We had just celebrated another year living in sunny Los Angeles, where I relocated six years ago with my husband, Iain, and two children, Pablo (15) and Indy (12), fleeing the rains of London.
I was heading for a day out with girlfriends, on an otherwise ordinary, blue-skied Tuesday morning. An extreme weather warning hovered on my phone screen threatening high winds – but nothing I needed to concern myself with, surely. That is, until text messages started buzzing that a wildfire had started in LA. This is depressingly common and seasonal, but the location of this fire was oddly residential.
And as the day wore on, it spread at a terrifying pace. At the time, it wasn’t dangerously close to our house or the kids’ schools, about 20 minutes away by car, but friends were beginning to be evacuated and scenes of abandoned vehicles being bulldozed off winding canyon roads as people fled by foot began pouring in.
We left the get-together early to make sure the kids were collected and home safe for supper, speeding past dystopian scenes such as a single tall palm tree engulfed in flames. Checking fire-tracking maps, I could see the acreage double by the hour. Triple. The city felt eerie and was gridlocked under darkening skies. As we neared, my son called from his friend’s, where he was having band practice, and I was sure he would be increasingly panicked about getting home. “Ten minutes,” I said frantically, relieved I had almost reached him. “Okay, I just wanted to know if I could go in Daniel’s hot tub,” he responded with jarring nonchalance.
Once everyone was safe and home, we read that our favourite restaurant, Reel Inn, down on the Pacific Coast Highway by Topanga Beach, had burned to the ground. The whole coastal roadside was gone – houses, shops and restaurants, landmarks from the 1950s or earlier. There was so much loss – but losing places where your core memories are built felt particularly disturbing, like someone tossing your old family photos on to a bonfire one by one.
Gone is the cosy, settled ambiance of patrons munching cajun fish under coloured lights, surfers bobbing in the distance. Friends have fled their homes and are watching their children’s schools burn on their phones, and Instagram is urging everyone to leave out water for animals fleeing from flaming canyons. We are sent tales of queues outside hotels, people lugging kids and cats and dogs and whatever they could grab, hoping for a room for the night. We are helpless but to repeat to everyone that we have beds if anyone needs them.
The night is sleepless, my husband and I tag teaming so we can monitor whether what are now two raging wildfires on either side of us start heading in our direction. The wind is howling and rattling our ancient windows. I wake at 2am and can smell burning. Grasping for my phone, I see we are still very safe in our house, but the enormous clouds of ash and smoke have reached us, and even with every window closed, they’re in my nostrils. By morning, the air outside smells of burnt plastic.
“Are we taking the kids to school?” I type into my daughter’s class WhatsApp. My instinct says no, but in the absence of any information from the school, I silence my instincts and opt to drive in. The fire hasn’t encroached further east towards their schools, though it’s just 15 miles away.
We traipse to the car through large flakes of ash that have fallen overnight. My son stoops down to pick one up and it melts at his touch; my daughter’s class text group is full of observations about the air – “It’s just unsanitary!” types one boy. There’s no fear evident in their demeanour, but perhaps it is just very well hidden, after so many years of practice drills for earthquakes and school shootings – a lifetime’s onslaught of the imagery of horror rendering them immune to true terror in their midst.
Setting off, I feel a little insane driving towards the fire. Ahead on the horizon is a billowing grey cloud like a volcanic eruption. The sky is blackening unnaturally. “It’s like Ghostbusters out here,” quips my son. The roadside is strewn with huge, dry palm fronds and branches dislodged by the winds, which the radio is telling us reached 100mph last night. I drop the kids at their respective schools, deserted as ghost towns in a swirl of bluster and leaves. On the way home, an official press conference on the radio tells me we must all stay home if possible, and not drive into school, and so I circle back. Driving home, we can see the glow of the Palisades fire tearing down the hillside to our left, surreal as a disaster movie.
Every minute brings at least 10 new messages, some with accompanying videos of infernos or their aftermath, streets of rubble and blackness, like a war zone. The burned-out shells of cafes we knew or shops we loved. “My mother-in-law’s house has burned to the ground”; “Our neighbourhood is gone”; “Our beautiful home is no more” read the messages. Someone forwards a description of horses let loose and bolting through embers, chickens strewn dead across yards. How can we console our friends?
The utter communal helplessness in the face of such an extreme natural disaster is humbling and terrifying. Scenes of firemen pointing seemingly tiny jets of water at blazing homes feel surreal. And then we hear they’re out of water completely. “Turn off all your taps!” comes the latest advice. Upstairs, the kids are on undoubtedly on screens – they know I’m too distracted by the endless stream of horror to intervene. But are they watching their favourite shows – or scrolling images of their hometown burning around them?
The world feels so horrific now, unrelentingly so. Words such as “dystopia” have hopped into everyday prose without much fanfare. Each day brings news of a flood, an earthquake, a wildfire… this is supposed to happen elsewhere. My daughter appears in the kitchen; she’s hungry. “Are you okay?” I ask, going in for a cuddle. She gives me a confused look: “Why wouldn’t I be?” Because school is cancelled. Because neighbourhoods have vanished. Because the world is burning. She munches a piece of toast and hops back upstairs.
On an invaluable group text of girlfriends, a constant stream of updates and hope and advice. We are all alive. But there’s no template for what to do when your kid can’t go to school in a climate emergency, no sign of when an end to the fire will come or if it will come for us. So what can we do but surrender – with love and hope – to the steady plod of parenting without its guidebook for a modern apocalypse.
