Hell Angeles - Chapter 4
January 8th
Has anyone tried biking up Palisades drive with a bike? A woman named Jasmin wants to know. She writes into the chat thread. Waits for a response.
Time is piling up, but time has lost all meaning. No one can keep track of the hours because one thing is becoming clear. We’re on a carnival ride we can’t get off. The “vegetation fire” that started at 1190 Piedra Morada Drive in the Palisades Hills on Wednesday January 8th was our ticket to the fun. Remember the Gravitron? We’re spinning round and round on this whirling cylinder of shock and disaster, terror and panic, watching flames eat sky and earth and roof and gutter pipe and the grocery store and Palisades High. The ride is spinning at 24 rpm, centrifugal force three times gravity. Every time we turn on the TV to see another street we know burn—we can feel our organs press flat to our spine. The walls are spinning. The floor drops out. Metallica’s black album from the early 90s is blasting. You want to get off the ride. You scream. Beg it to stop. The operator smiles. Cranks the speed. The numbered pie slice panels slide up and down with the music and riders near you are getting their extremities caught, their arm and leg flesh stuck in the cracks. Vomit sprays on the ceiling. People are upside down howling for mercy.
Will it ever end? No.
Julia responds to Jasmin in the chat thread.
Our bluff is basically burnt to the ground. My son went in on the bike. Today and our house is gone. Only pull up bar is left.
You can get in on a bike.
You can get in on a bike, she says. While the fire is raging out of control. This kicks off a discussion about bikes. On a day when 23,707 acres (95.94 square km, 37.042 square miles) are in flames you wouldn’t think bikes would be popular.
I find one woman driving her car.
Nechama drives and cries. Filming out her windshield. She is raw, vulnerable, laid open in this moment. Does she realize she’s crying as she records? She is driving along a bluff west of Pacific Palisades high school. It is obvious she is trying to maintain a semblance of dignity, hope. Trying to hold it together. Can’t. The fire has come through this area and ravaged everything in sight. We glimpse the monstrous Pacific Ocean hundreds of feet below. Grey, churlish. All that water. Nothing to halt the fire. Nechama keeps driving. Sniffling softly as she turns the wheel left, inland. A huge white building is in flames. The fire stirs a reaction in her; a guttural cry, her foot hits the gas.
I watch the video again.
Something about the woman, the crying.
People breaking.
Have I seen this many people break at once? Her name. Who is she? She’s a rabbi’s wife. They work together at Chabad of Pacific Palisades. Two young children. A community of people they care for and support. It accounts for the crying. I hear layers in her tears.
I watch the video again.
Extreme states of psychological stress. James Hollis, the Jungian analyst comes to mind. “Think of the psyche as a large mansion. In anyone’s mansion there are many rooms and in one of those rooms there is always a terrified, frightened child. The choices of others or our choices or unforeseen circumstances may suddenly place us in one of those rooms and we will feel absolute panic.”[1]
Primal fear. Losing one’s home.
Panic applies. Dissociation applies. People who fled to adjacent cities of Santa Monica, Brentwood, Westwood, Venice, Playa Vista and Mar Vista, Bel Air and Beverly Hills, Cheviot Hills, Century City, Culver City, as far down as Manhattan Beach and Hermosa Beach and as far up as Oxnard report that the smoke is thick where they are; there’s ash dropping from black clouds. They decide to evacuate further. A mom at Eloise’s school tells me she’s taking her three kids to New Zealand. She’s booking flights.
A dad, a knee surgeon reports he’s headed back into the evacuation zone. Into the flames. On a mountain bike. With a crowbar in hand. He decides to take his 14-year-old-son with him because they often mountain bike up the trails at Sullivan and Temescal canyon. As if this were any other day. It's not any other day. I wonder, if the knee surgeon with a medical degree might be concerned about the health risks of heavy aerobic activity when it’s raining ash. They live in Santa Monica. On a good day, from where they live to where they’re going it’s about a 5.3-mile bike ride. Today it will be a longer route. They’ll need shoot the gap amidst a 23,707-acre fire. Be alert for fallen, tangled power lines and cops who are chasing down bikers with handcuffs. Tanks are rolling in. The National Guard has been called.
I’m all for adventure. But this?
Enthusiasm (insanity?) for bikes is building in the chat thread. Whoever first spread this idea of peddling into the inferno has a lot to answer for.
If we want to enter palisades on e-bike to get to our house on upper Bienveneda do you know best place to enter? 1:13 pm on January 8th Dave posts this thought. You can bike… up tenescal and get up that way. Thomas jumps in. My son just biked through the area… all of De paw is gone… his house is gone. Anna says enthusiastically, she just saw people on bikes going on the bike lanes through the beach from Santa Monica. The route seems like a good option. There’s even a place you can rent bikes near the pier in Santa Monica.[2] Jeremy is curious about how the cops and firefighters feel about the bikers. Are they letting any residents back in if they show id? Or just on bike? Gregg asks about his house at 549 Muskingum Ave “if anyone is on a bike.” Darrell says he was on a bike but sorry he didn’t go further than Marquez Bollinger Livorno Edgar. Amani chimes in and asks a woman I know a question. The woman runs a Botox clinic. It’s news to me that she has a house in Pacific Palisades or that she’s a biker; or maybe she doesn’t have a house anymore and isn’t a biker. Unclear. Please let us know if you are thinking to bike or walk up, Amani asks her directly. Dr Ed jumps into the chat. His name reminds me of the 1960s show about the talking horse, Mister Ed. He is also concerned with which homes are still standing in his neighborhood, the highlands neighborhood, but he’s not willing to take a bike up there to check it out. Sheryl writes: For anyone by the sunset mesa area: Blue Sail took a hit. We live up that way and my husband took an e-bike. Cindy writes: Seems like people getting in on foot and bike. Yes, it does seem that way. Thomas writes: A friend borrowed my bike. Got to Sunset. Cops said they would take him to check on his place. a condo. But would not let him continue to ride the bike.
Brief interlude. Dogs and cats.12.24 pm Jessica writes to us. Please message me if you know any good dog sitters that would be open to taking two Vizslas for a few weeks. I’m bewildered that I’ve never seen this word “Vizsla.” It sounds like a car not a dog. An AI-powered search engine no better than the one I’ve been using for two decades but has triggered trillions in market cap gains tells me this: Vizsla is a multi-purpose dog suitable for work on upland game, rabbits, and for waterfowl retrieving. My instinct tells me Jessica has never used her Vizsla dogs to capture upland game. I’ve met people all over the world who take their dogs hunting, and I’ve never met anyone in LA who does this. Also, I’m thinking, she should just take the dogs with her. Nothing good results from pet owners leaving their pets behind. Facts are in evidence. Megan asks about her house and her cat.
600 block Via de la Paz?
Also I am missing a cat.
Camille would also like to know about her house on Embury, but more importantly:
My cats were still there. I just tried to get in to get them but was turned away.
Alisa is pessimistic:
Hi this is Alisa at 810 Hartzell. Any news? Likely it’s gone but just want confirmation.
No one seems to have any news. Sometime later, she reports to the group that both her home and office burned to the ground. She’s upset which is to be expected. Still, she feels compelled to tell us:
My friend lost her 3 grey cats – ran back to find them yesterday but the flames and smoke were too hot. Devastating.
Heartbreak emoji.
Megan reminds everyone. In case we missed it.
Also missing a cat.
Camille is the only one listening:
So sad. I’m sure our 2 are gone but want to look anyways.
Back to bikes. Someone pipes in: has anyone biked up to the highlands? The reply comes. There is still some smoldering. Carolyn apologizes profusely. Sorry I know this has been asked and answered. She knows she shouldn’t ask it again. She takes the plunge. Tomorrow if someone wanted to come in on motorcycle or bike to the Via Bluffs what is the most likely way to enter?
I can only explain this odd impulse, this neurosis to ride a bike—through one of the worst wildfires in California’s history—as an answer. To what question? This question: if the end is near, if the apocalypse comes and everything you know will go away—do you want to experience it on your phone? Or do you want to feel it from the seat of your bike? Move your body through it? Confront it with your five senses? The choice is clear. You can lie on a couch in an evacuation hotel room eating a Jersey Mike’s sandwich listening to your kids fight. Or you can get out there. Pump the legs. Fill the lungs with smoke. Taste the ash. Scream, yell, urinate shout and laugh as you peddle under flaming branches.
It's an impulse. To feel alive.
I get it. I understand this impulse.
I’m still trying to talk my husband out of it.
Jamie’s impulse to get close to the fire is real. The argument has been simmering between us all morning. Since 8:50 am. Send me a list of items you want me to retrieve. I refuse to send a list. If I do, then I’m placing “stuff” in psychic order over his physical safety. I prefer he not return to the evacuation zone at all. The kids happily handed over their lists. They are looking forward to seeing their Freddy Freeman bobble heads again. But they are kids. I’m an adult. I know better. Maybe the only gift of middle age is a wherewithal to understand that “stuff” i.e. material wealth means nothing. That will come as a surprise to the thousand pundits who are right now elucidating for us the grave difference between the Eaton Fire and the Pacific Palisades fire; their estimation is that the Eaton Fire is the one we should care about (morally, spiritually) because the people in Altadena have less and the people in Pacific Palisades have more. Well, I’ve got news for the pundits. One. It doesn’t matter. Stuff doesn’t make anyone happy. You’ve never been poor, they’ll say. Yes, I have. I’ve been poorer than you know. The suicidal souls I’ve met don’t have money problems. Most have decimals in their bank account. Two. If you live in the United States in 2025, literally anywhere in the four corners of this nation you are richer than 99.9% of humans who have walked the earth since the beginning of time. You have access to more edible food, potable water, medicine, warm clothes, sturdy shoes, roofs, screens, books, roads, airports, schools, etc. than almost anyone in history. Three. This fire is tragic because it’s destroying community. Community in Pacific Palisades. Community in Altadena. If you think of community as soul, then souls take fifty or a hundred or five hundred or a thousand years to build. We are spiritual people. I’m not the first to say it. When the community is destroyed by fire, when every place we’ve connected is burned to ash, something dies that can’t be rebuilt with federal grants and fast-track permits.
At 12:01 pm on January 8th I’ve officially lost the marital argument. My husband parks near Brentwood Country Mart. He can’t get closer to the checkpoint with the car. He’s jogging on foot. Would he prefer a bike? I don’t know. The wet washcloth is pressed to his mouth. He’s reporting, garbling his progress to me and the kids, intermittently, when he encounters cell service. The kids are hanging on his every report. Every twist and turn of this adventure. There’s a high fence around the Riviera golf club. He decides this is his angle of attack. He will jump the fence onto the 1st fairway, a 501-yard par 5 with a tee box that sits 80 feet above the fairway that offers tour players a lot of choices (this hole is mentioned in the opening of Bob Rotella’s Golf is a Game of Confidence). Jamie goes through the abandoned gate house at Riviera and up Capri. He’s approaching Sunset. Happily, he reports, he doesn’t see any fires right here. The smoke is so thick he can barely breathe. No cops or firetrucks or tanks at the intersection of Sunset and Capri. Green light. We lose him.
I decide to send him a warning from a person who lives nearby.
The fire is coming up rustic canyon towards Amalfi in the lower Riviera. Please don’t walk back into the evac zone.
It occurs to me I should put away the phone for a while. He’s in the thick of it. If he makes it out, it won’t be because I’m forwarding him text message warnings.
I send another one. This one is from Kambiz who just left the area.
Please stay away. It was very dangerous.
Trees and power poles falling because they are on fire.
I’m getting reports that on Romany, a street which curls off our street, every house is in flames except for the two at the end. Briefly, I look at X. That’s a big mistake. Someone named Dolores Quintana is mentioning the gas line that runs near our house, “Here’s some news from Sullivan canyon in Brentwood.” Then she fails to include news. Is there news? Utility companies aren’t known for their reaction time or transparency when it comes to reporting issues. But I might as well check the SoCalGas website. I find a tab called the “Interactive Map” which reveals a dark blue line, the transmission line that I’m worried about, running below Sullivan canyon. It meets a light blue line, a high-pressure distribution line on a busy intersection in Brentwood. Both appear to be fine.
I made the further mistake of asking my search engine this question.
What happens when a natural gas pipeline explodes?
Oddly, the first answer that pops into my browser is from Green America. Greenamerica.org reports “Natural gas pipelines explode with alarming frequency in the US, killing and injuring people. In just two years, there were 12 deaths and 10 injuries.” I think to myself, I shouldn’t read this list. I read the list. February 17, 2017: a natural gas pipeline operated by Kinder Morgan in Refugio Texas exploded, shaking homes 60 miles away. February 1, 2017: A pipeline in Panola County Texas exploded and created a crater in an airport runway, shutting down the airport for a month. August 10, 2016: 10 people in New Mexico were killed when they were camping near an underground natural gas pipeline owned and operated by El Paso Energy that suddenly exploded. April 18, 2016: 2 workers were killed when they struck a pipeline in Bonnie View, Texas.
Now I put away the phone.
KTLA local news swings its eye back to the Pacific Palisades fire, to a spot not far from where we live. I’m watching with new intensity as if whatever news I glean in this moment, might save a relative. In defiance of that, the newscaster stands with a veteran fire fighter. The two of them look half-asleep. She asks him about prevention. He rummages the contents of his brain. We wait. Finally, he says, “I could save thousands of homes from burning in California if people would just listen to one piece of simple advice.” We wait again. The lady in the yellow jacket holding the microphone shifts her weight onto the other foot. “Rodent screens,” he finally says. Rodent screens? The veteran fire fighter implores us. Stop whatever you’re doing right now. Drive to Home Depot. Pick up rodent screens that will cost you just five dollars. For just five bucks you can save your home by gluing rodent screens inside the vents in your attic or roof.
Reasonable advice. A bit late.
John jumps into the chat thread. I’m not sure if he’s on a bike or on foot, but he’s standing across from his kid’s school and he’s upset. He writes:
Our spirits were not made for this.
How we debrief our kids…. Will stick with them forever.
His kid’s school. He’s standing across from Pali Presbyterian which is burned to a corn husk. He tells us this is the jungle gym, the playground where his kids played before kindergarten. There’s a poster stuck to a column, “JOY TO ALL.”
I need to step away.
Someone attempts a joke. It’s easier to get back into town through checkpoints if you wear the LAFD hat that was free when you donated to the fire department.
John writes again:
My head is killing me
All of us have heads that are killing us. What was safe this morning isn’t safe at all. Flames that moved away are coming back. New angle. Different canyon. Smoke, embers, flames. The fire keeps coming, keeps coming, keeps coming. Circling. Returning. Nietzsche’s principal of eternal return. “The idea of the eternal return, the prospect of having to live one’s life over and over, every detail repeated, every pain alongside every joy—”
This fire is making a mockery of our sanity.
I’m right now watching internet footage of pipeline explosions. While following news of Eloise’s school. The principal of St. Matthews sends out a schoolwide e-mail. The school has miraculously survived the worst of the fire. Most structures intact. Later, another e-mail comes. The fire encircled the school. Most structures destroyed. Immediately the question pops into the chat:
Is anyone else hearing that St Matthews is now on fire? Any insight?
Jennifer responds:
Yes I just heard that
John did not step away. He writes:
Pali presbyterian was very badly burnt
Yes, we know John. You showed us pictures and videos of the jungle gym. Since people are repeating themselves, I half-expect Megan to jump in to remind us she’s missing her cat. Instead, someone writes in with just about the worst possible question at this moment.
Mary writes:
Does anyone know if planes will drop retardant? Seem to be focusing on Sullivan canyon as there is a gas line there.
Sullivan canyon. Natural gas line.
Horror of horrors, this is being mentioned again. The fear is not just in my head. The possibility of a pipeline explosion about 1,000 feet from my driveway is something that I will carry for these next few minutes. Or hour. I keep calling Jamie. He doesn’t pick up the phone. He sends me another text which predictably says:
Send me a list so I have it written down pls.
I’m busy though. I’m talking to my 9-year-old, Grey, about pipeline explosions. Grey doesn’t fall far from the tree. He takes an eccentric interest in manmade disaster. He often shows up to breakfast, bleary-eyed, in his swim shorts and Under Armour turtleneck toting a yellow glossy National Geographic book. The topic is always the same but different. Deepwater explosion in the Gulf of Mexico. Chernobyl. Fukushima. Exxon Valdez. He bows his head to eat cereal, flips pages, watching oil-soaked birds lying dead on a plank. He studies tsunamis. Earthquakes. Wildfires that start industrial fires. Buildings melted to lumps. Scaffolding stuck in the sky. Trees uprooted and cars overturned. Wreckage littered on barren earth. He asks me questions that aren’t answered in the book. The other day I told him about Bhopal. He never heard of Bhopal. During the Bhopal disaster, on December 2nd, 1984, the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India, released highly toxic gas (methyl isocyanate) into the surrounding area. Officially, 8,000 people died. Unofficially, it was five times that amount.
I try Jamie again. He doesn’t pick up.
The Carl Jung quote comes to me, “What I refuse to face within myself will meet me in the exterior world.”[3] Did I do something to invite this fire? It’s an insane thought. But it won’t pass by. Another insane thought. Is Jamie going to grab a few things that are important to me? Even though I refused to give him a list? Maybe the Christmas stockings. Maybe the handwritten cards we save from the kids. The art. A children’s author visited my daughter’s 2nd grade classroom. Gave a talk. At that time, I had just left one career and was struggling with a new one. Trying to be a writer. Eloise, in her 7-year-old head, knew this. She barely knew how to write or spell. On a white piece of construction paper, with a number two pencil, she laboriously took notes for me:
reWrite
Write What you hear arownd you
give the Carickters Your problems and them worse
doble Check words
reread
make it intisting
think about it
if you where not the author Would you like the book
Something else comes to mind. The signed photograph that Toots and the Maytals gave us after he played at our wedding. Our wedding was in the Bahamas in 2008. We had a 10-piece wedding band. When they finished, we announced Toots was coming onstage. He was a “surprise” we gave to our guests. Toots is Jamaican but he’s a reggae legend in the Bahamas, so when they heard the opening chords of “54-46 Was My Number” the cooks emerged in their aprons. In awe. They flooded the dancefloor with other 170 guests. My brother found a mop and was for some reason pushing it around, waving people into the center. Tequila shots. Toots was smoking a fat blunt, passing it down, lighting another and passing that around too. Pressure Drop. Country Road. Funky Kingston.
One of the great moments of my life.
Toots is dead now. He can never sign another photograph. Will Jamie remember to take that framed photo down from the wall, “To Tyler & Jamie on your wedding. Love, Toots,” throw it in the garbage bag?
Maybe my objection to making a list of things I want from the house is just that: an objection. A refusal. Denial. Inability to see, deal, imagine or consider the possibility that there are 1,000 other things in my house that tie me forwards and backwards to every moment in my life. To everything I know. To people who are gone. Places I love and will never see again.
Writers write to avoid suffocating…
My books…
I can’t even think about the paperback books that will ignite. How many pens have I dried filling the margins with my notes, thoughts, plans to write something similar. Ideas that spark a new direction. Turn of phrase. How many shelves? How many different dorm rooms, apartments, homes have my books lived in? The last time I moved, from East coast to West coast, I took each book off its shelf in New York and wrapped it, put it carefully in the cardboard box and marked the side of the box by subject. I didn’t trust anyone else to do it. When I got to California and felt more forlorn than I’ve ever felt in my life, more lost, more unrooted, when the duty to be a parent in a community where I knew no one was a constant heavy chore, when pleasantries and falsities were too suffocating to stand—when I was sure I’d never know anyone again and they’d never know me—I took refuge in those books I wagon trained across the country. I spent hours in the little room off the TV room. Organizing. Browsing. Rereading. I talked to Jack Kerouac. Hunter S. Thompson. George Simenon. Alan Ginsberg. Jhumpa Lahiri and Kurt Vonnegut and Primo Levi and Norman Mailer and Truman Capote. Milan Kundera. Ha Jin. Cormac McCarthy. Patricia Highsmith. Salinger. Tennessee Wiliams. Jorge Luis Borges. Michael Lewis and Danny Kahneman and John Kenneth Galbreath. John Krakauer and Raymond Carver and and Chekhov. Hannah Arendt. Maya Angelou. Solzhenitsyn. Albert Camus. A thousand more.
They were all jumbled. Putting them in order meant something.
Those books…
Have I felt like this before? I go into the cellar of my subconscious and dig around for a comparison. Nothing comes. Robert Frost wrote, “The afternoon knows what the morning only suspected.” My brain is now barb wired to a notion; I should have known this disaster would come. Predicted. Avoided. We never should have moved here. Never. I get a cryptic voicemail from Jamie that I can’t understand. Smoke thick. He’s in a panic. Alarm being left off because the battery is low, and power is gone anyway. House burning at top of street. Then a broken text. I’ll call you when I’m out.
I ask around to see if anyone knows which house is burning at the top of the street. Everyone is occupied. Everything is flammable.
Still, plenty of people on bikes. Avi writes:
Tried to get in with electric bike, got to Temescal, they turned me away, went up Chautqua, biked along the bluff, all houses are in good condition, made it to the village, they stop me there, I beg for the officers with no success, not happy.
He adds two sad faces. Rachel writes to us that she found a dog roaming north of Montana. Then she forgets to include a picture of the dog. Camille wants to know about her cats again.
Anyone seen any cats in the alphabet streets? Mine were there;(
Just when I’m feeling the weight of darkness, thinking this will never end and if it does it will end in natural gas pipeline explosion, just when I can’t imagine relief—
It comes.
2:41 pm on January 8th my husband writes to me:
Safe. Across Allenford.