The Conditions of Apocalypse

THE LOS ANGELES FIRES

There will be no end to the amount of things written about the Los Angeles fires, which started 48 hours ago and are still burning, but I have been fighting back the urge to text, email, and call so many people that I thought I might as well gather my thoughts in one place.

The fires began two days ago, first in Pacific Palisades, in the coastal foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains, just west of Los Angeles, then another fire further east, in the San Gabriel Mountains north of Pasadena, where the flames rapidly spread down into a city called Altadena. Several others broke out not long after, including, as I write this, a growing fire north of L.A., near a city called Sylmar. In all cases, the fires were driven by extreme seasonal winds that allegedly reached 100mph at times, which, if sustained, would have qualified as a Category 2 hurricane.

My wife and I live very close to Pasadena, technically within walking distance, which means that we are just outside the evacuation warning zone for one of the fires. The main barrier protecting our neighborhood is, of all things, a freeway—this is as Los Angeles a thing as I could imagine, in this city where automotive infrastructure can act as a shield, a medieval fortress wall, against the unfamiliar or unwanted. The winds that night shook our house, whistling through even small gaps in the carpentry, our chimney moaning for hours. Debris began landing on the hillside behind us—other people’s trash and plastic bags, empty soda cans, burned leaves and branches, and, eventually, snowfalls of ash. Then the smell of smoke finally hit—first quite subtly, but growing worse and worse, an atmospheric effect powered simply by prevailing winds but that gave the illusion the fires were getting closer, evoking something almost primal in terms of panic and alarm.

Somehow we slept, with our emergency bags packed and bottles of water everywhere, my brain addled from constantly refreshing social media feeds to see if the fire near us was spreading. That one is called the Eaton Fire, as it ignited in a place called Eaton Canyon, the same canyon where my wife took me birdwatching two years ago as a birthday present, a gorgeous river valley that flows down out of the San Gabriels, filled with wild quail and towhees and kinglets and jays, many of whom must surely have burned to death in confusion and terror while flames consumed everything around them. We woke up to a text from a neighbor in our street’s group chat asking if we should now go ahead and begin evacuating or if we were still waiting for the official order, which we took to mean, holy fuck, the fires spread further than we thought last night, everyone’s about to flee, and we nearly missed it due to sleeping. I threw the bedroom curtains open to see dark orange clouds so low they looked like fog, with heavy smoke and ash passing overhead, and my hands began shaking. But, at least for now, we remain both at home and safe.

The smell outside is overpowering and inescapable; the thing with air, you realize when you can’t breathe it, is that it is coextensive with everything around you and that suffocation is as much a spatial phenomenon as a respiratory one, because you can’t get out of it. There is nowhere else to go. Ash is now literally everywhere, nearly a centimeter deep on our car windshield alone. When we step outside, our shoes leave black footprints.

And we are the lucky ones. Both blessed and fortunate, we have only ash, fear, and inconvenience as our complaints. But thousands of homes are gone, churches and synagogues have burned, schools and assisted-living facilities were destroyed. Elderly people in wheelchairs were rushed across smoke-filled intersections in the darkness as embers blew past on hurricane-force winds. A woman was rescued running alone through an empty neighborhood while the trees and houses around her burned, filmed by the driver who saved her. And the animals—ground creatures that can’t run fast enough or fly away, that don’t know where to go or how to find safety, all paths blocked by embers and toxic debris, even the mourning doves and sparrows outside our own house here rustling through what looks like charcoal, a few squirrels nearly blackened as if they slept inside chimneys—not yet realizing perhaps that the landscape that so recently fed and protected them is gone. So many will starve to death or die in fear, hiding inside the burnt ruins of houses and trees, looking for clean water but licking firefighting foam, their tongues coated with ash.

Worse, the fires are still growing—even if, as with the Eaton Fire, at a slowed pace—but the thing that really frightens me is that, until there is substantial rain, which we have not had since last spring, even if these particular fires are extinguished, all the mountains surrounding Los Angeles will remain bone-dry, all the plants growing up their slopes so desiccated they crack like peanut shells, which means that the risk will still be waiting. Some asshole with a cigarette butt, or a teenager who thinks it’s funny to light a firecracker outside, could start this up all over again. There’s an entire mountain range in the middle of town where my wife and I hike several times a month that, so far, remains unscathed, but all its hills are covered in oak trees and ceanothus and sage, dry as chalk. Even with total fire containment, without rain it’s difficult to believe these fires will really be “over.” We’ll just be waiting for the next flare-up.

And the damage is absolutely mind-boggling. Huge swaths of Altadena are in ruins, as is an estimated 75% of Pacific Palisades. A colleague of mine had to flee her house in Santa Monica, where a fire such as this would have been science fiction just five years ago, and my wife and I are hearing more and more stories, countless stories, of people who lost everything. Drone shots—which have their own downsides, as drones interfere with firefighting aircraft, yet the aesthetic power of the aerial shot is such that every dickhead with a new toy now wants to go out and shoot things for their Instagram fans—show whole neighborhoods scrubbed down to chimneys and foundation walls. Entire shopping malls and high schools are gone. The word “rebuilding” is used, but it seems meaningless to me right now, not to mention logistically impossible. Many people have already said that there will be a Los Angeles before and after these fires, but I think that might understate the changes coming and the effects of what’s occurred. I don’t know.

There wasn’t water in the hydrants for fire crews to use. Viral footage showed one firefighter reduced to using what appeared to be a luxury handbag filled with water to douse the flames as, for whatever reason, his equipment was inadequate or simply did not work. There are obviously political reasons for this, as well as technical ones and, in particular, environmental ones—the landscape is as dry as paper—and all of this will, and needs to, be parsed in detail later. Whether the heads of municipal departments or the state’s Governor or all of the above simply prioritized the wrong things or looked the other way, or, of course, whether they did everything exactly right but the conditions of apocalypse simply overwhelmed the human capacity to plan ahead, we don’t know yet. I have to assume it’s a little bit of everything. But you can’t call it “rebuilding” if you don’t know what went wrong in the first place; you’re just temporarily huddling up again and pretending to be a city until the next disaster strikes.

I think one of the casualties of the fires will be the feeling that Los Angeles exists in a time of abundance, one where residents have leeway not to worry about existential risk, where we can confidently assume a disaster like this won’t break out again while we’re sleeping. Maybe that sounds like everyday trauma to you, or like I’m describing overly-coddled Americans so sheltered in a state of numbness and comfort that many have only now awoken to a world of hostility and pain brutally indifferent to their expectations. Maybe. Or maybe you’ve already been through disasters like this yourself and it just sounds like I’m whining. But encountering a world that has been instantly, catastrophically reformatted to have no place for you is not something people universally experience, even if it’s something you yourself once lived through, and, when this occurs to millions of people at once over an entire geographic area—Los Angeles County alone is four times the size of Rhode Island—the coming effects on morale, political affiliation, and personal stability seem extraordinary to me.

But, then, I’m writing this in the midst of something that has no real end in sight, inside a house filled with red sunlight, our clothes reeking of smoke, looking outside at thirsty, baffled animals discolored by ash. People are cooped up in airport hotels watching their own homes burn down on live webcams. Los Angeles Fire Department bulldozers are pushing luxury cars out of the way on mountain roads, abandoned there by drivers who fled on foot, in the process trapping their neighbors behind them. Lost pets whose owners evacuated without them have been found wandering through ruined neighborhoods in confusion, their homes nowhere to be seen, all visual landmarks gone. In many areas, the water is not just unsafe to drink, it’s unsafe to boil and drink, contaminated by heavy chemicals.

If I’ve already emailed you some variation of all this, thank you again for reaching out and listening; and, to everyone affected by this or other tragedies, stay strong and stay safe.

A DEVIL WENT DOWN TO GEORGIA

For those of you in Los Angeles—assuming the timing of this isn’t affected by the wildfires [NOTE: This event has been postponed, most likely until March 2025; stay tuned for updates]—I’ll be moderating a Q&A with author Deb Miller Landau at Vroman’s in Pasadena next week. Her recent book, A Devil Went Down to Georgia, is about the 1987 murder of Lita McClinton Sullivan. In what Oprah selected as one of the Best True Crime Books of 2024, Landau explores “the shocking events that followed Lita’s murder in 1987, including the surprising lack of evidence, racial bias in the justice system, and the international manhunt for Lita’s killer.”

Join us at 7pm on Friday, January 17th, at Vroman’s—but please check the Vroman’s website nearer to the date to ensure that nothing has changed due to the ongoing disasters here.

WIRELESS PUPPETRY, OR ROBOTICS FROM THE OUTSIDE IN

A somewhat random topic I’ve been following for a while now is the creation of robots not by assembling inert parts into a coherent machine that is then powered by an internal motor, but by altering a collection of objects such that they become responsive to an external force, such as a magnetic field. The latter could be compared to a marionette, but without strings—wireless puppetry, perhaps.

Examples would be this “glue-like magnetic spray” that “can turn objects, such as pills, into mini robots that can be controlled by magnets and navigated through the body,” or these “robots made from sticky tape and dust” that “can morph into various shapes under the direction of a magnetic field. They may one day be able to crawl into computers to fix broken circuits or even inside the human stomach to apply therapeutic patches to gastric ulcers.”

There’s a strange, even delightful magic to this that captivates me: the idea that you might be able to sprinkle magnetic particles onto otherwise unrelated physical objects, then drive or control those objects using an external force. They become temporarily united—a constellation, not a machine—until you turn the external force off, at which point they return to dormant matter. When needed again, however, you switch the magnetic field back on and the “robot” reassembles.

At its most basic, this sounds very likely to be the basis for future children’s toys; more dramatically, this could be the premise of an interesting heist film, in which the target of a sophisticated theft is carried away by an externally-driven collection of nearby objects; at its most nefarious, this will very likely end up weaponized in some terrible but clever way by a high-tech military group. Unbeknownst to you, for example, the seemingly passive objects in the room around you are ready to be triggered into malevolent action by the appearance of an externally-controlled magnetic field, at which point they rise up against you in a moment of horror. Imagine the locked-door mysteries of the near-future: a murder weapon that disappears simply because its constituent parts deconstellate. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice by way of DARPA.

LIFE IS BUT A DREAM

Finally, in my previous newsletters, I ended with ambient music recommendations. Maybe it’s the fires, but I thought I’d recommend a couple tracks in a different mode.

First is the superb and melancholy “Life Is But A Dream,” from 2013, by the Canadian singer-songwriter Tess Parks. Continuing that atmosphere is “Feel Alright,” released in 2024 by Eazyhead, from the Philippines.

Enjoy, play them loud, and take care.