This could be hell, but this is our heaven

By Partha Chakraborty-

I am a transplant from New York City, and it took me years to fully absorb the allure of Los Angeles. I joined millions before me who came to love the climate, appreciate the suburban living, enjoy a diversity of flora and fauna nestled in laps of nature. For the last fifteen years I have been living at the base or somewhere higher up on a small hill in a bedroom community, one of 88 towns that make up the County.

On a (really) really good day, I claim to be able to see the Pacific from my deck; for the others, I am content in my quiet hillside where I am awakened by chirping of birds and retire at the end of a day to a glorious sunset against the hilltops. I can traipse down the slopes to the base of the hill till the fences of the next property bar me from walking into a winding street that abuts it.

On Wednesday, January 08, a small fire broke out at a neighboring parcel around 2:30 PM. Firefighters battled it for two hours and contained it fully. Fire never came within 40-50 feet of our property lines; embers could easily travel farther in the high winds that beset the valley, but did not. Brush on our land had been freshly cleared in anticipation of the fire season, and we were safe. Teresa Fire, as the small fire was named after the hillside alley I mentioned, never again flared up.

Hundreds within our acquaintance circle were not that lucky, unfortunately. The Eaton Fire, the second largest fire in the current set of conflagrations, engulfed Altadena, the next town across the Arroyo. Altadena, a town of about 43,000 with a good school system, is a hub of Black middle class in the greater LA area.

People fled Jim Crow or relocated while in active duty and found out they could afford a nice enough home with a swimming pool on quiet streets, not to speak of the weather and overall welcoming nature of the Los Angeles area (i.e., no redlining). We were frequent in that community — our son played soccer and visited the High School premises on numerous competitive occasions, and our favorite pizzeria is there. No more.

Eaton Fire tore through over 5000 structures in the last few days. Entire streets were laid to waste in heaps of debris, blacked out remains of chimneys, ash, broken tree stumps, and an occasional burnt car on a non-existent road. Gone are decades-old memories; fire burned so fast that there was little time to look for the photo album or the cassette or that VHS tape, or heirloom of any import. Down at the base, fires destroyed our favorite bakery, our son’s favorite ice-cream shop, and numerous ethnic grocery stores that were our regular haunts.

Many people in and around Altadena are retired and on fixed income. Most are ill-equipped to go through the insurance red-tape for reimbursement on whatever little coverage they carried. In most cases, it included a small fraction of replacement cost, only, memories and heirloom not included. They will have insufficient wherewithal to revert to any modicum of respectable living if they choose to stay back post-disaster. Most would not.

Among younger homeowners, calamity is just as real — most took home equity out, repeatedly, in long periods of low interest rates and ever-rising property values. The value of one’s primary home is the single biggest component of wealth in Southern California for most; thousands would see a large chunk of their financial health wiped clean.

I do not believe most local businesses will come back, burdened with clean-up, rebuilding and restocking, with a client base that will be a fraction of what it used to be. Effectively we will see the livelihoods of thousands on pause, at best, and these are not just the mom- and-pop shop owners, but also their employees, many of whom would travel miles to get there.

Equally vulnerable are casual workers, many of whom already come from vulnerable demographics — they tended gardens, did small repairs, provided house-keeping services or delivered at-home care for an aging population. It is highly unlikely that the vast majority will find comparable opportunities. No matter how you look at it, months, years, even decades from now, Eaton Fire will have fundamentally changed the community of Altadena and surrounding towns.

Far west from Altadena the situation is as dire, and worse, in the wake of a much larger Palisades Fire, affecting affluent communities of Pacific Palisades, leaping into tony Malibu and across the Pacific Coastal Highway to the uber-desirable beachfront homes.

Two weeks since the fires started, combined, the two fires burned almost 38,000 acres, reduced over 21,000 structures to ashes. Almost 41,000 residents are still under evacuation orders. The National Guard and the local police have cordoned off communities — left in darkness without access to amenities of minimal civilized existence — so looters do not run amuck. Firefighters on the ground, and in the sky, dominate the landscape, working 48 hour shifts up and down the ravines, twisted roads, and limited, if any, access to water to help them.

Watching a fire battalion move in tandem through a disaster zone gives you faith in humanity, even when you are in distress. It is a choreography borne out of institutional memory of humankind’s ageless battle against catastrophes where these women and men are our saviors, literally; yet there is little movement that is not absolutely needed. Their silhouettes move blithely against the reddish hue on a dark night from a distance. You come closer and their yellow heavy overalls, with all the gear, move in unison, almost weightless, even if their own bodies are hunched up under the weight of it all. The hose could have a life of its own if let go, but letting go is the last thing these lifesavers are to do. They do not let go, they truly run into fire that you are running from. They do not let go of an injured person till they are evacuated to a triage site, and they do not let go of their own brothers and sisters. You walk up with a box of cookies and water; you see beads of sweat trickling down their neck and cheek even on a very cold night.

Firefighters are guardian angels in our City of Angels. Not that we treat them as such in real life, but I will leave that for a later date.

It has been bright and sunny for days on end since the fires dissipated in my little corner of solace — you do not even smell anything funny in the air. If my daily routine does not take me outside of a, say, two-mile radius around our home, I could truly forget all about the carnage and the sleepless nights shook up at the slightest alerts on our phones — maybe this could be another evacuation notice, maybe there is a fire just on the other side of the ravine that we could not see.

We stopped being on edge, though we are fully aware that thousands are looking into a bleak future, at least in the immediate term. As of now days are warm enough for a winter, Santa Ana winds are barely perceptible, and I am looking at another glorious sunset from my study. It could almost be heaven if you asked me.

Los Angeles does this to people. It is a bizzarro land where very real — scrappy new members of the community hungry for any opportunity to use their hands for the family — for example, and very surreal, people who duel in only make-believe triggered worlds of no consequence, to be generous — have learned to coexist, and even feed off one another. It is a world where even when we are getting into what could be the costliest catastrophe in the nation’s history, we cannot but revel in the beauty surrounding us all. It is a world where, paraphrasing Woody Guthrie, we roamed and rambled, and all around us a voice was rumbling that “(T)his land was made for you and me”.

This could be hell for some of us now, but for all of us, this is our heaven, because, this is our City of Angels.

(Representational image. Photo: Quarrie photography/www.who.int)

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