Broken and beautiful Los Angeles

I was in Los Angeles this week for work.

It’s been just three weeks since the fires erupted (strange how the fires are singular enough – even in a city used to fire – that you can simply refer to them as ‘the fires’).

They burned terribly for days, then interminably, and then last week it rained, taking the ash out of the air and Watch Duty’s containment estimate up to 98%. Still not 100% though, even now.

The city, it goes without saying, is different, though I only glimpsed that difference from the plane, as every passenger on the left leaned forward in their seats to gawk at the emptiness below. Even then I was straining, a disaster tourist disappointed that the city from the sky didn’t live up to the drama of social media.

On the ground, meanwhile, Los Angeles felt different – muted, chastised, vaguely haunted – but, apart from the omnipresent signs thanking the LAFD, it didn’t look different. As we zipped around the city – from West Hollywood to Culver City to Venice to Beverly Hills to Westwood – I searched for signs but found only that same vaguely unsettling feeling. That plus the not-so-small talk we made with everyone we met: were you affected? How about your family? How are you holding up?

We didn’t drive up to the Palisades, or to Altadena. It felt wrong – like rubbernecking at a car accident – and they’re checking for proof of residency anyway. So the feeling is all we got of the fires. Lucky us.

Lucky not to see the damage, and lucky to love LA all the more for what it’s endured.

After all, save for New York, Los Angeles is the city that looms largest in my imagination. 

I’m not above its heady beauty. 

Not above considering it the only viable non-New York option.

Nor above reading Joan Didion and childishly feeling I understand something about its essential character.

Even now, amid the post-burn hangover, I love being in Los Angeles. It’s a city that has always been, and will always be, a little weird. Complicated and unpredictable and tinged with sadness even as it’s sunny and glossy and glorious. I love it in all the shallow ways – for the pilates classes and juice bars and temples to youth and beauty that I’ve written about here before. And I love it in the dark ways too. This time around I stayed at the Pendry, in a room overlooking The Comedy Store, where a fight broke out on the sidewalk at 5pm and I just … watched it. The next day, I walked passed The Viper Room and lingered. I kept accidentally using metaphors – ‘scorched earth,’ ignite as a verb – that weren’t metaphors at all, not here. And every time I did I kept thinking – oh, THIS is LA. Kreation and Erewhon and Joan’s on Third almost had me fooled.

I’m back home now, in familiar New York. Though I’ve never lived through a disaster here – not 9/11 or Sandy or any other – the ‘what if’s lap at my ankles, demanding that I imagine an alternate universe, the possibility that, as that viral tweet goes: ”Climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones ... until you're the one filming it.”

Until that perhaps-inevitable moment, we cross our fingers, we love hard, and we marvel at the remarkable resilience of places like this.