Desolation Row: The Fires That Will Change L.A.

And then the kerosene
Is brought down from the castles
By insurance men who go
Check to see
That nobody is escaping
To Desolation Row…

Bob Dylan

 As all the world now knows, Los Angeles is living through a fourth day of loss, heartbreak, and anguish compounded by uncertainty.

I’ve rewritten this post three times as events move apace. One minute ago came a local ABC7 report that at least three homes have been hit by looters in the Rustic Canyon section of the Palisades. 

 Part of my agenda here was to reassure kind friends who have checked on me and my family, to tell them that my marginally idyllic Venice hood seemed immune--and then half an hour ago came the report of a small apartment house on fire (at once knocked down) a mile away on Indiana Avenue. 

 At this moment about 180,000 citizens are living, in some cases fleeing, under evacuation orders from four main fires.

 Ten are dead as neighborhood sweeps continue. There’s very little hope that the current valiant firefighting efforts can do more than barely keep pace with new outbreaks. (The Palisades fire, upon which this post will center, is currently at 8% containment.)

Around 5:20 a.m. today, the 10^th,  my phone came alive to the second misbegotten evacuation alert I’ve received. The top city official for that system apologized profusely a bit after 8 a.m., along with the not-that-comforting assurance that technology, not any human hand, had triggered the widespread false alarm.

All this comes as, considering what use might come from posting about my own undramatic experience of these days, I have been brooding over what to serve up from my own chronicle of this strange moment in Los Angeles history.

The word “privileged” gets tangled up with “lucky” as I write. One path to a narrative seems to be reliving it all backwards in time.

Yesterday around noon, three days in,  I clapped the laptop shut and  thought I’d drive down the streets of Venice  to one of the  locally preferred,  demographically plotted and overpriced (okay, tasty) gougeries where snacks come dearly. 

 Yes, it felt like an arrant exercise in striving for a bit of chill. I have friends who have lost almost everything, others who are waiting to hear if such is the case. Some had reason to fear at points for their lives; the disorderly Tuesday night evacuations from the more elevated (and jeopardized, and now largely incinerated) districts of the Palisades was frantic, apocalyptic, gridlocked, terrifying to many. 

 So on that rather balmy Thursday early afternoon, I went in search of a sandwich. I had just turned onto the main drag when the familiar ball sack-cinching burr of a citywide emergency alert make my mobile phone twerk insolently with the news that the Sunset Mesa enclave east of Topanga Canyon was under an EVACUATION ORDER—caps theirs—and below, more caps declaring, LEAVE NOW. 

 This alert was authentic, detailed, and being splashed across local and even national news channels. 

Moments later came a second alert, this time adding more territory, now  in fabled Malibu where the storied celebrity palaces were already leveled and smoking feebly. By day’s end, the number of mandatory evacuee orders for the Palisades fire (one of four then active) reached just shy of 20,000 in number.

I drove down sun-splashed Abbot Kinney Boulevard to a the gaggle of shops clustered around Windward Circle. Foot and vehicle traffic was light, the vibe slumberous. The only dog in the shop fought boredom as I stood beside his owner, a yellow lab taking a polite sniff of my own provender until he too, was privileged to get a boutique-y dog biscuit from the jar on the countertop. (The most heartening non-humankind news story I saw this week was of volunteers scrambling in earnest to feed and care for displaced pets.) 

So, fair warning what follows will be somewhat voyeuristic, lived and related from outside the danger radius of the ravaging catastrophe that is our latest warning that global warming will have it say.

All three are part of the Palisades branch of the still spreading fear and sorrow. (The accompanying photos I took with an iPhone may lend some color to the stark greys of the reality.) 

Call it a brief exhale in a literal and psychic windstorm thick with embers, or call it simply an admission of having dumb luck amidst good people's much greater woes. 

Among the estimated near-5400 destroyed structures counted in the Palisades sprawl, three were chiefly on my mind in the 24 hours since the  disaster jumped off on mid-morning Tuesday. Each has a story that can’t be concluded while nature continues to take her course.

One such proceeding starts on Saturday,  January 4^th. I began  my day making the (then!) quick drive from Venice to the section of the exclusive (hoo boy, count on it) West side-L.A.  escarpment known as the Palisades Riviera, with its evocative place names and an array of grand homes and top-tier landscaping.  I’ve been crisscrossing that  enclave regularly  from when I first moved to L.A, in the Nineties, usually in search of one of three preferred hiking trails. The original go-to hike was at Will Rogers State Park off Sunset, a preserve named after the sometime owner, of course the legendary populist-with-a-heart whose name it bears. 

It feels miserably weighty to say the Rogers manse, planted near an expansive lawn  favored by families with scampering toddlers, is confirmed to be no more. The sharply ascending trail, where on a leafy descending stretch I hollered to Alejandro Iñárritu (whom I still never have met) that I and my hiking partner had spent our entire walk discussing “Bardo” (no, I didn’t spit out the “False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths” subtitle).

Moving east on Sunset brings you first to Capri—a central, sloping, haute- residential street amidst a nest of snaking roadways—and then to Mandeville Canyon, the latter offering access to the Westridge Trail. 

Of the First World problem of losing for an indefinite spell my three preferred hikes, each a  spirit-balming, dusty track surrounded by beauty and epic views, I’ll shut up for now. My simple mission that day was to drop of a packet of reading material to a longtime friend, a filmmaker whose privacy I’ll preserve in this case. I slid the package, wrapped against the elements, under the gate of his picturesque vintage residence. His neighbors and creative peers, arrayed on a tight radius centered on Amalfi Drive, would include Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks. The former’s adobe-style home is a visible landmark when one looks across the green canyon between Amalfi’s hillside back yards and the Will Rogers trail. (On the set of “Hook,” I watched him fumfer for a moment when one of his youthful charges asked, “Do you have a mansion?” He had to grin, even though the frisky little bunch would have tested any director’s patience, and after a beat he offered, “Uh—we call it a compound.”)

My friend’s thank-you note came on Tuesday some minutes before the first 911 call came in from the Palisades Highlands where the entire Armageddon jumped off.

Since then, has family has been under an evacuation order, and both his current whereabouts and the status of his once-so-inviting home are unknown to me.

 As the fire and the alarums spread, I made a call to a third family friend, a loving matriarch to a bevy of in-laws and extended family—people we holiday with. She fled to refuge with her dog and the choice of valuable items from her life of nine-plus decades, at least three of them in her showplace residence. Like so many residents of her area and many many thousands well beyond, she will await official clearance before she can return and wash the ashes of a half-annihilated metropolis away.

Finally--if there can be any finality to this lingering nightmare facing a hungry conflagration—I have also learned the sad fate of another house that contained a family’s hope for financial and emotional security. It’s a low-slung, elegantly modern perch that sits near the top of the fabled, winding, ridge--topping road (and trailhead) Paseo Miramar. Here, too, I’ve hiked many times, and as with the Riviera section, partaken of the scenic half-wilderness of Los Angeles that once made the territory--now subjected to  ruin and to still further threats–-into a dreamland. That is now and forever changed utterly.

View from the Palisades Bluffs Park of an LAFD command and truck servicing center along the Pacific Coast Highway in Santa Monica, January 9