CALIFORNIA

Her Fires & Her Beautiful Impermanence

It made me sad whilst living in CA that much of the rest of the US had started to resent, turn on, and actively hate the state. Having moved from the UK, and previously only knowing New York where Christina and I got married (that’s a whole other story, definitely worth telling one day!), I had grown up dreaming of living in the Golden State, so people hating on it was deeply confusing to me.

California had always seemingly been a land of hope, creativity, and unprecedented freedom. The movies were there. The music of Laurel Canyon, and the radical cultural experimentation of Haight and Ashbury. Here were golden hills, golden beaches and the Golden Gate, peopled with golden gods wearing golden flowers in their hair. The surf culture, the cars and great freeways. The chance to start anew in a vast, stunningly beautiful New World… It was intoxicating and impossible. I dreamt of living there, but never imagined I ever actually would. Working class Derby lads from the industrial Midlands of England did not get to do that.

However, the dream persisted, and some 13 years ago it came true.

The reality, of course, is never the same as the myth. Real, day to day life dresses wherever we live in a cloak of banal repetition and routine. I don’t think there is another country in the world quite so good at mythologizing itself, and believing that mythology! As a brit, I recall first hearing the very American notion of the greatest love of all being to love yourself, and being horrified. Such a concept seemed steeped in vanity, something bred out of Midlanders centuries ago. We are born with an innate distrust of arrogance. It’s in our DNA. But we secretly wish we were imbued with a little more of it.

It becomes, while living there, very quickly apparent that California is still a frontier, and very young. The oldest house where we lived in Walnut Creek, just North of Oakland, is not as old as the not-remotely-uncommon Victorian terrace we left - and have now returned to - in Derby, but in Walnut Creek it has been enshrined as a museum. American plug sockets are tiny, with no earth, and 110 volts compared to the UK 250 volts. The plumbing consists of thinner tubes that block easily. The freeways are literal arteries that connect the cities, and most offshoot roads go nowhere, other than to townships and hamlets. In the event of emergencies you have to get to the freeways, as there are none of the ancient byways, farm and country roads, and all other interconnecting roads, that cast a great net over older, highly populated countries.

And all of California is a forest. There are far more trees than I ever imagined, and amongst them, houses. The houses, by necessity, are built almost entirely of wood, in order to flex when the earth trembles, and tremble it does! It is a land of grand sheds, often thrown up at an incredible speed, and built for living in now. These are practical family homes, never meant as monuments. Never intended to withstand the greater sweeps and ravages of time. The houses themselves are a forest of wood.

Californians are great optimists. The people who go to live there are almost all of a type. They are, and always have been, pioneers, opportunists and adventurers. I recently read that when the ships started to come through the Golden Gate during the era of the great Gold Rush, there were eventually so many of them they had to be abandoned. And those abandoned ships became the ground fill upon which the Marina district in San Francisco was built - wood on wood. At that time there were 160,000 people in California. Only five years after the US Civil War there were 560,000, and by the beginning of the 1920s there were 3.4 million, 10.6 million in 1950, and 39 million today. Many of them drawn there in the same way I was. The places they came from offered them nothing. Some were always outsiders, others filled with wanderlust, others just wonder, but the golden state called to them, and they came.

People were drawn by the promise of gold, and the vine, the garden that became the cultural melting pot of LA and Hollywood, and more recently the new gold rush of the tech world - of which I caught an inch of that tiger’s whipping tail during the start-up age and was myself pulled ineffably there.

And we dreamers dreamed on, despite the ever-present threat of the long-overdue ‘Big One’. We braved the seasonal fires, sucked up the inflated prices of living in such a bloated economy, ignored the shuddering earth. And we did this because, when the slog of work and family routines abated enough, we looked up at the azure dome of the sky and out across the undulating golden hills with life-affirming joy and great gratitude. We stood on the shore looking at the great spouts of the whales, and the cresting dorsal fins of porpoises out in the wide blue vastness of the Pacific Ocean. We marveled at the blur of tiny hummingbird wings, admired the eagles - one of which I once saw with a snake in its talons, like the Mexican Coat of Arms - and squinted up at the ever-present circling Turkey Vultures, two of which often roosted on the pseudo-neolithic rock pile that my drawing board overlooked. Many local CA residents don’t like Raccoons, but our family delighted in their regular evening visitations, always looking out for the one with a single eye that the kids dubbed Nick Fury. We watched a family of Skunks playfully tumble across our back deck, and stood within arm’s reach of a sleepy possum in the crook of a tree branch.

As time passed, though, the fires did seem to be getting ever worse. In the Bay Area over the last decade a great many sprung up, sometimes devastating neighborhoods, and sending the residents out into the world in their RVs, to try and find a new future for themselves. One fire on Mount Diablo was particularly near us, and we were ordered to shelter indoors in our luxury wooden huts amongst the trees by alerts on our phones we never knew we would get, and were thence left watching planes dump fire retardants on the flames on our laptops in real time.

There is little support for devastated families in America. It truly feels dog eat dog. And there is little faith in the insurance industries that seem to dominate so many aspects of US life. It may indeed be so, that the latest spate of horrendous fires are found to be a product of wind, not flame, and as such don’t qualify for payouts. Such is the brutal nature of that protections racket. Who pays, why and how, will be fought over for years to come. People will cast blame in all directions, and others will cheer. There are already those that see so-called ‘woke’ CA as a Sodom and Gomorrah that somehow deserves the horrors befalling it.

In the end CA did not work for us. We couldn’t keep up with the inflation, and buying a house where we wanted to live was impossible, and eventually unwise. After 12 years we moved back to grim, grey Derby, and happily so. But I will always, always love CA. I will defend her to my grave.

Watching LA burn has reminded me of how hopeless and small we are. How weak, as singular individuals. How little we can do alone. And how dreadful must it be to lose all the things that we love, that have shaped our lives, and preserved our memories? How many of us can truly imagine that? It’s too glib to say that life alone is all that matters. Stripped of all my books and studio trinkets I find it near impossible to draw. Imagine starting anew without all the echoes through time that the ‘things’ that surround us are imbued with? Our souls reverberate through such minutia.

How we come together, somehow, to rebuild and support after such devastation will be the telling factor. How it gets politicized will scar CA in ways it should not. Where there have been failings there, of course, should be accountability. But we should never gloat or feel smug when lives are devastated. There is no victory for anybody here, though some cruel people will claim it.

I have no prayers for this life. They are meaningless. The world is my witness in that, and the great sea of turned-away human backs to all manner of cruelties and manmade conflicts are the evidence. I’m struggling in this age to see the angels of our better nature, and to believe that at our core we are good. I doubt it. I think fundamentally we are a selfish ape. But we are, nevertheless, capable of goodness. And I hope that it is that goodness that drives our response to these horrors. Not greed, nor gain, not brinkmanship, nor careerist opportunity. We need to connect as humans again, find the uniting sense of love for who and what we are, not the dividing hate. Then, and only then, can there rise out of these ashes something meaningful.

I won’t hold my breathe.

I can do little to offer succor my fellow Californians who are suffering so much because of these fires. Time will, no doubt, reveal the little ways we can do something. There will be the GoFundMe pages, the charities, the collective arts projects that spring up, and that we’ll have to navigate to find the best route to helping. There’ll be the scams too. If it’s true that this was a result of arson then I hope the perpetrators are subjected to whatever their own personal hell might be some day. Such cruelty is beyond me. Such people are true monsters. But our hearts are with the people we know and love there, and all who are suffering, little though that means. We feel the horror. It was our home too once, and a fate escaped by what feels like a heartbeat and a hair’s breadth.

At my drawing board in Walnut Creek, overlooking our back yard, and beyond that, the golf course where vultures roosted, turkey’s roamed, and all manner of local critter passed by.

Here are some useful links care of Jim Zub’s SubStack -

California Fire Foundation’s Wildfire & Disaster Relief Fund:
https://cpf.salsalabs.org/disasterrelief/index.html

California Community Foundation Wildlife Recovery Fund
https://www.calfund.org/funds/wildfire-recovery-fund/

Greater Good Charities:
https://greatergood.org/disaster-relief/california-wildfires

World Central Kitchen — Working to provide meals for affected families and first responders.
https://donate.wck.org/give/654000#!/donation/checkout

L.A. Food Bank’s map of where to find food and meals.
https://www.lafoodbank.org/find-food/pantry-locator/

California Department of Social Services Disaster Help Center:

https://www.cdss.ca.gov/

A spreadsheet of LA-based animators affected by the wildfires with links to fundraising pages:
https://airtable.com/appugwkqKAVGDdeaJ/shrrujOu1GKwKAW0f/tblBTejpocYFoeauX

Support for people displaced by LA fires — A new public Facebook group offering a place for people to share resources
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1162491225218312/