The Hotspots of Memory
Los Angeles on Fire
There’s nothing like a major disaster where one has once lived to stir up memories. Our heart rate accelerates. We gasp in horror and disbelief at the scale of the destruction unfolding, at the lives lost and upended. We are relieved we are no longer there and now live far away, and yet we long to rush to the site of the catastrophe to do something, anything to help. We fervently wish to rewind to a time before disaster struck, destroying a part of our past we believed would remain intact forever and that now is forever gone.
I felt this way watching the Twin Towers come down on September 11, 2001, in New York City after I had moved to Vancouver, Washington. I’ve felt this way watching the recent fires in Los Angeles from my home in France.
Flashback
My mother is three, maybe four years old. She is in a garden in California, perhaps at her first home on Micheltorena Street in Echo Park, Los Angeles. It is a hot day and my mother, a very young child, has been allowed to strip off her clothes and play with a garden hose to cool off. The hose has a sprayer attachment that forces the water out into a wide, fine mist. Or perhaps my mother has blocked part of the mouth of the hose with her thumb or a couple of her small fingers to force the water to fan out. She is bent to the hose that snakes toward her through the grass as if she has just picked it up, or as if, alive with the pressure of the water coursing through it, the hose is an unwieldy thing for a little girl to manage.
When I saw images of exhausted firefighters covered in soot unfurling fire hoses on suburban Los Angeles streets, and homeowners with mere garden hoses trying to stop a wall of flames headed their way during the recent Eaton and Pacific Palisades fires, I thought of this old photograph of my mother with a garden hose watering down vegetation on a hot Southern California day. She, like so many in recent days and years, would have been no match for a wildfire.
I found this photograph among my recently dead mother’s preciously guarded family memorabilia. Going through the letters, school awards, newspaper clippings and many photographs my mother saved over the years, I realized my mother’s parents and their siblings were among hundreds of thousands of winter-weary Midwestern migrants to California in the early years of the 20th century.
On my grandfather’s side, the Christiansens came to California in 1911 to help build a utopian Danish community under the California sun near Santa Barbara called Solvang, “sunny field.” On my grandmother’s side, the Pedersens were lured by a campaign by powerful California businessmen to attract new settlers to the state. Among my mother’s things, I found a booklet that must have belonged to her parents, published exactly a century ago in 1925 by Californians Inc., called California: Where Life is Better. Among the marvels of the state, the good business titans of the day go so far as to assert that children in California grow taller and are more intelligent than those from other U.S. states. Not surprising in a land “teeming with life. Sun and soil cry a perpetual invitation to man to join them in creative partnership.”
My great-uncle Christian designed and built a house east of Los Angeles in San Bernardino in the middle of an old orange grove with a fishpond on the roof to keep it cool. “Natural air-conditioning!” he boasted to me one day when he took me up a ladder to the roof. “Oh, better get the hose,” he said once we were up there. “If the water level gets too low, my fish get sunburned!” My great-uncle Viggo built the Pedersen sawmill in Fawnskin on Big Bear Lake in the Los Angeles National Forest. He ran it for many years. It’s still there. You can visit it anytime. Uncle Viggo went to fetch his little sister Arta from his parents’ home in Nebraska in 1929, the year of the stock market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression, and brought her out to Los Angeles where she met one of his Danish-American friends who’d come to Los Angeles looking for work, Ejner Christiansen. The two were married two months later.
Dissolve To
In the last century, tens of millions of people heeded the siren call of California. The forests of California live oak that survived well into the 18th century were so thick a man could ride the whole day through the canyons and over the foothills of what would become Los Angeles without leaving the deep shade of their canopy. They were all cut down by timber- and land-hungry settlers, sparing a few majestic specimens here and there and allowing shrubby and highly combustible chaparral to grow up in their place. The people pouring in needed homes. New subdivisions marched first over the orchards of oranges and walnuts in the valleys, and then further and further up the canyons into the chaparral, the wood-framed houses like so many match boxes waiting for a spark. Wildfires were a regular part of the ecosystem. Urban encroachment and climate change made them deadly.
My mother was born at Queen of the Angels hospital on April 14, 1934. The hospital, a then modern pile built in 1926, was founded by the Franciscan Sisters of the Sacred Heart. It was named after the original 1781 farming settlement called El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles del Rio de Porciúncula (The City of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels of the River Porciúncula), founded by eleven Spanish, African, indigenous and mestizo heads of household come up old Mexico way. Such was the beginning of the metropolis known today as “L.A.” In 1941, just after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, my mother’s family moved to a farm outside Junction City, Oregon. That is another story.
In 1962, after years in Oregon and Seattle, Washington, where I was born, my parents moved to the San Fernando Valley. It was the height of the Cold War. My father, an aeronautical engineer from India, became a U.S. citizen, thanks in no small part because he was married to a U.S. citizen, allowing him to work on the great race to put a man on the moon before the end of the 1960s.
Iris In
The sun is setting, taking the heat of the day with it. The new dichondra lawn is cool and soft under my bare, five-year-old feet. My mother is wearing pedal pushers. She is watering the yard with a garden hose. Her long fingers curl around the open end of the hose, forcing the water into a jet that she aims in swaying arcs around the perfectly square backyard. The yard is surrounded by a concrete-block wall. To one side is a fire station. When they aren’t putting out fires, the firemen hoist me up into the driver’s seat of one of their big, red trucks and let me “steer.” My parents’ brand-new stucco house is in a new subdivision in Canoga Park. The house is close to Rocketdyne, where my father has a new job. Aerospace and defense industries fueled by the war in Vietnam and the space race are booming in Southern California. My father is sworn to secrecy about what, exactly, he is working on. Later, we will learn that it was the retro rockets on the Apollo spacecraft that would allow the vessel to turn around in the vacuum of space and bring the astronauts inside back to earth. Later, my mother told me he ground his teeth at night during those years.
Iris Out
In 1965, we moved to a ranch house on an acre of land carved from a former walnut orchard in Woodland Hills. We lived there, on the northern edge of the San Fernando Valley, for nine years. The nearby soft, brown hills, now tightly covered with houses, were bare back then, but for tall grass and live oak and enormous tarantula spiders. When we moved into that house, I was seven years old. When we moved out, I was sixteen years old. Those were formative years. I remember, in no particular order, the Watts riots, the nightly casualty numbers in Vietnam on the CBS evening news, the discovery that Charles Manson and his gang had been living quite near where I used to ride my mare Misty June up into the nearby hills after school, when the Fallbrook shopping mall opened, when the musical Hair played at the Hollywood Bowl, climbing up the trees growing in our garden and picking and eating sapotes, tangelos and oranges on the spot, spending hours after school in our swimming pool or in one of our neighbor’s swimming pools or in one of my friend’s swimming pools. I remember we hosted a series of Indian relatives of my father in the process of immigrating to America, and my mother taking the wives out to the local Ralph’s supermarket parking lot to teach them how to drive. I remember my father getting up from his seat in front of the television watching coverage of the 1968 Democratic primaries to get something to drink, and saying: “Watch out Bobby, or they’ll get you too.” And then he was shot. My father was badly shaken, and I felt that, once again, Los Angeles was the center of the universe, for good and for bad. I remember cutting class at El Camino Real High School, a group of us heading with one of the group at the wheel of his or her own car, out of the Valley and through Topanga Canyon to Malibu Beach.
I also remember how the real world of our neighborhood of families from varied backgrounds was permeated by the entertainment industry. “Out in the Valley,” as we referred to our San Fernando location, television ruled. Many of our neighbors worked in the studios in Burbank. (The movie people lived in Beverly Hills and Laurel Canyon and Pacific Palisades, exotic locales of great wealth and glamor that struck me with awe and where we never went.) One next-door neighbor was a writer for The Mod Squad. Another regularly had the Smothers brothers and James Taylor (be still my thirteen-year-old heart!) over for drinks around the pool. We’d watch the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and Laugh-In on television, and then, there they were, Tom and Dick Smothers, lounging around our neighbor’s swimming pool where I could see them if I got up on my horse and rode around the back of our property. The actor and comedian Red Skelton lived directly in back of us. Maureen McCormick, who played Marcia, the oldest child in The Brady Bunch, was nominally a student at Charles Evans Hughes Junior High School at the same time I was, but we rarely saw her and understood that she was “on the set.”
All around us, but especially in Chatsworth, was the exact same landscape we saw on television in episodes of Zorro or even Star Trek, where it was odd to see far-flung planets where Captain Kirk bravely engaged in hand-to-hand combat with aliens before Scottie finally beamed him up to safety on the U.S.S. Enterprise that looked exactly like the boulders we clambered over on family outings to Stoney Point in Chatsworth Park.
Iris In
September 25, 1970. My father is up on the roof of our house with a garden hose, spraying down the cedar shingles. My brother remembers this. I do not. A fire sparked by downed power lines near Clampitt Road, fanned by 80 mile-per-hour Santa Ana winds, is raging out of control. Another fire has simultaneously broken out heading to Malibu. Together with a third fire, by the time the flames are out, they will have burned over 157,000 acres. It was the worst set of wildfires in recorded Los Angeles history up to that point. Our home was never directly threatened. I doubt that even had my father stayed up on the roof with the garden hose all night, nothing would have saved our house from an inferno of the magnitude of the Pacific Palisades fire.
I have no memory of the 1970 fire. But I do remember very clearly the 1971 San Fernando earthquake that hit just a few months later on February 9, 1971, at 6:01 a.m. and registered 6.6 on the Richter Scale. The quake killed sixty-four people and injured over 2,000 others. I remember being awoken that morning by a deep roar, a sound that I cannot describe but that I will never forget. It was the sound of an earthquake rippling toward you just before the seismic waves buck and shake and break everything in their path. I barely made it to the door jamb of my bedroom, where I knew I needed to brace against the house possibly coming down. I could hear things crashing to the floor in the kitchen. Most of the books on the wall of my parents’ home library were thrown to the floor. My mother set us to work cleaning out garbage cans that we put in the back of our pickup truck and filled with water for the horses of her friends out near the quake’s epicenter. As we drew near, we kept having to change course because the pavement would suddenly break and start up again a few feet higher on the other side. Nothing was left standing of many houses except their chimneys. My mother’s friend said that before the earthquake, her horse had been inside a six-foot chain link fence. After the earthquake, the horse was outside the fence, she didn’t know how.
The fires and the earthquake happened so close together, that people dubbed the twin scourges “Shake ‘n Bake” after the then popular seasoned breaded coating for chicken sold by General Foods. That was Southern California: Shake n’ Bake.
At school, I remember three kinds of emergency drills. We did fire drills where, when the bell rang, we lined up in separate lines of boys and girls and calmly followed our teacher out onto the playground. We did earthquake drills where, on signal, we dove under our desks and put our hands behind our necks to protect them as we hoped the desks would protect our heads. We also did “the Soviets have launched a nuclear attack on the United States” drills (all those aerospace and defense industries in Los Angeles) where we ran to the inner wall of our glass-windowed classroom and hunched down with our hands behind our necks clenching our eyes shut so we would not be blinded by the nuclear blast. We never did any drills for after the blast. It was never clear to me why saving our sight was so important when the world was coming to a violent end. We also did not do “active shooter” drills, and it was far from anyone’s mind then to imagine children in America would ever have to do that.
Fade Out
In Los Angeles, there is “fire weather” in the dry autumn when the Santa Ana winds blow down from the mountains toward the sea. This year, that weather happened in January. There is also “earthquake weather” when the atmosphere goes hush in oppressive anticipation of long pent-up release. But the beauty of the mountains cupped around and through the city and the vast blue of the great Pacific Ocean and the sun that shines day after day makes the known risks of sudden and utter destruction worth the pleasures of what is paradise on earth until the “big one” hits or a wildfire rips through your neighborhood.
Among the life lessons I learned in Los Angeles are that everything can go up in smoke and everything can come tumbling down at any time. Here today, gone tomorrow. In between, there was sun, surf, sand, oranges, swimming pools, cool water spraying from garden hoses, and the consolations of mass entertainment.
The recent Pacific Palisades and Eaton fires in Los Angeles horrified as much by their ferocity and the damage they did to entire neighborhoods, as by the destruction they threatened to do to the California dream machine, already weakend by COVID and AI. The fire came very close to Hollywood, in the middle of awards season. The Oscar nominations had to be postponed. Famous actors, including Jeff Bridges, Mel Gibson and Sir Anthony Hopkins, lost their homes. The flames came right up to the edge of the Getty Museum. The neighborhood of Altadena, home to a close-knit diverse community and many artists, was very badly hit.
In an era of worsening climate change, of hurricane-force Santa Ana winds and long droughts that suck the last hint of moisture out of the ground, and now of a president at war with American democracy, climate change mitigation and every Blue state, particularly California, how long can the dream last? How long can anything last?
Links:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/02/03/inside-the-fight-against-a-los-angeles-inferno
https://lastreetnames.com/street/micheltorena-street/
https://www.dailynews.com/2022/08/05/tainted-groundwater-from-old-rocketdyne-site-has-inched-toward-homes-and-la-river/
https://scvhistory.com/gif/galleries/fire092570/#:~:text=The%20Clampitt%20(Newhall)%20and%20Wright,result%20of%20downed%20power%20lines.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-02-09/50-years-ago-1971-sylmar-earthquake-shook-la
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Red-Skelton
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smothers_Brothers
https://www.abebooks.com/first-edition/California-Where-Life-Better-Californians-San/31460674681/bd
Really loved this piece!
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