We Know These Winds

One of the first stories we shared on The Mortar was a brilliantly strange portrait of Los Angeles, published in the wake of last year’s wildfires. Today’s selection returns to the same subject, but with very different results, as writer Nicole Stanton reflects on her own response to the fires, and the ideas of safety and community that hold us together.

The day the Santa Ana winds picked up, two or three students lingered in the English office to meet with teachers, but none of them were the one I was waiting for. Outside, hurricane-like winds shredded fronds from the trunks of palms and sent them plummeting groundwards. Oak leaves blew in gusts and swirls. I thought of my dog at home and let I’ll be home soon tumble from my mouth in a whisper, as though she might hear me two freeways away.

My dog and I once risked a walk in winds like this, and a palm frond landed in front of us on the sidewalk. Now, at the smallest gust of wind, her tail tucks between her legs like a comma. I like that she won’t ever invent a new fear, without something real attached. But once she does get scared, she absorbs her fear as a truth by which to live her days. I try to learn from her — I am afraid of so many things that will never come close to me.

My student was late for our meeting, and I was impatient to get home. The energy in the air crackles with something sinister when the Santa Ana blows. Everyone acts a bit strange, irritable. At lunch in the teacher’s lounge with Neemu, a coworker turned friend who just moved to LA, I assured her these winds were normal. I liked being the one who was from here, who could insist that being afraid of nature is part of living here, something to adapt to. Angelenos know these winds. They are hot, they are dry, they are intense. The power flickered in and out, briefly. I said, again, normal, normal, I remember these, like an incantation that might hypnotize her. A few weeks earlier, there had been an earthquake big enough to feel, big enough to rattle the stones piled in a bowl on my desk. Neemu’s eyes were filled with tears. I just picture a god somewhere cupping her hands around the city and giving us a good shake, I told her, even as I imagined my apartment’s plaster ceilings smothering my dog.

My student arrived just as I felt ready to give up and go to my car. His face hovered over his phone screen. He told me he had to go, and was sorry, but his neighborhood in the Pacific Palisades was being evacuated. “This has happened before, it’s always okay, ” he said with his eyes still on his phone. Yes, yes. I nodded because he got it, and the Palisades is a rich neighborhood. This city always protects the rich neighborhoods. “We’ll reschedule for tomorrow,” I tell him, and now I get to go home, too.

That night, his house will burn down, along with all the others on the street where he grew up.

At dinner that night, I took a picture of my partner Jacob and sister Shelby in the breakfast nook, to capture the face of my dog at their feet, cowering under the table. As we ate the wind picked up, rattling our single-pane windows and whistling under the doors. My sister cleared our plates, and the power went out. We had put out the candles and headlamps already and watched the shadowy bounce of power lines out the front window. The dog trembled herself to sleep on our pillows. We slept and the next morning woke to orange light filtering through the window across our quilt.

The dog would not go outside. The sky from the North, from the Eaton Fire, sent one volcanic cloud of grey smoke over our house. The sky to the West, from the Palisades fire, was a distant cloud of black. Jacob and I waited in the yard for the dog to reluctantly pee and watched the street for our neighbors — do we leave? I watched the sky innocently and with a strange calm, like a child in rapture, waiting for an adult to explain how the world works. For someone, not me, to say: Fires always burn like this, don’t worry.

My sister slept on the couch and woke up to us loud-whispering and packing our bags. My body said leave, even though no evacuation warning had been issued for our neighborhood. My body felt light, like gravity no longer rooted me in place. I tethered myself with tactical movements, instead, and reached for my go-bag packing list. I tried to remember the things I had spent the last decade teaching students about climate disasters, what it meant to be prepared, and the essential role of care networks for moments exactly like this one. Today, though, I could only think of my partner, my sister, my dog, myself. I wanted to pull a blanket over all of us, dig a tunnel underneath us, find a cocoon for us to melt inside of. I turned up the air purifier even as I heard the construction crew next door start their work on a new house. I called no one, I did not remain calm, and hovered above myself, watching myself build a fortress for four.

I handed Jacob a copy of the list, like it was any list, like I had done a hundred times with other lists. I felt soothed by the feeling of a packed trunk. By knowing we could leave our house and lock the car doors, and drive away, away. I put a mask on myself and handed one to my sister before locking the front doors. Neighbors up and down the street were doing the same thing, placing pets in back seats and tossing duffle bags in trunks and waving to each other somberly saying “stay safe.” The construction workers continue their work, maskless, blasting music and chatting.

We would drive to my parents’ new house in a town near Palm Springs. That night I walked the dog on the golf course behind their house. The sky is clear here. The houses are huge. A golf ball hurls from somewhere and bounces underneath my dog’s ribs, terrifying both of us, and I scream at a golfer I can’t see, somewhere around a bend.

When I was young and growing up in Southern California, I couldn’t fall asleep until I heard my mother bolt the front door. Well, it was always bolted, so really she unbolted it then bolted it again, to make sure her senses didn’t betray her. Once the door was locked, I was safe from everything. Now, I could dream. The sound made the house a fortress, like every wall and window and door became impenetrable, because the lock was a spell that kept everything out. What “everything” was I couldn’t be sure. My mother said “just in case,” like a refrain. Honey, check every window latch in the house “just in case.” Go lock the backyard gates “just in case.” She bought a gate to place inside of the backyard gate to go around the pool “just in case.” As I’ve entered adulthood, I’ve tried leaning on the same spells, though they don’t work quite the same. My partner, who never locks anything, asked me early after we began living together about my habit of locking doors, checking windows. I said, as my mouth took the shape of my mother’s, “just in case.”

“In case of what?” he laughed. And I couldn’t quite explain. If I tried, I might be embarrassed by the fantasies that haunted my imagination, most of them the visions of a person, me, who has never actually experienced real danger.

When I was growing up my parents would host a lot of parties. I don’t know where any of the party guests are now, or who they were exactly, but once a weekend I would fall asleep to adults talking and laughing over bottles of wine and platters of grilled food. There is something powerful as a child when your parents have people over to your home. Not that anything extraordinary happens, exactly, but you see your parents in a posture different than any other time. They were louder and happier. The doors left unlocked, the windows open so food could pass from the kitchen to the yard, and the gates wide open. I could fall asleep these nights, not because of the bolt sound, but because of a different spell. That of many, many adults whose presence meant safety. Because all of them had come to our house, that meant our house was very, very safe.

When the adults left, the doors would re-bolt, the gates locked. Safety again meant the threshold of inside and outside was only crossable when we decided it to be so. Their methods didn’t always work. When it rained, the concrete patio flooded, and water seeped into the dining room. An earthquake once sloshed the water in our pool back and forth like a tiny tidal wave. During fire seasons, the ledge of my window collected ash.

Where I grew up in Long Beach, we were 20 miles from Downtown Los Angeles and just a mile from the Pacific Ocean. As an adult, I would move back to Southern California, a mile or two west of Downtown to Silverlake, and would learn quickly I knew nothing of this city. In Long Beach, the mornings cover the town with a blanket of dense, dewy marine layer. Whenever my family drove north, away from the ocean, I remember feeling unsettled by the city skyline shimmering against the mountains, beneath one streak of yellow smog. When we exited the freeway to wherever we were going, my mother would re-lock the car doors. My body registered Los Angeles as the “everything” we dutifully kept out.

I went inside the Mexican restaurant for more table salsa. Jacob, Shelby, and our friends, Will and Jocelyn, were eating burritos on the patio. On our drive to my parents’ we began calling our friends, seeing who was leaving and if they needed anywhere to stay. As soon as we left, I felt calm — like a captain of a ship, gathering information and distributing it to the crew. I could handle this as long as I couldn’t see the smoke. I spoke about our decision to leave like it was a fact of safety and wisdom: “I would leave if I were you,” I said, “just in case.” Over and over. “Come stay at my parents’,” there are plenty of rooms.” The only friends who took me up on the offer had received an evacuation warning that had turned out to be a system error. When they left their home they said goodbye to their flock of chickens, because they read that the chickens would likely die from smoke inhalation. (They didn’t.)

As I sat down, I tried to catch up on the game they were playing. Jocelyn had chosen this restaurant, which is a job we always give her because she is so good at it. We put little pebbles on our paper plates and napkins so they wouldn’t blow away. They played a game that passes the time, the sort of game you never really care about winning, but nevertheless carry with you wherever you go. The game goes like this: someone comes up with a completely imagined idea. Then, everyone goes around the table and guesses the idea. The more impossible the idea, the better, like: a pelican addicted to shampoo, or a baby who makes sandwiches. Whichever idea feels closest, even though they’re never actually close at all, wins.

Six months have passed since the Los Angeles fires. During those months I have forgotten, I assume, countless details I had wanted to catalogue forever — but I have not forgotten this game or the burritos or the hot wind on the patio that had followed us here, too. We had driven ourselves a hundred miles east, away from our home, down a hot freeway of car dealerships and big box stores. The drive east from Los Angeles gets hotter and hazier until you see the wind turbines marking the edge of the desert valley and the mountains busting out of the dusty flats. Why had I insisted we come here? Overnight several friends had lost their homes in the Eaton Fire. My email inbox began to populate with the names of my students who had lost their homes in the Palisades Fire. Most of the friends now without homes stayed a few miles away from the flames, just safe enough.

It’s hard not to look back at that moment and feel how far my fear had taken us. A hundred miles away, on a patio eating burritos, safe, I guess, creating fantasies to pass the time while our real city, our real home, was being destroyed by flames. Had we stayed in our apartment, we would have been safe, entirely, and Jacob trusted this version of events. Though, for me, the promise of the fortress had stuck onto me. With me. I couldn’t relax without the illusion of the locked door, the sealed window, the “everything” staying at bay. My insistence on leaving was founded on “just in case” scenarios – I pictured packed, unmoving freeways and the fire jumping neighborhoods. I had read enough about disasters to know what can happen if you wait too long to leave, and that sometimes, leaving before a mandated evacuation can be a good thing. I ultimately feel confused about whether or not we should have left.

My confusion lives in this memory: the second day of the fires, a new fire broke out in the Hollywood Hills. We can see these hills from our apartment’s front yard. Our neighbors texted us pictures of the flames, while we watched them on my parents’ long beige couch on a flatscreen. While our neighbors felt fear together, talked through choices together, and strategized how to care for each other, we were a hundred miles away from home. Whatever resources we would have been able to offer we couldn’t, not really, not until we returned a couple of days later.

Before I left school that first day, I sent my students the Joan Didion essay on the Santa Ana winds. I wanted to tease them with this line, because class had acted so strangely that day. They stayed quiet every time I asked a question and talked incessantly when I asked for focus. Didion writes: “In Los Angeles some teachers do not attempt to conduct formal classes during a Santa Ana, because the children become unmanageable.” The next morning I realized they would likely only read this line: “The winds show us how close to the edge we are.”

Not unlike most climate disasters, the Los Angeles fires revealed and continue to reveal the extreme variation in Angelenos’ proximity to “the edge.” I had always read that line in Didion’s essay as a statement of community, and one I was eager to take on. I felt proud for a long time of being courageous and clear-eyed about the “edge.” Yes, I know about the earthquakes, the fires, the landslides. I know we have no water of our own. The collective condition of the “edge” in Los Angeles has always made me hope that when disaster arrives, we will all be dragged towards collectivity, towards a level of bravery and care impossible in “normal” times. Though, the fires reminded me this is not a guarantee.

Years ago I taught at a private high school much less financially elite than the one I teach at, now. Students took the city bus across half a dozen neighborhoods and most didn’t pay to attend. While reading Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, we started poking at the question of what we would all do if Los Angeles deteriorated like it does in Butler’s book. What if we ran out of water? What would each of our families do? I proposed the idea of moving somewhere else. Most of the students in the room thought that notion was wild, impossible, and shut it down immediately. The ones who did agree they would get out of here were, mainly, students who hadn’t ever taken the city bus and whose parents paid full tuition.

The school I teach in now is known for its wealth, its seemingly limitless resources. Two days after the Palisades Fire burned down the homes of dozens of students, the school had rehoused every family in the spare Los Angeles real estate available to the community. When we met on Zoom during cancelled school days, most students were in vacation homes they had fled to after the fires broke out.

What can we do when our home is on fire? It partly depends how you define the “edge,” and which spells you rely on to keep you safe. One spell, a spell of privilege, can take you far away. Another spell brings you back, opens you up, and makes home something you have to offer others — doors open, table full. Since the fires, I have witnessed profound generosity and jagged grief. I’ve seen support I couldn’t have ever envisioned and profound corporate greed. There is awe here, there is chaos, and as we turn to fall again, the Santa Ana winds will return like they always do. Yes, Los Angeles is the “everything” I was taught it was, but this time I’m trying to let it in.

Loam is a community-powered print publisher, telling stories at the confluence of ecology and systems change.

Nicole Stanton is a writer, teacher, and death doula living in Los Angeles, California. She runs Threshold Writing, a one-on-one container for writers. She is the founder of Bernadette, a monthly writer’s group on Zoom inspired by the experiments of poet Bernadette Mayer.

Delaney Gibbons is an illustrator, writer, and cartoonist based in central Iowa. You can see more of their work on Instagram.