Hell Angeles - Chapter 9

Trees

On the desk lie heaps of receipts, scraps of paper, notes so feverishly scrawled and chaotic, I have to stop and think where I jotted down the sentence, “Los Angeles has no native trees.” Who said that? When? And why? Why does it keep coming back to me as I watch the Pacific Palisades fire tear open the earth? It is the first day since the fires started on January 7 that I attempt to sit at a desk and write. Record letters. Process the images. Inferno. Trees. The beginning of writing about a thing is the gathering of images. Straps cut the shoulder. Feet stumble on the trail. It’s awkward and unsteady. Stay with it. 

Gather the images.

Daniel Clive McCallum, a neighbor in Pacific Palisades, said the craziest thing he saw was a 12-foot Christmas tree ablaze, tumbling down the center of his street. It was 8:30 pm the first night and the Santa Ana winds were out of control. The tree, a giant flaming orange spear, shot right towards him. He described it as “mesmerizingly beautiful and terrifying at the same time.” Another resident, Anna Wonder, after her house and neighborhood burned in total posts a picture. The picture was taken as the fire approached. Billows of grey-yellow smoke gather over a flowering rose tree in her backyard. The sun is still out and there’s blue sky yet. The buds on the rose tree are blush pink, perfectly formed, immune to danger. She writes to us, “Before everything burnt… I had no idea the capacity of the of catastrophe… but I felt the need to take a picture... I felt something.”

She felt something. The fire coming.

Andrew Dubbins, a journalist, drives up the winding road towards his childhood home, a two-story wood-shingled Craftsman his dad built 40 years ago.[1] The house sits high atop the road leading to Will Rogers Park where the trees are majestic (when I have out of town visitors, I always send them there). Dubbins knows the fire isn’t there yet; but it may be coming. He needs to check on his elderly parents. There’s only one road leading out of that place. A “fire trap” in local parlance. As he drives, he passes a grove of California oak trees where he and his sister used to look for deer grazing. He describes the pine tree and redwood in his front yard. The flowering pear tree where they strung Christmas lights every year, the two oaks which shaded his upstairs bedroom like a tree house. An unruly avocado tree. A round pine that a prior owner, a professional golfer, trimmed in the shape of a golf ball. It had quirky branches, perfect for climbing. Bougainvillea in the backyard. His dad used to clip the Bougainvillea on Sundays while his mom took her coffee, read the Los Angeles Times by the window looking out at a liquidambar. His parents are in shock as the fire approaches. The parents don’t want to leave. Dubbins negotiates. He says that once the firetrucks arrive, they need to evacuate. The firetrucks never do arrive. The “pop-pop-pop of trees being incinerated” is their cue to leave. Mother, father, son pile into the car. They hurriedly call 911 and are patched through to the fire department. “Will Rogers is on fire, and there are no firefighters, not a single truck!” Dubbins shouts. Through gridlocked traffic they drive to his one-bedroom on West Adams. He parks his parents on the couch in front of the news because what else to do with them? They’re in shock. He prepares a depressing dinner. Microwave leftover pasta and rice. His mom can’t swallow. The flames they narrowly escaped they now see. A KABC news anchor points up to Will Rogers Park— burning now, that part of Pacific Palisades is burning. It’s almost unthinkable. They pile back in the car. Why? Because there are neighbors who didn’t get out. After midnight, they tell an LAPD sergeant stationed on Sunset Boulevard below Amalfi to please call Station 69 and report those people. There are no firetrucks up there, they repeat. The LAPD sergeant is disinterested; he tells them to use their own phone. In shock, drained and hopeless, they trudge up Amalfi Drive to see what they can see. Flames swallow the entire canyon. It’s a miracle they can just pick out their home, their two-story Craftsman. “There’s your mom’s pine tree,” the dad says as it goes up in flames.

My mind becomes a split-frame camera. I read his account; the “flowering pear tree where we string white Christmas lights every year,” and it occurs to me: we have our own version. The California sycamore that sits like a king on our lawn. Thick, glossy leaves. Stone grey trunk. Wide branches for the kids to climb. The first of December each year, we wrap it with lights. They sycamore becomes a beacon for the neighborhood. It can be seen from the bottom of the hill, and my kids point it out excitedly as we drive home. People walking their dogs tell us they look forward to us lighting that tree each year. 7:17 pm on January 7, 2025, the doorbell camera points across our front lawn, under the heavy, leafy branches of the sycamore. All is well on our front lawn. A hundred feet beyond the tree—a panoramic view of hell. The sky is painted red. The canyon is on fire.

Every time I read The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein, to one of my kids, it leaves my throat empty. My kids ask me endlessly in their different ways, what the story means. They seem to know that because we’re reading about a tree, the story means something. Why does the boy take everything, her branches and leaves and apples? Why does he go away? When he returns, why is he unhappy and why does the tree offer him what little she has left? He cuts down her trunk and abandons her again. Now on the final page he’s an old man. Wrinkled. The tree remarks that she has nothing left to give him except for a place to sit. He sits on her stump. Lowers his chin. The final line of the book. And the tree was happy. But how can the tree be happy? After so much betrayal and ruination. Always, we hover over the pages pondering the mystery.

Trees are in the psyche. Imago Dei. The image of God is what makes man human? The image of the tree is buried just as deep. Deeper.

The problem of where we came from, what we are doing here, finds the tree. Nabokov starts his memoir with, “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” The first image of his life is an empty cradle, made of wood, floating in a void. The Buddha sat under a tree for 40 days. Christ was nailed to a tree. Images of the Argonne Forest where the deadliest campaign in American war history was fought—a million Americans participated and 26,000 were slain—are famous not for the carnage, we can find that anywhere, but for their trees. Those haunting trees. Blackened trees split open against a white sky, exploded, askew, like teeth sticking out from a coffin. The negation of the negation. From the Jewish Kabbalah, the tree of life. It represents God’s creation itself ex nihilo. Ex nihilo. Out of nothing. Three words followed by three words. Tree of life. Out of nothing. When man is at his bottomless worst, no image haunts, no image conveys, like the tree destroyed.

January 7, January 8, January 9, January 10, January 11, January 12, all through the weekend and into the next week—as the Pacific Palisades fire rages—people topple forth with images of destroyed trees. Trees bringing destruction. Trees carrying fire down from the mountain ridge, trees exploding, trees tangled in power lines, trees crashing into the sides of homes collapsing in flames, storefronts, schools, and churches collapsing in flames. The church spire made of wood, burning. My friend sends me a side angle video of her home, the entire thing made of unfinished wood, with 270-degree views of Sullivan Canyon, the thing is burning like an Olympic torch. Trees carry flame, they bring death and destruction from somewhere to us. Something from nothing.

There are no native trees in Los Angeles.

Now it’s bothering me that I can’t remember who said this, so I go to the archives. Not an easy task. When I read, I read with a pen. I notate too much so when a line haunts me a decade later, I embark on an endless treasure hunt. This one is hard to track down. John Cheever. A Pulitzer Prize winner. Awarded the National Medal for Literature. Considered to be among America’s great short story and novel writers (“Chekhov of the suburbs” they called him). Like F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner, he did a stint in Hollywood. When The Paris Review interviews him about his life and work in 1976, they ask him what he thinks about Los Angeles. His answer is provocative.

Interviewer:

What do you think about working in Hollywood?

Cheever:

Southern California always smells very much like a summer night… which to me means the end of sailing, the end of games, but it isn’t that at all. It simply doesn’t correspond to my experience. I’m very much concerned with the trees… with the nativity of trees, and when you find yourself in a place where all the trees are transplanted and have no history, I find it disconcerting.

He goes on to say that his “principal feeling about Hollywood is suicide,” and each morning before he started screenwriting, he’d “try to make it to the shower before I hanged myself.” His answer twists and turns through odd detail (the pools are too hot, the store that sells Yarmulkes for dogs bothers him) and finally, we are left with the impression. Trees with no history make him suicidal.

But is it fact?

It can’t be. Washingtonia filifera, an ugly, scrubby palm tree comes to mind, with dead dogs lying sideways. A strange memory. I’m on a road trip to Palm Desert with my friend Allison. She’s driving me through the place, it’s my first time, and she isn’t saying much about the predictable milieu of smoothly paved roads, country clubs and strip malls. What is there to point out? Then we leave civilization to cut through the desert and instead of cutting through open desert we find ourselves passing a thousand Washingtonia filifera planted in rows. She tells me these are California native palms; they’ve been in this desert since the dawn of time. Out of nowhere she says, “so many dead dogs here” in a wistful tone. I’m still fixated on the trees. These trees are oppressive looking. Their tops are heavy and dusty and overgrown, the same hair as the beasts in Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. The trunks as are thick as three humans strung together. They grow with equal space in between, making dark corridors of shade. Now I see a dog. A mangy, underfed thing teetering through the trees. The next dog I see is a carcass, hit by a car, on the shoulder. As we drive, I see mangy dogs, more carcasses lying on the side of the road. A dog baring his teeth, trying to cross. What the hell is going on here? I finally ask my tour guide. We just left the land of fountains and country clubs and now we’re in a Cormac McCarthy novel. What dark dance is playing out here? Who owns these dogs, where are they coming from, where are they going? Why do they keep trying to get murdered crossing the road? My friend is unsure. She writes it off to coincidence.

Interestingly, the native tree of Los Angeles, Washingtonia filifera, is not the one you see on the front page of newspapers when the city burns.

A famous photo from the 2018 Woolsey wildfire in Malibu shows eight palm trees standing tall, fronds blowing left through wind, backlit by a home exploding in flame. Those trees were imported. While the house explodes, the imported palm trees stand triumphant. People on the internet grow angry about this photo. The comment field fills with poison. How can manmade structures burn, and palm trees survive? Is it a conspiracy? Is there an arsonist targeting homes and businesses but saving the trees? What kind of arsonist would that be? A non-native-tree-loving arsonist? Bored college scientists offer their knowledge online. Palm trees contain enough moisture to resist flame temperatures that climb to 1400 degrees. But beware of overly dry palm fronds, they caution (as if that’s a problem we can do something about.) Dry palm fronds ignite, they float easily, they are perfect carriers of fire. Yes, we know.

An image comes to us from the Eaton fire on January 8, 2025. Here is the head of a palm tree swimming in a crimson sky, swimming in red sparks. No angry comments yet. If the tree succumbs it can avoid interrogation.

In catastrophe, it seems, people want catastrophe. The want the beginning and middle and end of the catastrophe. Images should contain terror, because how else to convey it? Matthew 24:44; So you also must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour when do you not expect him.

At 4:17 pm on January 8, it comes. “Aerial view of the alphabets” lands on our phone screens. This image is taken from a plane or a drone; the angle that war history prefers. Make no mistake. This neighborhood in Pacific Palisades, the one founded in 1921 by Methodist ministers and named accordingly (the nomenclature of the streets follows the alphabetical sequence of their families starting with ABCD; Albright, Bashford, Carey, Drummond, Embury, Fiske, Galloway, Illiff, etc) has gone to war. The place has gone to battle with a higher force and lost. Approximately 900 dwellings are annihilated, flattened to ash and smoking dust. A crude image. A fate worse than death. Annihilation without the bodies. Every writer who writes about California wildfires describes their fire as the “worst in California history.” It could be a fact. The facts keep changing, growing, evolving. Destruction worsening. What I know when I see “Aerial view of the alphabets” is that we’ve reached a new level. The firetrucks didn’t bother to drive up those streets. No sword and shield were drawn. In a city where most everyone is a transplant—where history is either offensive or doesn’t apply—finally, finally we’ve erased it. January 8, 2025, at 4:17 pm the beating heart of Pacific Palisades is gone.

Catastrophists breathe a sigh of relief.

I’m staring at the dark lines between smoldering piles of ash, wondering if those are trees. Did any trees survive? Are those dark lines trees? The photo is going viral. “Aerial view of the alphabets” climbs from local news to national news then onto BBC and South China Morning Post and Al Jazeera and TV Globo. It makes its trip around the world. Soon, friends of ours from the East Coast, an old family friend in France, sends us the photo and asks with trepidation if we live in that part of town. My 9-year-old tells me the photo reminds him of Hiroshima. We visited the Hiroshima Peace Museum exactly 46 days before this fire. He's not wrong. The photo does look like Hiroshima.

From this moment on, my anxiety triples. It’s not the homes that are gone; by this point, everyone we know in town has lost their home. We know that. It’s the other thing. The home we don’t speak of. The separation between you and your neighbors. Everything you look at when you look out the window. What you walk past when you walk. What you smell and breathe and feel, what you sit under, what you lean on when you lean.

A diversion, a memory.

When I first moved to California, I was disconnected in a way I’d never been. As a teenager I knew what I lacked, what I needed, and I’d gone after it. Someone at my rehearsal dinner called me ambitious, and it made me cringe. Ambition it turns out, is useful in the world of Universe One.[2] By 32 I’d gotten everything I set out to get, and by 34, I was more lost, more confused, more anchorless than I’d ever been. I was a wife, a mother of two pregnant with baby three and four—beating the odds—climbing the ranks on a male-dominated trading floor at the most powerful bank in the world. It sounds trite now, because it is. Success in the world of Universe One leaves you with the problem of what to do with your soul. My soul was aching. Quit the job. Quit the status. Quit the money. Start doing something you care about. Well, I did that. I started writing. First, I wanted to write for TV. Then I wanted to write movies. Then a novel. Try, try, try, fail. Try, fail. Try, fail. Fail, fail harder. Try forever and fail forever. Try designed for the Fail. After five years, writing brought me more pain than anything else. I was in a world of pain. Here was a joke God was playing on me. Succeed at the thing you’re not designed for. Fail at the thing that fills your soul. But that was it. That was my story. In a final twist of irony, my husband thought we should move to California. Not just California but Los Angeles and not just Los Angeles but Pacific Palisades. The place where when you go to grab a coffee, you stand behind the best, most creative, most celebrated, highest-paid writers in history. Literally every direction I turned, parents at school, people waiting at their cars at a stop light, there were writers who had succeeded. Succeeded on an enormous stage. To say I was faceless, shapeless, invisible and ashamed—ashamed to be me—is to understate the problem. When I met people, I didn’t talk about what I was doing. Or I lied about it. Or I lied by omission. I grew to my smallest size. I rose each morning to eat breakfast with the kids, saw them off to school, sat down to write inside an invisible lie of shame, and felt pain like I’d never felt before. In the afternoons, I went walking. I walked off my pain.

Pain through the trees.

The trees in Pacific Palisades became my friends. Coral trees bursting in scarlet bloom. Japanese elms. Seventy-foot shaggy pine trees with pinecones dripping from the bows. Sycamores planted in rows, olive trees rising in a spire. Towering Eucalyptus trees. Lemon trees. Non-native palms from all over the earth; slender and handsome, their heads bending in blue sky. No resemblance to Washingtonia filifera. From my driveway, the trees accompanied me all the way up to the trailhead. Once I got far enough back on the trail, I could look over the envelope into the canyon and see for miles, a certain tree that wears a single white ballet slipper bloom. Even on hundred-degree days, days when only me and the rattlesnakes were out, I’d sweat my way up to that canyon and walk for miles just to be in the company of those trees. At the worst time in my life, the trees listened. The yoke was made less by those trees.

When I see the image “Aerial view of the alphabets,” I have a feeling of death. 

I can’t think about what it will be like when I return.

I begin not sleeping. I go days without eating much. My husband and I try make decisions about how to stay evacuated, how to deal with the aftermath of this fire, how to work again and get the kids enrolled into new schools, whether to rent somewhere else in Los Angeles and finish out the schoolyear, whether to stay with friends and not sign a 12 or 24-month lease that insurance won’t cover, whether to leave California entirely and not deal with any of this (a fantasy if ever there was one) stay, leave, stay, leave, leave, stay just long enough to get organized to leave, stay, leave— the decision tree is knotted and ugly, the walls of the prison grow thicker. To uproot four kids is to invite everyone’s neuroses in for dinner. To live in this prison of indecision is to ask for marital discord. People sense our confusion. We get a hundred phone calls, texts, e-mails. Friends inside and outside the state. “You can’t live there.” “It’s a toxic mess.” “The air is unbreathable.” “Everyone is leaving.” The logic is presented. The logic is real. But the problem is, our home stands. It’s right on the burn scar. What to do? We’ve been married 17 years now, and neither of us recognize the other. The fighting, the uncertainty, it’s poison.

Maybe it will get better when we have clarity—

What clarity?

I read an article in the LA Times containing “lessons” for us from victims of the Tubbs fire (which tore apart Napa and Sonoma County in 2017). Lessons for how they rebuilt their community. Coped with the loss. “Many replacement homes are still under construction. Some lots are still empty…. Grass from winter rains wafting in the wind along with the sharp echoes of hammers and nail guns. In Larkfield Estates, Sherwood and his family have moved into their new home. The old walnut tree that used to shade his front yard has been transformed into an elegant dining room table.”

A dining room table is not what I wanted from this. What I want, what I can never have, is the way our town was before. The trees…

If I can just get back there, if I can get back there…

In times of trauma, memory is fantasy.

January 17, 2025, at 3:34 pm I’m pulled into the present. The checkpoint is manned by the National Guard. I drive past tanks, soldiers in uniform, and I take a left climbing up the hill on Sunset. Every day that week I’d tried to get through the checkpoint between the designated hours, just to lay eyes on my home. Tuesday, I brought my daughters with me to the checkpoint. We wore N95 masks as we presented our credentials, an electricity bill with our name and address, matching driver’s license, matching passport, car registration. The military men wouldn’t let us through. They turned us away. Wednesday, I drove back by myself. They shoved me off at Kenter and Sunset. Thursday, I got as far as San Vicente and Allenford, to the crest of that hill where I can see the edge of my neighborhood in the distance. But they wouldn’t let me further. On Friday January 17, I get out of my car. I show my credentials to the thick-necked man in bland camouflage and Oakley wraparound shades. I’m expecting him to say no. Refuse me. Turn around and drive the other way. Recall: it’s in my personality. Try. Fail. Try. Fail. The Try seems designed for the Fail. He remarks, people with press badges are being allowed through. I don’t have a press badge. But then he nods at me. I can proceed?

I go slowly. 10 or 15 mph; I’m half-expecting him or one of the policemen to call me back. The car climbs Sunset. I take a right on the first road leading into my neighborhood. The first thing I notice is that on this side of the neighborhood, the tree canopy is thick. Soot-covered, but thick. I’m overwhelmed with emotion. The air is yellow and toxic, so thick and chemical you can’t breathe. Ash drifts onto the windshield. Ash all over the place. But the place is there. In surreal state, it’s there. I can see Eucalyptus trees on the hill, fifty feet up and to the left, against a backdrop of burned mountains. Scorched earth going back, back for as far as you can see.

I’m in a state I can’t remember being in—ever—as I pull into our driveway. The house I live in, the one where my kids feel safe, is there. To see it now, to see it there in the place that borders a 23,000-acre graveyard—where 6,900 structures burned in the same zip code—the existence, the confusion, the line between what’s here and not here, where we can exist and not exist, brings a feeling.

How to describe?

I go inside. The air is unbreathable, smoke and chemical and ash, soot on every surface. But the floor is beneath me. The walls are upright. Glass smashed on the floor. Flowers rotted in the vase. Not burned. What can it mean? A Category 5 hurricane came through our backyard. To be here, to clock the destruction but know that it’s nothing, nothing really in the scheme of what’s been burned what’s been lost—to know that the place exists and it’s here, but we can never live in it again, not now, not like this—

Everything moves through me.

Through the head right to the heart.

I sit. Remove my N95 mask. I cry so hard I nearly choke, vomit. People visit me that haven’t in a long time. At 5 years old I walked into a funeral home and peered over the edge of my dad’s coffin. Haven’t seen that face for years. My grandfather, same church. My grandmother, same church. Same funeral. The dog I loved, the black labrador wandered off and never came back. The bunny never came back. My mom wailed when they took my brother away, not knowing if they’d bring him back. I was left alone all that time, small and young and afraid. Didn’t know if anyone would come back. My 9-month-old daughter, her head gushing blood, as I carry her into an emergency room. This is fear, grief, in all the ways I’ve known it, lighting up my nervous system. And there should be relief. Relief should be mixed in there, but it’s not. The faces of my kids are on the wall. The front door is there, it’s not burned to the earth. The orchid I never water, lies smashed in its pot. The charred mountains outside are not inside, the smoke and soot and ash can be washed away. But it’s impossible. You can’t live on the edge of a graveyard. Can you?

Finally, when none of it makes sense, I pick up my head. A strip of narrow window runs on either side of the front door. I can see sycamore leaves.

The tree made it, I see.

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[1] Andrew Dubbins for Alta Journal, January 16, 2025
[2] Page 40, True and False Magic by Phil Stutz. “Universe One is defined by mathematics. Anything dominated by mathematics, whether it’s a culture or a religion, eventually becomes completely money driven. The bottom-line value is money. In Universe One, nobody is satisfied, and the field is very narrow. People are pissed, because someone else is getting more than they’re getting. Money, in itself, cannot create what you need, and you end up with all kinds of conflict. Higher forces do not exist in Universe One because they cannot be quantified – in Universe One, you cannot access them. No matter what happens in Universe One, even if you make all the money in the world, you end up feeling like a loser, because the only real value is in Universe Two, where you must create something. Page 41, “If you want to know who you really are, ask yourself what you would spend your time on even if you knew it would never make you any money.”