I had just fallen back into bed after the feeding of the 4 of our little daughter's daughter when my partner, Sean, turned around and said: “We should leave now. Switch smoke. “
Our air quality monitor jumped from green to yellow. My breath dried my throat.
We had not yet received an evacuation warning. “Hopefully a little,” I said, as if staying in bed meant that Eaton Fire was not real.
In the fragile landscape of concrete rectangles of Los Angeles and the drowning highways, Eaton Canyon, just seven miles where we live, was a sanctuary of thousands of people. He saved my life many times. And now I was on fire, with the fire extended quickly.
From our dark bedroom, we scan our phones to obtain information, approaching and leaving the slow cargo fire evacuation map. The red perimeter pushed against the yellow warning zone in which our Eagle rock house fell.
The night before, I denounced the surface burned aloud to my partner when Laist updated its website: “400 acres, zero containment.” Then, “800 acres, zero containment”, my voice trembling as if the burning map outside my own skin. The next morning, the number of acres in flames had reached the thousands.
I looked at the photos we had taken in Eaton Canyon on New Year's Day, a week before fire: our baby wrapped my chest smiling without teeth; My feet planted in the current.
The dry stream, “dry” in Spanish, low from the mountains of San Gabriel in the National Forest of Los Angeles and runs along the two -lane highway in Pasadena. In recent years, this river route often won depth due to unprecedented rain. Three inches of water became three feet, and holes appeared.
Eaton Canyon Trail hikers appeared on their swimsuits, carrying towels. A waterfall and a swimming stream located in a shaded cannon is a unicorn in southern California. And welcomed the dogs!
During the pandemic, families, small day campaign explorers and the mass public reached the paths with their masks and basketball sneakers; Suddenly he felt like Disneyland. The portable speakers drowned the music of the stream. The garbage irritated me, just like waiting in line to register the stream. But the crowds also meant something important: Eastside Angelenos had a place to put their fear and concerns for a time when we were afraid to breathe.
I started walking along the Altadena paths after my divorce a decade before. I offered my loneliness and heartbreak to the oaks and living sicomor, rejected that they could do in something useful in the same way that they convert carbon dioxide into oxygen. Nature became my refuge. My sorrows was swallowed with his speech mouth of everything.
I would start on a path, breathe the sweet sage brush and dust and feel in a harmonious development that had nothing to do with me personally.
With the end of my marriage, the furious drought and forest fires of California and the imminent elections of 2016, I fled to Berlin. At that time, I did not know how to cultivate a new life for me in Los Angeles, the Brown hills beyond the 134 highway put me alone. I attacked a city of more vegetable environments. Green meant hope.
When I returned a year later, the man for whom he had not voted was still president, my experiment of “eating, praying, love” had failed significantly and was sure that, at 38, I would never find love or have children again. I appeared in the stream most of the days, sometimes to a bed of half dry and cracked. Then I realized that nature feeds us in two ways. The first is through recreation and adventure. The other is when we are dealing with the unknown and surrounded by chaos. Then, nature presents its cycles as a comfort, reminding us that, whatever is happening, we can trust things to change.
Finally, the drought passed, just like that of my heart. The waterfall went from dripping to plumar. I baute my pregnant belly in the waters of Arroyo. I would bring my new mother overvalued there. And 12 days after his birth, I introduced my newborn to the stream, radiant as if he met a grandfather. I wanted to show him what I learned: that we are never alone among the Rudujos, the silt and the stones, which we also belong to nature.
As Eaton fire was triggered, he whipped the palm trees and devoured the artisans of our residents of Los Angeles, our daughter slept in her crib, without realizing the toxins in the air. Let and I push their mamelucos and bags of sleep in a backpack, rummage through our clothes and grab enough underwear for an indeterminable amount of time. I took my jewels in a shoe box with my passport. We dress for the day, then we returned to bed for a couple of sleep hours, ready to start when we need it.
Sean looked at me as if I had lost my head when I grabbed the dog's strap at 7 am, opened our door to a Tawny's misty screen and took out our confusing pet behind me. A thin and oxidized coil of sun burned through a patch in the clouds.
The rhyme of the nursery that says “Ladybird, Ladybird, flies home, her house is in flames, her children have gone”, he repeated cruelly in my head. Everything is going to have gone, I thought with a shudder.
At 9 in the morning, we were sitting in the evacuation traffic on highway 5, going to the family in Orange County. The fire had not jumped the highway to Eagle Rock, but an evacuation warning appeared on my phone with dozens of frantic texts of my Moms de San Marino group: “Do not come to Joshua Tree! The power is out. Without gas or edible! “,” Water alert insecure for Pasadena! “And a series of links to resources for formula, diapers and wipes.
With our daughter and dog, Sean and I moved from one place to another among the houses of my mother -in -law and the parents during the next two weeks. I downloaded the air quality application of the Environmental Protection Agency. I still maintain careful observation in statistics. Now we are back in our house and the fires have ceased, but we no longer open the windows when we cook for fear of contaminated air. Instead of closing the stream, I take the baby and the dog to the park and I worry because none of them can wear masks. Once again, life feels chaotic. I'm afraid of breathing.
I know that healthy forests need regular burns, but it is not natural for entire communities to level during the night, so that fire insurers leave their clients and that people lose their homes and what they love most to live in them.
I tell myself that the gift of nature in difficult times is to remind us of its perpetual cycles. Today it is raining. The air will be breathable again one day. Spring will come, but I don't know if there will be green leaves this year in the cannon.
The author is a writer, educator and mother who works in a memory. She is on Instagram: @Sophiecsills
Los Angeles Affairs Chronices The search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the Los Angeles area, and we want to listen to their real history. We pay $ 400 for a published essay. Email [email protected]. You can find presentation guidelines here. You can find past columns here.
