In the wake of the Palisades Fire

When memories become time travel - plus two masterful films

I never watch television, but sitting in a Mexican diner in Palm Springs last week I looked up at the TV screen on its walls. It showed the gathering news story of the Palisades fire.

The experience resembled watching the tragedy of the Twin Towers and 9/11 unfold. There’s history before such an episode and a different history after.

Whatever the spark that caused these conflagrations, this is a climate change story. Abnormally heavy rains of a year ago saw vegetation grow, which has since dried in a year of drought. Hurricane level Santa Ana winds rushed down the slopes of the Santa Monica mountains and blew flames into a miles-wide furnace. The fire is still raging, uncontained.

We bought a new home in Santa Monica days before Christmas. James is hyper alert to climate risk, so we settled on a quadrant of California that felt pretty safe. The evacuation warning zone is now on the other side of our block. Close. And expanding.

(The picture is of the old oak in front of the historic Will Rogers House in Will Rogers State Park, taken on one of our regular walks a few weeks ago. The house is now burned, and I fear for the tree too. The flames seen on the mountains were forests ablaze.)

Pacific Palisades was beautiful, and perilous: wood-framed houses on hillsides flanking the Santa Monica mountains. We had considered the fire escape routes from the area, basically one steep and narrow road that would be clogged by any traffic fleeing a likely fire, and ruled it out as anywhere to live (though it was way out of our price range in any case). Instead we went there to visit with friends, their home feeling like ours. That home, and everything in it, is now gone. As is the entire neighborhood.

They are safe, as are other friends who have lost their homes in those hills, and others whose homes are threatened now. But all those delicate choices that turn a house into a home, all gone. The humming bird feeder swinging on a tree, gone. With the tree.

In my mind I can still walk around the restaurant at the top of the Twin Towers, watch the waiters at work, and look down through its windows to the Statue of Liberty rendered tiny by the distance height brings. I can curl my feet onto the couch near their Christmas tree and talk to my friends in their Palisades home, stroke their dog under their table. Memories have become a form of time travel.

The Pacific Coast Highway runs from Santa Monica through Malibu and along the coast. A ribbon of properties lined the ocean side with their private slices of beach and ocean views. I have memories of a weekend in one, that belonged to a Hollywood producer. In climate risk terms we saw these houses threatened by a tsunami. Instead fire leapt the highway and took them all out.

Will these thousands of homes be rebuilt? The slow and grinding process of city permits mitigates against it, but a tinder-box climate and forested mountain slopes in a region tilting toward desert-like conditions suggest human habitation doesn’t work here any more.

Pacific Palisades was very beautiful, a city at a human level designed for community. A relic of a kinder, more sustainable era.

Hopefully its people can keep happy memories as they work out just how to rebuild their lives. Think of them and wish them well.

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I wrote a guest essay for the Queer Love Project substack that came out this week … please find it here: Coming Out on Top - by Martin Goodman. It tells part of the early story of James and myself.

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We were in Palm Springs to see friends, and visit the film festival. From the reconnoitre we bring back two real treasures for you, a couple of masterful world-class films.

Francois Ozon’s When Fall is Coming … someone should have helped out with the awkward translation of the title into English, but everythiung else about the film is perfect. It’s French noir in many ways, but utterly compassionate, unfolding in that rich, steady and surprising way that Ozon achieves. James and I left the cinema and walked home quietly, wrapped in all the film had given us.

The other classic was Bushido, a Japanese samurai movie. I expected lots of sword fights, chases and leaping about, but the film opens with the click of pieces falling onto a Go board. The playing of Go is central to the movie, with wonderful acting and script and resolution, terrific cinematography, and through the central character of a samurai displaced by an injustice yet retaining his values (bushido, I’m told, is the term for the samurai moral code) you have a hero worthy of the term. It’s my first film from Kazuya Shiraishi, but with the vision he displays we need to discover more.

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I’m writing this from a friend’s cabin in the Mojave desert. On the way here we walked through the canyon at the Big Morongo Canyon Preserve. Last winter the place resounded with the calls of frogs. Floods damaged trails that are not yet reopened. Now the area is dry. It’s still a wonderland for birdwatching though, birds dropping into its cottonwoods on their migration routes. Hundreds of bluebirds dared between the treetops, white winged doves roosted on bare branches beneath a full moon, and when we sat in another Mexican diner and James asked me for my favourite moment of the day I teared up and recalled a long visit with a Ruby-Crowned Kinglet, preening itself on a twig then darting about in search of insects. The joy of birdwatching for me is the intense privilege of leaving human concerns for a while and entering a bird’s habitat, and in some slight way its consciousness. Such times in the natural worls are immensely healing.

So we felt a spread of calm as we settled into the cabin and looked over a now familiar stretch of desert toward distant mountains. I have a daft amount of travelling to do in the next month, through England for the launch of My Head for a Tree there and then a February 1st event at the Jaipur Literary Festival before heading back to LA via Hong Kong. Once the book is eased out into the world, I look forward to a whole long period of steadiness, and some natural world balm.