteen years later, when you drive her to LAX so she can take an eastbound flight to her university, you realize that it did.
You’re 47 watching a red sun from a hotel balcony, the Malibu shoreline behind you. Not too far from billowing smoke and fire, people still shop for groceries, still check their phones, still post dumb shit on Facebook, still bicker about the minutiae of life, still pick up their kids, still run late, still put gas in their cars—yes, Southern California loves its cars, its highways, its parking lots. We are always going, going, going. This is why you’re here.
You’re 51 and sitting next to your daughter at a fire circle. You realize you haven’t shared the comforts of a backyard fire with your daughter since she was in middle school, six months before the house was demolished. A glowing interruption amidst months of FaceTiming, texting, lives lived on screen. You need this moment to last. You know it won’t but you ask the fire, “Please, this.”
You’re home, your empty nest fills with the evening hour, and you light candles on your coffee table as you do every night, as you’ve always done for years, tiny flames that change the solitude yet could wreak havoc if left alone, take down an entire apartment complex as fire has done before here. Miles around you, wildfire continues to sear Southern California. There will be more red suns. More hazy skies. More black trees. More wild animals running, people choking the highways trying to leave. Evacuations for communities that you know and many that you don’t know. And then maybe weeks or months or a year or two later, something new arrives because something new always arrives.
