Loss List of items to pack

Published on January 24th, 2025 | by Cheryl Klein

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Hazy Shade of Winter: Fire, Destruction, and Survival in Los Angeles

On Wednesday morning, we packed things that were important: old photos, the kids’ adoption papers, teddy bears, a file folder labeled “Records” that usually lived in the back of the nine-year-old’s closet. We packed things that were important in the moment: clothes and Hot Wheels cars and cat litter and a jug of oat milk. We loaded them into our cars next to the cats and the kids. 

Throughout Tuesday, the Santa Anas had whipped palm fronds and Dodgers flags, and spiked the air with an ominous crackle. Late that night, fires sandwiched Los Angeles: the Pacific Palisades fire hugged the coast, and the Eaton Canyon fire engulfed the foothills. It was like a cruel take on that old LA claim that you can visit the mountains and the beach in just one day.

Watch Duty, the fire-tracking app everyone downloaded that week, divided the city into “Go” zones and “Set” zones. We were just below a “Set” zone on the map, but an alert blared on our phones, telling us to pack a bag, just in case—an official, unofficial “Ready” zone. We drove south and west to my dad’s house, to the beach town where I’d grown up and learned to roll my eyes at its yuppie ways. 

It was an emergency, but there was time for Jack in the Box, and Dash wanted a Jumbo Jack. In the drive-thru line, I completed the online check-in form for a telehealth visit with my psych NP because I didn’t want to be saddled with a cancellation fee. 

In the past two weeks, how often have you felt like something terrible might happen? 

I looked at the sky, which was half blue, half choked with brown clouds of smoke. I checked Several days. 

Palm trees and a roof against a smoggy, orange-ish sky

In truth, this is not where my anxiety resides. A city on fire is scary, but my house has never burned down. I ruminate about lonely, personal catastrophes that might separate me from the people I love. When friends checked in, I half joked, I’m fine for now, but in a week I’ll panic and think I have eyebrow cancer. 

On my dad’s giant TV, the Palisades fire raged. Dash watched with interest while Joey, our two-and-a-half-year-old, demanded Paw Patrol. Why were dalmatian puppies not driving these fire trucks? 

“They’re sending helicopters to drop that red stuff,” Dash said excitedly. “That’s really good news.”

All day our screens were orange, and then gray-black with pictures and videos of burnt areas. My dad’s TV showed spiral staircases turned skeletal, sooty swimming pools surrounded by the carcasses of homes in the Palisades. 

Posts from a few friends and many acquaintances started to pour in. Everyone in my feed was closer to the Eaton fire. Altadena is a historically Black, middle-class neighborhood whose relative affordability made it a popular place for people of all races to buy first homes. The family of a kid on Dash’s soccer team lost their house. The family of a kid in Joey’s daycare class. A novelist and his family. A photographer-poet I’d met long ago. A college friend. My therapist. So many artists.

In bed in my sister’s old bedroom, Dash asked, “Will our house burn down?” 

The confident, jokey, interested kid from earlier in the day seemed to have evacuated his body.

“No,” I said. In my head I added, knock on wood. “We’re here to avoid bad air quality and power outages. Mama texted our neighbors and they said everything on our block is fine.”

Dash had a stomach ache. He couldn’t sleep. He tossed and turned and asked for C.C., my partner, who was with Joey in my old bedroom. We switched places. He took another bath. He took some deep breaths. We talked about coping strategies. We talked about how there is a big nerve running from our brains to our stomachs, and sometimes our bodies send our brain confusing messages, and vice versa.

*

On Friday, my dad and I took Dash and Joey to Polliwog Park, where my family had attended free concerts every summer. Its crowning glory had once been the Sunken Galleon, a giant wooden play structure where we climbed rope ladders, walked the plank, and acquired splinters. It had long ago rotted into the earth, but sometime recently, it had been replaced with a new boat-shaped structure. This one was smaller, or maybe the original had grown in my memory. But it had a rope ladder and a plank.

Ducks and geese populated the large pond where, as kids, we’d scooped mucky jarfuls of tadpoles and guppies. There were Canadian geese and mallards and little black ducks with white bills. There were also breeds I didn’t recognize. 

Cormorants drying their wings at the edge of a pond

Three mystery birds with slick dark feathers stretched their wings, forming an M with their bodies. They had slender yellow bills and beady eyes. The same feeling swept over me as the first time I’d seen wild turkeys—a certainty that birds were the descendants of dinosaurs. I thought about mass extinctions, and the life that followed. 

*

C.C. and Dash had planned to spend her birthday weekend visiting friends in Seattle. Getting on a plane sounded crazy now, but the internet promised me it wasn’t. And so on Friday afternoon, I drove them to the Burbank airport while Joey napped in his carseat. The trip took us on a long slender loop through the middle of Los Angeles County, 33 miles each way. The sky was blue-brown and hazy, but otherwise, everything looked…normal?

Starbucks was busy and got my order wrong. A tagged-up sign next to the wide, busy freeway declared that my tax dollars were helping to rebuild California. Even the Getty Center, whose grounds had been breached by fire according to the news, looked like it always did: big, white, imposing. 

C.C. and Dash got on their plane and flew to a city of rain.

That week, people were quoting author Mike Davis’ predictions in City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of Los Angeles about the flammability of Malibu. But today I thought of his other book, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World, where I’d learned the definition of the word “decimated.” It does not mean “entirely destroyed,” the way we often use it. It means to kill one person in ten.

If one person in ten dies, nine live—grieving and evolving to their irrevocably changed world. Entire species of dinosaurs died, but some lived and became birds.

*

A toddler walks past a seafood restaurant with a rusty sign

On Saturday, Joey and my dad and I wandered the horseshoe-shaped Redondo Beach Pier, which had somehow resisted the upscale makeovers that long ago claimed neighboring beachfronts. Scrappy little stands sold fried fish and soft serve. Joey played with a rubber shark at a souvenir shop and swayed on a section of rotting wood outside a Tudor-style building that had seen its own fire. 

“I’d like to see Dash have a job,” he said, reminding me that he’d started delivering papers at six, pulling his red wagon from house to house. My stomach tightened. I could tell him about the chores Dash sometimes did for money, but that was just one true story. Other truths: I carried credit card debt; we’d started an allowance for Dash and forgotten to maintain it; we stayed at budget hotels when we traveled instead of camping, like he had always done.

I exhaled when he switched to a story about visiting the beach as a kid after a storm battered the pier. It was roped off, but no one stopped him from venturing past the Enter at your own risk sign, and so he crouched down and stared through the gaps in the broken wood at the ocean’s blue-green churn.

A grandpa and toddler play on a pier

*

C.C. and I have been talking about the future of Los Angeles. We are third- and fourth-generation Southern Californians. We have no intention of leaving, and at least for now, we have the privilege of staying. But everyone sees what a friend described as the “real estate bloodbath” on the smoky horizon. 

The thesis of Late Victorian Holocausts is that European colonizers took advantage of naturally occurring weather patterns, which made food scarce, and leveraged ensuing famines to strengthen their hold in East and Southeast Asia, India, Brazil, Ethiopia, and New Caledonia. Mike Davis argues that most of the indigenous societies had customs for navigating lean years, but when Europeans instituted capitalist principles, the locals starved.

“It’s never just one thing that takes down a civilization,” I said to C.C., doing a poor job of summarizing a book I read twenty years ago. “It’s one thing, then another thing.”

Streaming services, AI, and cheaper shooting locations are already chipping away at the entertainment industry in L.A., leaving the many middle- and working-class people it employs struggling for work. We already had 75,000 unhoused people in the county before anyone’s house burned down.

Would the fires be some kind of final blow? A penultimate blow? Would we become sanitized, unaffordable Manhattan? Gentrified, post-Katrina New Orleans? Economically depressed Detroit? Was it a luxury to even entertain these thoughts, when so many people were trying to find shelter and clothing? Was I intellectualizing to avoid my own fear and grief? Maybe, maybe, maybe. Yes, yes, yes.

Park play structure shaped like a boat

*

On my last night in Manhattan Beach, Joey banged a door into a wall, enjoying the sound it made. My dad scolded him like a cat who had jumped on the counter. 

“No, Joey! NO!” 

I swooped him up and took him outside and we sat in my car. Joey likes to pretend to drive and bounce from seat to seat when the car is stopped. But today, when I put my head on the steering wheel and cried, he said, “Mommy okay?”

“Yes,” I said. “But I feel a little sad.”

Over dinner, my dad and I circled back to a conversation we’ve been having in fits and starts for all of my adulthood. He claims he loves me because I’m a decent person: not perfect, perhaps, but kind, objective, honest, and responsible. On a good day, I am these things. But I don’t think that’s why my dad loves me. I think he loves me because I’m his kid, and I told him as much.

“Dad, remember that time you said, ‘I can’t imagine you doing anything that would make me stop loving you’? That meant so much to hear.”

“I think that was just a failure of my imagination,” my dad said amiably. “I know you, and I can’t picture you doing anything really egregious.” 

To him, the idea that I have met the conditions of his conditional love is the highest praise. If his actions echoed that, I would be a much bigger mess than I am. As it is, I live with mixed messages: embodied unconditional love, proclaimed conditional love. 

*

Shelves at the Bunny Museum dedicated to Chocolate Bunnies
Wikipedia

When Dash was still small enough to carry around in a front-pack, we took him to the Bunny Museum, a weird and wonderful collection of bunny toys, bunny figurines, Easter bunnies, antique bunnies, and bunnies that seemed to have been recently purchased at CVS. Carole and Steve, the couple who started it, also had real bunnies. All the living bunnies and their humans were able to evacuate when the fire swept down the hill toward the museum’s Altadena building. But the wooden and fabric and papier mache bunnies burnt along with the structure.

I thought of The Velveteen Rabbit, Margery Williams’ 1922 book about a beloved stuffed rabbit who perishes in an incinerator, but is given a second life as a real rabbit, animated by the love of the boy who lost him. I imagined the Altadena foothills come spring, green shoots sprouting, bunnies frolicking.

I imagined it, but I didn’t really feel it.

Sometimes I think that a braided essay is the only way to tell a story. Let juxtaposition say what we don’t have words for. Let it show how two opposite things can be true. Okay and not okay. Real and not real. Conditional and unconditional. Broken and whole.

*

A week after the fires broke out—had it only been a week?—I drove to the street that separated Pasadena from Altadena to bring food to a friend. Her house on the Pasadena side was standing, but homes around her had burned, and it had taken her three hours to scrub soot from the walls. It would be weeks before gas was restored, she said. 

One side of the street was strung with police tape. Rows of black garbage bags lined the sidewalks. So much destruction had happened, and already so many people had stepped up to make a liveable neighborhood. In the dark, it could almost pass for normal, until the National Guard trucks rolled down the street.

Is this what it feels like to live in the midst of a spiraling climate? Is normal life being disrupted, or was normal life the illusion? Our bodies, which evolved over epochs to understand only “predator imminent” and “predator not imminent,” don’t seem to be able to hold both. So I swing back and forth, dizzy from movement.

At the corner, blinking police lights turned a white church blue. Then white again. Then blue. On off, on off.

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About the Author

Cheryl Klein’s column, “Hold it Lightly,” appears monthly(ish) in MUTHA. She is the author of Crybaby (Brown Paper Press), a memoir about wanting a baby and getting cancer. She also wrote a story collection, The Commuters (City Works Press) and a novel, Lilac Mines (Manic D Press). Her stories and essays have appeared in Blunderbuss, The Normal School, Razorcake, Literary Mama, and several anthologies. Her MUTHA column “Onesie, Never Worn” was selected as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2022. She blogs about the intersection of art, life and carbohydrates at breadandbread.blogspot.com. Follow her on Twitter: @cherylekleinla.



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