My world's on fire, how 'bout yours?

Today’s installment of the newsletter is going out free to everyone, and apologies if it isn’t particularly lengthy or maybe particularly rambling, but my house has only just had the internet restored, and I’m not sure for how long, so here’s writing while there’s internet available upon which to write.

(That may not be grammatically accurate, but I’m tired!)

You’ve almost certainly heard by now that Southern California is being ravaged by some historically horrific wildfires. And as luck may have it, that’s where I live! Things began going wrong on Monday night, when the predicted high winds began. Tuesday morning was just tons of wind all day long; 70-plus-mph persistent gusts that rattled windows and uprooted trees and downed power lines and helped create the perfect conditions for wildfires to begin, spread, and rage out of control.

Contributing to this (mightily) was one of the driest winters in record — Los Angeles had experienced a total of two-hundredths of an inch of rain since autumn, which was tough for my mind to reconcile considering that my family had just returned from a holiday trip to Sacramento, where we spent three days bunkering from rain before spending about six hours driving in it; nonstop rain from Lincoln to the Grapevine, just a week ago. None of that rain reached our county.

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Tuesday was when our kid finally went back to school; his first day back at kindergarten since December 20, and we were very excited about not only getting him out of the house during the day but also getting him back into his very important daily routine. By midday, while our son was having a school day without outdoor recess due to the absurd winds, the Palisades fire was already raging. As of this writing, on Thursday night, the Palisades fire has burned 20,000 acres of land and is only six percent contained. That’s only one of the fires that Southern California is dealing with right now.

The Eaton fire is the one closest to me. I’m just on the south side of the freeway from GLN-E026 on the above map. (Shout out to the amazing Watch Duty site and app, which has been an incredible resource for many during these events.)

(I want to be perfectly clear: while we’ve been dealing with a ton of stress, anxiety, terrible air, and some other inconveniences I’m about to go into, we haven’t been in an evacuation area at all this time. I know many people who have had to evacuate, decamp, leave town or host displaced people this week, and I don’t mean to insinuate or imply that we’ve been directly bodily threatened by these fires at this time. This is just something that has taken over my week and the weeks of pretty much everyone I know, so it’s what I want to write about.)

Tuesday night, our son basically without warning lost a tooth — his third. That amped him up quite a bit, and an hour later, at around 8 p.m.,while we were doing Tooth Fairy prep and reading him a story before tucking him in, the power went out in the city where we live. Like, all of it. We’d been keeping an eye on the fires and the winds, which were both extremely severe by that point. After our son finally fell asleep (without his normal sound machine, night light, or monitor), we rounded up our flashlights and emergency lights and our candles, battery-powered and otherwise, and managed to get a battery-operated radio tuned to the local news. My wife quickly determined we should pack some things, and somewhere between 11 p.m. and midnight, we attempted to get some semblance of rest, if not sleep. The wind whipped and banged against our building the entire night, and my son (who for some reason really wanted us to read him a bizarre fire-prevention book he’d been given at school called Bernie Burn) kept waking up, first to yell IT’S TOO HOT at the unfamiliar battery-powered candle we’d put in his room to supplant his night light, and then to holler, while eyes closed and still mostly asleep, that we needed to take the book away. (The book had been put away before he’d fallen asleep.) Beyond the stress of not knowing whether we’d have to evacuate, my son sleeping fitfully and the pervasive knocking wind, no power meant no CPAP machine for me, so sleep was essentially impossible (at least for any longer than a handful of minutes at a time).

Just before midnight, our son’s school was announced as being closed on Wednesday, and by mid-morning, with fires raging everyone and power still out in the city, his school was announced to be closed throughout the week. We kept listening to the radio and monitoring things on our phones, because 5G still worked for us at least, although spottily for some time. I made an emergency run to Petco to get a new cat carrier (since one of ours has somehow gone missing) and some disposable litter boxes in the event of evacuation, as well as to get gas. As I entered Petco, I got a series of emergency alerts on my phone that were basically impossible to decipher, but indicated I was being ordered to evacuate my area. I got home and found my wife had not gotten any of the alerts I’d gotten, and that as far as we could determine, we were not being ordered to evacuate.

The power finally came back on after about 14 hours without it, and it’s a bit striking how much less insane you immediately feel in an active disaster area when you at least have a working refrigerator and can charge your phone via a wall socket. Our internet did not return, however, and would not return until nearly a full 48 hours after we lost it. Here’s something that you never want to have to deal with: explaining to a modern-day five-year-old that the reason he can’t watch anything he wants to watch is because “the internet,” something he’s never had to consider before, “isn’t working.”

The air was atrocious on Wednesday, and far worse for people in neighboring areas, but the wind died and our local skies cleared throughout the day, and at the very least, we had power during the night, which meant I could fire up the CPAP and we could all try to sleep in earnest. And sleep we did. I was essentially out when my head hit the pillow and I don’t believe I moved an inch for the next eight hours, waking up feeling like I’d just fallen down a flight of concrete stairs.

And so we’ve spent the bulk of this week managing our confused son, keeping one ear and one eye on the fires that continue to pop up and continue to spread in case we need to grab our bags (still waiting by the front door) and shove our irritable cats into their carriers and drive. One particularly fun bit from Thursday was the fire that appeared and raced up Mount Wilson, where the entirety of infrastructure for local television, radio, cellular and communications towers for Los Angeles County resides. Luckily, after several hours, firefighters seem to have that one under control.

We’ve also spent a lot of time checking in with our friends and family in the area, and seeing amazing displays of charity, community, and solidarity in abundance. It’s been a very stressful and frustrating week for us, but there are so many whose entire lives will be changed or ruined by these fires and subsequent events. Everything happening here is so surreal. It’s bizarre to see a completely different color sky than you’re used to at any given time of day. Ash is drifting through the air and covering everything. Trees are down everywhere. In practice, everyone is drifting, feeling helpless together. And under smoke-filled skies, there is the pervasive mundanity of people going to work at fast food restaurants and gas stations and pet stores and supermarkets, waiting tables because they have to or because there’s nothing else to be done. My wife and I ended up being at a Buffalo Wild Wings to make use of their wifi, being served by people in an active fire area who have to do their job because there was no internet at our house for us to do ours.

It’s been a singular week for all of us in Los Angeles County. The hope is that each day it gets a little better for more people. The multiple-times-a-day press conferences keep hammering the message from our authorities that “we will rebuild,” although they keep saying it in an accusatory fashion, because absolutely nothing can ever be normal anymore.

I’m not holding out hope that any future “normal” will be like the “normal” I used to know, but I’m at least confident that at some point, it won’t be weird to look outside anymore. And that will be nice.