Musings on fire, in word and song

When the hills of Los Angeles are burning

Palm trees are candles in the murder wind

So many lives are on the breeze

Even the stars are ill at ease

And Los Angeles is burning.

-- Bad Religion

“Los Angeles Is Burning” (2004)

Fire in Malibu has a relentless, staccato rhythm. The rugged coastline is scourged by a large fire, on average, every two and a half years, and at least once a decade a blaze in the chaparral grows into a terrifying firestorm consuming hundreds of homes in an inexorable march across the mountains to the sea. In one week last month, 10 homes and 14,000 acres of brush went up in smoke.

And it will only get worse. Such periodic disasters are inevitable as long as private residential development is tolerated in the fire ecology of the Santa Monicas.

Make your home in Malibu, in other words, and you eventually will face the flames.

-- Mike Davis

“Ecology of Fear” (1998)

We can see the fire from the freeway. The entire hillside is ablaze. Tracy’s condo is up there somewhere. Flames claw at the night sky, and smoke blots out the stars. I don’t even know how you’d begin to fight a thing like that. Maybe that’s what the helicopters are for. They circle and dip, lights flashing.

Tracy is still asleep. She could barely walk from the trolley to the car but wouldn’t let us touch her. “Stop laughing,” she yelled, so messed up she was imagining things. She’s curled up on the backseat now, her arms protecting her head. We decide not to wake her until we’re sure of something.

The police at the roadblock can’t tell us much. The wind picked up, and everything went to shit. The gymnasium of a nearby high school has been pressed into service as a shelter. We are to go there and wait for more information. A fire truck arrives, and they pull aside the barricades to let it through.

“How bad are we looking?” I ask a cop.

He ignores me.

-- Richard Lange

“Dead Boys” (2007)

The ridge road was about midway between us and the main body of the fire. Toward the east, where the foothills flattened out into a mesa, the road curved down toward a collection of buildings which looked like a small college. . . . Bulldozers were crawling back and forth on the face of the mountain, cutting a firebreak in the deep brush.

The road was clogged with tanker trucks and other heavy equipment. Men stood around them in waiting attitudes, as if by behaving modestly and discreetly they could make the fire stay up on the mountain and die there, like an unwanted god.

-- Ross Macdonald

“The Underground Man” (1971)

The damage caused by forest fires, particularly brush fires, in Southern California simply cannot be estimated. For many years, the brush fires have begun to burn each August and September. During these months, fires can usually be seen burning in a half-dozen areas of Los Angeles County. Following the first ‘Santa Ana’ desert winds in May, similar fires frequently occur. For example, on May 17, 1945, the Los Angeles Times reported: ‘Firemen Kept Busy as Heat Again Hits 90.’ On this particular day, 388 grass fires were reported in the county. A glance at the scarred hillsides, in fact, is sufficient to indicate the damage caused by forest fires.”

-- Carey McWilliams

“Southern California: An Island on the Land” (1973)

The hot, dry wind gusted about the corners of the building, whipping at her hair, threshing the limbs of trees below. It was the light that she first noticed, some unnatural quality of the sunlight, and then the white powdery ash sticking to her sleeves. There was more ash on the flagstones below, and a scum of it floating upon the clear water of the small swimming pool. And the air was still filled with it, irregular bits and pieces, sifting down as silent as a snowfall. She looked out toward the sea then, over a shimmering purple-yellow layer of smog, and saw the great ominous pall of smoke streaming across the empty sky to the west like some extraordinary, indigenous cloud formation.

-- Maritta Wolff

“Sudden Rain” (2006)

Last autumn, when the first of two recent fires swept over the mountains from the valley, leaped the crest of Boney Ridge and devoured the forest of red shanks which graced that mountain’s southern slope, we feared a long bareness for the burned flanks. Winter rains brought a myriad of flowers in places where the sun had not penetrated for years, and then in the spring we rejoiced to see rise from the base of the burned chaparral delicate new growth. The fire had not proved mortal, though ten years would be needed for the forest to recover.

-- Lawrence Clark Powell

“Ocian View” (1987)

‘Dry winds and dust, hair full of knots,’ our Malibu child wrote when asked, in the fourth grade, for an ‘autumn’ poem. ‘Gardens are dead, animals not fed. . . . People mumble as leaves crumble, fire ashes tumble.’ The rhythm here is not one that many people outside Los Angeles seem to hear. In the New York Times this morning I read a piece in which the way people in Los Angeles ‘persist’ in living with fire was described as ‘denial.’ ‘Denial’ is a word from a different lyric altogether.

-- Joan Didion

“Fire Season” (1989)

Fire wind, oh desert wind

She was born in a desert breeze

And winds her way

Through Canyon Way

From the desert to the silvery sea.

-- The Beach Boys

“Santa Ana Winds” (1980)

Despite the agony in his leg, he was able to think quite clearly about his picture ‘The Burning of Los Angeles.’ . . . Across the top, parallel with the frame, he had drawn the burning city, a great bonfire of architectural styles, ranging from the Egyptian to Cape Cod colonial. Through the center, winding from left to right, was a long hilly street and down it, spilling into the middle foreground, came the mob carrying baseball bats and torches. For the faces of its members, he was using the innumerable sketches he had made of the people who come to California to die; the cultists of all sorts, economic as well as religious, the wave, airplane, funeral and preview watchers -- all those poor devils who can only be stirred by the promise of miracles and then only to violence.. . . . No longer bored, they sang and danced joyously in the red light of the flames.

-- Nathanael West

“The Day of the Locust” (1939)

Although the winds have been commonly called Santa Ana Winds or Santa Anas, many argue that the original name is Santana Winds. . . . The name Santana Winds is said to be traced to Spanish California when the winds were called Devil Winds due to their heat.

Los Angeles Almanac (2007)

It was a bright September morning. The edges of the sky had a yellowish tinge, like cheap paper darkening in the sunlight. There was no wind at all now, but I could smell the inland desert and feel its heat.

Before we reached Santa Teresa [Santa Barbara], I could smell smoke. Then I could see it dragging like a veil across the face of the mountains behind the city.

Under and through the smoke, I caught glimpses of fire like the flashes of heavy guns too far away to be heard. The illusion of war was completed by an old two-engine bomber which flew in low over the mountain’s shoulder. The plane was lost in the smoke for a long instant, then climbed out trailing a pastel red cloud of fire retardant.

-- Ross Macdonald

“The Underground Man” (1971)

I see your hair is burning

Hills are filled with fire.

-- The Doors

“L.A. Woman” (1971)