Doom Season in Los Angeles

Photo

LOS ANGELES — Before the fires came, our skin turned dry and the winds cleared the smog from the air. November passed with barely any rain, and on Thanksgiving the high was 92 degrees. We Angelenos had been blessed with a beautiful autumn. But all the while, we felt a sense of doom.

Last week the outdoor humidity as measured by my home weather station dropped below 10 percent. By Wednesday morning, wildfires were burning on a wide crescent of mountain ranges on the fringes of the metropolis. One of them loomed near the treasures of the Getty art museum and threatened homes on Linda Flora Drive in Bel-Air — the street where my kid sister lives.

At 5:45 a.m., she awoke suddenly. “I had this innate sense that something was terribly wrong,” she told me later. But all was quiet. There were no sirens wailing or helicopters hovering overhead. Her baby daughter, husband and most of the neighborhood were asleep. “Even before I saw it, I knew there was a fire,” she said. “I got up and opened the door — and it was right in front of me.”

Across the street, the sky behind her neighbor’s house had filled with the otherworldly glow of a wildfire. The orange light illuminated smoke that was climbing upward like a pillar.

Fire season brings the prospect of swift and total annihilation to many California communities. In less than an hour, an entire neighborhood can be burned to the ground, with lives lost and memories wiped out. In October, one of the worst wildfires in California history hit Santa Rosa and other Northern California communities, killing more than 40 people.

Californians live in an increasingly precarious balance with the flora and fauna that surround us. Last winter’s rains brought brush and hillside grasses back to life, but they didn’t resurrect the more than 102 million trees killed by five years of drought; each one becomes kindling for future blazes. Meanwhile, new subdivisions keep being built in traditional fire corridors.

The fire season after a wet winter is always an especially dangerous time in Southern California. As the brush grows thicker it can feed powerful flames; they sweep down the same routes in the San Gabriel and Santa Monica Mountains that packs of coyotes follow to prey on our dogs and cats. We’ve pushed the landscape to the limits of human habitation.

“The simple formula is fuel plus meteorology plus ignition equals fire,” Bill Patzert, a climatologist for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told The Los Angeles Times in October. “The catalyst is people.”

Doing whatever we can to fend off fire is an annual ritual in Los Angeles hillside communities. Every spring, we go out and clear our brush. One year, I attacked the oat grasses on my property with a machete, which my neighbors found quite amusing.

But fires burned here even before there was a city. Or human beings of any nation or tribe.

“In millennia before Los Angeles settled its plain, the chaparral burned every 30 years or so, as the chaparral does now,” John McPhee wrote for The New Yorker in his classic essay “Los Angeles Against the Mountains.” “The burns of prehistory, in their natural mosaic, were smaller than the ones today.”

Some critics have seen Los Angeles’s fire seasons through the lens of class warfare and overdevelopment. In his 1998 book “The Ecology of Fear,” Mike Davis infamously made the case for “letting Malibu burn.” He argued that the cost of suppressing fires in Malibu and other hillside communities “accelerates gentrification” and pushes out residents with “bohemian lifestyles,” transforming the communities into enclaves for the wealthy.

Plenty of bohemians still manage to cling to their private patch of hillside, however. The people in the path of the latest fires include working families who’ve lived for decades in humble subdivisions with gorgeous views of the deadly chaparral in the mountains above. For them, fire is intertwined with the region’s natural beauty.

“The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself,” Joan Didion once wrote. Of the famous winds that fuel the city’s fires, she wrote: “The violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.”

My sister went to bed on Tuesday night to the sound of the gusting offshore winds. Perhaps that explains why she imagined a fire outside her door the next morning, even before she saw it. She ran back in the house and woke up her husband and her baby.

“I grabbed the diaper bag, a little bit of dog food and our passports,” she said. “As we were driving out we saw the fire department coming up.”

This being Los Angeles, the conflagration enveloping my sister’s neighborhood was a media event. I followed the progress of the fire that morning on five different television stations, looking for her house in every shot. Firefighters attacked the blaze with aircraft that dropped a crimson-colored rain of fire-retardant chemicals. They trudged about on foot too, pouring water onto the roofs of burning homes.

Watching them, I had a flashback to my days covering fires for The Los Angeles Times. I remembered the red-tailed hawk I once saw circling high above a burning canyon, slicing through clouds of smoke. At that same blaze, I saw horses being evacuated, and looked up and saw the midday sun shrink to a small, tangerine disk.

Every year, California’s fire season gets a little longer. Forty to 50 days longer than a half century ago, according to one estimate. The fire in Bel Air struck one month later than the blaze that swept through the community in 1961.

My sister’s home survived. Several hundred others across Southern California did not. By Friday, fires were burning from Ventura County and the northern fringes of Greater Los Angeles to San Diego County in the south.

Even those of us who were far from the fires felt the subtle changes in the natural world around us. Late each afternoon, the smoke in the atmosphere turned the daylight a darker shade of orange, as if God had placed a filter on the sun to bathe us all in a nostalgic glow.

I found a nearby ridge to watch as the sun dipped toward the hazy horizon. It turned a shade of pink that was beautiful and frightening.