On the Past Couple of Weeks in Los Angeles
And one happy story.
In October 2020, as I recount at the end of Health and Safety, I drove a camper van across the country as a favor to a friend and because I wanted to get out of New York. On the last day of driving, I left Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada in the morning and at mid-afternoon arrived at the house my brother had recently rented in a Los Angeles suburb called Altadena. I was messed up from everything that happened so I decided to stay with my brother and my niece instead of going back to a shut-down New York to spend the winter alone in a half-furnished apartment.
In the two months that I stayed in Altadena with them, many days I would walk from my brother’s house to sit on the sunny outdoor patio of a coffee shop called Cafe de Leche. I was having trouble eating at the time, so I would order what seemed to be the most caloric drink, the “Mexi mocha” and sit down and write what would later become Health and Safety.
Because everything was closed for the pandemic there was nothing to do in L.A. and I didn’t have any friends there, so I walked around Altadena a lot. I would walk past the parking lot of the Rite Aid on Altadena Drive and the San Gabriel Mountains would just be there, enormous and glowing pink. I took a lot of photos that capture nothing except the mountains, and sometimes the Rite Aid.
It was such a singular time, and what a strangely timeless place to end up. Altadena had flocks of green parrots that would squawk outside the window each morning. It had hummingbirds, fruit trees, the Theosophical Society, beautifully kept gardens, craftsmen bungalows.
It was astonishingly pretty, tucked away at the foot of the mountains, and could not have been more different from what I had left behind at Myrtle-Broadway.
When I first arrived that October, my brother’s patio furniture was covered in a fine white ash blown down from the mountain. It was the residue of the Bobcat fire that had burned that fall. While I was staying with him, I read some Octavia Butler, but not Parable of the Sower, which everyone is talking about right now. I read Lilith’s Brood. I read Michel Houellebecq’s Possibility of an Island. I read John McPhee’s “Los Angeles Against the Mountains.”
Early in the morning on January 8 it all burned down: my brother’s house, Cafe de Leche, the Theosophical Society. The strip mall with the Rite-Aid is fine. I happened to be back in Los Angeles this winter, first to spend the holidays with my family and then to sell my furniture, close this chapter of my life, and go back to New York for good. My parents were also in town, and we all had dinner together at the house the day before they evacuated and never came back. They all thought they were just going out for the night when they left on Tuesday, and they didn’t bring anything with them—not their laptops, or their passports, and not my brother’s cat, Carrot Cake, who was outside at the time.
Since the fires started in Los Angeles on January 7, I’ve reported a couple of stories: One about the first twenty-four hours and a second about a multigenerational family who lost their homes. I also did my first New Yorker Tik Tok, but I guess that’s offline for now. (For more of my thoughts on the past two weeks, I also had a very nice conversation with Sam Fragoso for his podcast, Talk Easy.) This is some video I recorded on January 8:
As I was reporting all this, every time I returned to the burn zone, which I could do with my press pass, I would try to drive by where the house used to be and look for Carrot Cake. I told myself I was deluded. The fire had burned everything for many blocks.
I was having trouble sleeping, worrying that Carrot Cake was somehow alive but with nothing to eat or drink. I finally decided to just put out bowls of food and water—even if the cat were dead some other animal might need them. I didn’t know where to put them because the place was so toxic I didn’t want to lure any animal to a poisonous pile of ashes but I didn’t want to put them somewhere where Carrot Cake couldn’t find them. I left them on what was left of the front steps. As I got in my car a flock of crows immediately descended on the food.
I thought leaving out the little shrine to the cat would make me feel better but instead that night I couldn’t sleep again, now worrying that I had left the food and water in the wrong place. The next time I was again on the other side of the National Guard barrier, I went back to the street again, thinking I could just scatter some piles of cat food around, but the area was busy with Cal Fire search and rescue teams and utility workers and police, and I didn’t know how to explain that yes, I was a journalist, but I was really just looking for a cat that I was trying to accept was probably dead.
This isn’t really my story to tell, it’s more my brother’s—but last Thursday, eight days after the fire, a fire fighter working in the burn area found Carrot Cake in a tree somewhere on Stephen’s street. He was brought to the Pasadena Humane Society and identified by his microchip. He had burned paws, smoke inhalation, and was very skinny, but he was alive.
Stephen took him to an emergency vet, who bandaged his paws and gave him some painkillers, then brought him back to my place, since there was nowhere else for him to go. He drank two full bowls of water and had a healthy appetite (I wish I had more video but my phone wasn’t working). The next day Stephen took the cat to a regular vet, who offered to board him for free for a few days and keep an eye on his health. (I’m hoping Carrot Cake can come back here until Stephen finds a place to live but in another complication, the place I’ve rented here in Los Angeles, which I’m leaving for good at the end of the month, was leased to me at a discount in part because it came with a senior cat named Earl. I love Earl, but he was freaked out about another cat showing up in his apartment. The line “tenant is responsible for caring for Earl as if he is her own” is a clause in my lease, and I generally think of Earl as my landlord.)
I’m haunted that all those times I went back there I never looked up, maybe I would have seen him, etc. But we don’t really know exactly where he was found, just that it was on the street in a tree. Amid all this sad news we are just so, so happy he made it.
Thanks as ever for your excellent first-hand reporting, beautiful writing, and humanity. And hooray for Carrot Cake!