Pages From the Fire

The world watched on in horror as the infernos of Los Angeles tore through her communities without mercy – savage, cruel and total. Like nothing we had ever seen before in its utter violence and unforgiveness. 16,000 structures and countless acers lost. Like an insatiable creature of hell not recognizing rich from poor, old from young, even the just from the unjust, the fires fully erased all that held value and beauty for thousands, rendering both humble cottages and gleaming mansions into ash. Entire communities, block after unrelenting block, transformed into a toxic smoldering hellscape where all that remained were the small signifiers of homes that once were – part of a fence, a lonely chimney, a crumpled mailbox and cement stairs leading not to a living room, but the charred ruins fallen upon themselves and colored a strangely pale beige and surrounded with gray ash and twisted metal. Overwhelming absolute loss.

In the black smoke which rose like some horrid exhalation, were not just the precious possessions but the invaluable recollections they possessed. It wasn't just the dining table passed down from family but the countless meals around it. The toasts, the laughter, and the announcements of babies yet to be born as soon-to-be grandparents' eyes welled with tears and joy. There would always be other tables but not that one. Not that one ever again.

Personal stories of loss from my friends flooded in – artists' entire bodies of work, musicians prized guitars, rare and impossible to replace book collections and the keepers of family histories whose photo albums reached back through time to the 1800's. Gone. All gone, the smoke a particulate thief bearing away all that held meaning, tearing westward in the awful winds to the Pacific Ocean beyond.

But not everything was entirely lost. In the midst of all the horror a strange phenomena occurred – singed pages from books began appearing in peoples' yards like strange prophesy. The first reports were from friends who found pages from the bible and speculated that some Christian cult had placed them there as some portent of God's judgment. Some were simply baffled but some became alarmed and incensed. Who would do such a thing? Who would make such an effort in the midst of this tragedy? Why mess with people when entire communities were grieving?

But it wasn't so. Soon other reports came in – the pages strewn were not just from the bible, but from all over: French poetry and survival guides, American history and a photo of a WWII bomber, even a fragment from Cormac McCarthy's The Road reading, “The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void.”

These strange missives from the fires gave all a bewildering pause. Depending on one's perspective they meant nothing or they meant something - something ineffable and perhaps strangely purposeful, even personal. Like some celestial mailman delivering charred letters from the inferno and sent to them and them alone, like some mad poet of the skies spewing out baffling verse like infernal fortune cookies.

I am not a scholar of burning books, but the appearance of these pages makes sorrowful sense. Books are dense and hard to burn entirely through, their pages packed tightly together and likely thicker than most wood. And while the shelves containing them collapsed in the inferno, their spines broke under the intense heat and the convection of the scalding air lifted the singed pages like scorched angels into the intense winds to be delivered miles away – past burning palm trees, past highways packed with fleeing vehicles and past families still evacuating as they hustle terrified children and pets into cars and clutching their last heirlooms while the burning hills are filled with the dire cries of animals dying in the flames. The sheer horror of it all. Yet these pages remained while the homes which held them are gone.

What gives something meaning? In a non-burning world, the arrival of a random page in your yard would be a mere curiosity, but across Los Angeles these pages are all measured against one thing – catastrophe. A hopeful Dickinson poem can now mean loss, a photo of a soldier - sacrifice and a survival guide - brutal irony. If we look for meaning then yard after yard becomes a litany of micro-stories, each custom delivered to the individual.

Only we can infer meaning upon things, upon events or even blackened pages that arrived silently by night. And as now orphaned families sift through the wreckage, small miracles emerge – a man finds his dog saved by neighbors, a woman finds her grandmother's wedding ring and an artist finds a tiny stone statue of a turtle painted by her daughter and holds it up in exultation – all these things now holding a grander significance then they did before as if all loss is briefly redeemed by a stone turtle.

But these temporal moments become swamped by the greater loss. To have no home, adrift in the ugly search for couches to sleep on and relying on the graciousness of friends while being constantly anxious about overstepping boundaries and not overstaying welcomes. Refugee lives in limbo while battling insurance agents as the corporate vultures attempt to sweep up their property for pennies on the dollar only to build condos they likely couldn't afford nor want and knowing Los Angeles will never be the same again, and a new home, if possible, is eighteen months away - or longer - or may never be.

So as people wait in the limbo and if one can find meaning in stone turtles, found wedding rings or these strange epistles of flame, then let us take a pause and find meaning wherever we can.