Fear and loathing in Los Angeles ‘25: hell on earth in the City of Angels
Writer, Jasper Harvey, writes about his harrowing experience following the LA fires.
Image Credit: Jasper Harvey
In the second week of January this year, a series of unprecedentedly destructive wildfires burned for days in Los Angeles. The untold damages they inflicted have been enough for them to be categorized as one of the costliest natural disasters not only in the history of the United States but of the world too. The total area burned is roughly 40500 acres, or nearly 164 square kilometers. Between them they are responsible for twenty nine deaths and counting, and have destroyed the homes of tens of thousands of people. I was one of the unlucky many, and the following is an unfiltered account of how it all went down.
It’s January the 7th, 2025. I should be writing an essay (ironically and rather prophetically about Ed Ruscha’s Burning Gas Station), but the Santa Ana winds have been beating up on my house in western Altadena all day like a prime Mohammed Ali. There’s an uneasy feeling in the air making work of any kind impossible. A fire is burning in the Pacific Palisades, which has everyone on edge since it’s awards season, not fire season in LA at the moment. Still, I live a good thirty-ish miles from there so unless something biblical happens I should be okay, right?
Around six pm I get a text from a good friend’s mother telling me there’s a fire near me that I should keep an eye on. It’s burning around ten acres, about three miles away in Eaton Canyon. Firefighters have labelled it the ‘Close Fire’, exactly not what you want a wildfire to be called. The wind is showing no signs of slowing down, in fact it’s supposed to get worse overnight. We do what we’ve always dreaded but never actually had to do and pack a bag in case the worst happens. I pack three t-shirts, three pairs of socks and underwear, a hoodie, a new pair of jeans, my laptop, passports, a copy of Roland Barthes’ Mythologies, John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, and three notebooks containing work from my first year and a half of university. I leave behind too much to list.
Around half past seven my parents, my brother (Theo) and my sister (Eleanor) and I take on the impossible task of putting our three cats into carriers. They scream and claw and scratch. Blood is drawn, but eventually for their own good they succumb. We’re not in the evacuation zone yet, it’s still a few blocks away, but my mother and sister and I decide to leave anyway. Theo and my father stay back to hold down the fort. We’re just being cautious, we all tell each other. The wind should push the fire away from us and we’ll be back in the morning. Our neighbor Kevin’s family has lived here since the 60s and he tells us the fires never get past a few blocks. We’ll be alright.
At least now I know my answer to a popular dilemma of whether or not to listen to music in the car should some tragedy befall you. You don’t. You stare into nothingness, hands shaking, mind racing. You tell yourself it’ll all be fine while you weave around fallen trees and branches. You listen to the cacophony of exasperated meows coming from your cats in their carriers. Each one feels like a knife to the heart.
We make it to our friends’ place in Eagle Rock and try to get some sleep. It doesn’t come. Instead I doomscroll harder than anyone ever has, sending Theo wind maps of Altadena, curling up into the smallest ball possible and, before I know it, it’s two am. Around three, my father and Theo join us. Our house is now in the evacuation zone, and the worst case scenario starts to feel all the more possible.
On Wednesday around 7am I wake up to a blaring sound I’m sure all Angelenos will now forever hear in their nightmares. Dazed, I pick up my phone and read “An EVACUATION WARNING has been issued in your area”. I frantically open Watch Duty; the now renamed Eaton Fire is at 2227 acres. Altadena, Pasadena, now even La Cañada and parts of Glendale make up the world’s most dangerous Rothko. I glance out the window and for a second the sunrise nearly convinces me I’ve woken up in hell. We hurriedly pack our things and put the cats back in their carriers. It is only marginally easier the second time. Outside, the air is suffocatingly smoky; you can almost smell the panic.
We drive to my good friend Josephine’s house in the Hollywood Hills. For once, her dog Sosa doesn’t bark at me like he always does even though I’ve been there countless times. Even he knows that we’re all going through it. My mother tasks us with going to get supplies for the cats. Jo gets us coffee while I look around the pet store. The shelves are nearly barren; we’re clearly not the first evacuees of the day. They’re out of our cats’ favorite dry food, but desperate times call for desperate measures so they’ll have to settle for something else. Jo comes back from the coffee shop and hands me my matcha. It tastes like shit. She tells me the cashier was fighting back tears while asking her what milk she wanted, and now I feel like an asshole not liking the drink.
We get back and I suggest we watch Palm Springs. I need something feel-good right now. Eleanor initially opposes the idea, but Jo is completely on board. She’s quickly won over when she realizes that Andy Samberg and Adam Sandler are two different people, with the former being much more attractive than the latter. Our viewing is cut short an hour in when the wifi goes out; a house up the street had caught fire but was quickly put out. Jo and I go take a look, and find our family friend Amy on the scene. We hug, she asks about our house, and I tell her the little we know.
I check Twitter religiously over the next few hours, seeing posts about houses blocks away from ours on fire. Reports of a man trapped in a burning house just across the street from ours, a gas station half a mile away blowing up, and endless new evacuation zone orders make my heart race faster than any amphetamine in the world. I respond to a man’s tweet saying his house has burned down. He lived one street up from me. I think that maybe I’ve seen him at the grocery store, or at a restaurant in the neighborhood. I ask him if he got a glimpse of whether my street was on fire, holding on to the smallest shred of hope that it might be safe. I get a one word response from someone else: “Yes”. Moments later my father comes over to show me a video on his phone. Our friend Thomas had driven up to Altadena on his motorbike to see the damage. What was once our house is now little more than a front porch and a pile of smoldering rubble.
I get another notification from Watch Duty. The winds have picked up again, and are too strong for any planes to fly over and drop retardant on the fire. Jo makes a deeply politically incorrect joke that should not be repeated, and we chuckle for a minute. If we don’t laugh, we’ll cry. After a moment’s silence, she sighs: “God this shit is so fucked”. It really is, but I doubt he can hear us over the Santa Ana winds.
It’s 6 pm, and I get another god forsaken notification about another fire. This one’s called the Sunset Fire. I check the map and almost laugh. Of course it’s right next to us. Why wouldn’t it be? God himself is clearly out to get my family for being such staunch atheists, and I gotta say it’s a real dick move on his part. So much for the Lord being merciful and gracious. Time for a third evacuation. Third time’s the charm isn’t it? Our cats accept their fate this time around, barely putting up a fuss. We cram the car full of our few remaining belongings and the bags of clothes we’ve acquired from caring friends and get ready to brave the once in a lifetime Hollywood evacuation traffic. Just as we’re ready to set off, Jo’s mother Delphine asks us to take an ornate metal rhino head that’s hanging above the door. It takes me a second to realize she’s being serious, but naturally Theo and I oblige and stuff it into the car. We set off again, hopefully for the last time. We arrive at another friend’s house just off Sunset Boulevard after getting mildly lost because my dad didn’t actually know the address. I promptly crash out on their couch, hoping to find solace in a dream where these past 48 hours never happened.
Around 1pm on Thursday at Fred62, a diner in Los Feliz, I eat and promptly throw up a smashburger and fries. It tasted better on the way down. A waitress is telling the owner about how she wasn’t a fan of Timothée Chalamet in A Complete Unknown, with the kind of valley girl accent that carries for miles. She says that Bob Dylan’s life was too boring to merit a film that long, and for just a moment, the stupidity of her claim is enough to make us all forget our situation and laugh. We meet up with my mother in Pasadena and try to make our way home to see what’s left of it. We get about a mile away before we meet police blockades stopping cars and civilians. We park and join countless others on a pilgrimage through parking lots until we’re on the other side of the police cars, exchanging solemn understanding glances with them all the way. The air is overpoweringly thick and smells like a campfire. We walk up a mile through burned America. Fallen power lines, charred pickup trucks, and blackened trees stretch as far as the eye can see. Like a scene from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, it’s all painfully grey: “Nobody wants to be here, and nobody wants to leave”. We pass a couple holding cat food and a carrier, calling out for their lost pet. Getting closer now, we pass the house by the park that you could barely ever see their garden was so overgrown. There’s nothing there, except the oak tree towering over us all. I think about telling my dad that there’s a good metaphor in there somewhere, but I don’t have the energy to put it into words. A few lucky houses are unscathed; one of which will only need to fix their broken white picket fence. As symbolism goes, it’s almost too on the nose. Closer now, we pass the house that always had the nicest vintage Cadillacs parked out front. The house is no more, but the car is still there, its vibrant red only slightly dampened by a layer of ash. There’s a fire still burning at our neighbor’s house when we get to our street. They always used to throw the craziest parties, with mariachi bands playing well into the night, sometimes even on school nights. My window was overlooking their backyard, so they’d keep me up for hours. Now I wish for nothing more than for that to be what’s keeping me awake at night. A weird sense of relief washes over me as we trudge through the ashes and broken roof tiles. Each step produces a symphony of crunches and cracks as we walk over the last five years of our lives. At least now we know how fucked we are; there’s no false sense of hope. All that remains are two decorative ceramic house number tiles given to us ages ago. We’d never put them up because my dad thought they were tacky. My mother puts them in her bag, and we get ready for the long trek back. I go for one last piss in the backyard. A truly apocalyptic piss. My mother tells me to close the gate behind me before we leave, and we all burst out laughing. Wouldn’t want anyone stealing all our things now, would we?
The grief comes in waves, some gargantuan and others smaller, but the lull between them is never more than a few hours. One minute, at a donation center organized by my old high school, Theo and I are trying on a dressing gown doing our best impressions of how the dude (Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski for the woefully uninformed) would react to these fires. Moments later, the dreamy opening chords of Ethel Cain’s American Teenager start to play and I can feel the tears beginning to well up in my eyes, the lump forming in my throat. My heart feels heavy again and the magnitude of what is happening to the city I love hits me like a freight train. When she sings ‘it’s just not my year’, I can’t help but smile through the tears because it certainly hasn’t been so far. I wipe my eyes and take another sip of my iced matcha. It was free for evacuees and fire victims. My community has been torched and will likely never be the same again. No more shrimp and grits from the lost in time ‘Little Red Hen’ cafe, no more buying vodka from the liquor store on the corner with Theo’s ID. The cashier always knew I wasn’t 21, (because what adult in Los Angeles uses a green card with a photo of themselves from a decade ago as their main ID, right?) but she always rang me up with a smile, asking “anything else mijo?” before sending me off to accomplish whatever degeneracy was in order that night. I wonder if I’ll ever see her again. I hope Tacos 210, my local taco truck, drove off in time; their shrimp tacos are, dare I say, fire.
If I had a nickel for every time I responded to someone’s condolences with “my family is safe and that’s all that matters”, I’d damn near be able to rebuild our house. They’re overwhelming, but the condolences do actually mean something. When everyone’s telling you to let them know if you need anything, it’s difficult to know where to start.
It’s odd regarding which of the possessions lost you think about the most. Everyone in the same boat as us agrees that it’s not the things you’d expect. I tell myself that at the end of the day they’re just things, and any memories I have of them or emotional attachments are still there, but it does little to help. I liked my things. It’s not like I’m some consumerist dipshit; so many of them were second hand or random things I’d had for years. I mourn the Post-it note stuck inside my copy of Rules of Attraction saying “To Jasper, love Bret” from my favorite author Bret Easton Ellis. Recently acquired merch from my favorite band, The Hellp, that I’d spent far too much money on, my grandfather’s suit jacket, my father’s collection of Hunter S. Thompson’s journalism that I was just itching to read, the knives my godfather had given me years ago when my dream was to be a chef. All reduced to a pile of ashes. They seem so insignificant to me now, but at the same time their absence so monumental.
“Most refugees aren’t being given cashmere”, my mother remarks, and I feel like truer words have never been spoken. There are no safe beds at a friend’s house 20 minutes away for them. There is so much pain in the world greater than mine, and still I feel as if these past few days will mark me for the rest of my life. Every family in Gaza has experienced horrors a trillion times worse than my neighborhood burning down. Even in this, the worst moment of my life so far, I know how lucky I am and how much worse millions of people have it.
I’ve spent nearly 14 out of the past 96 hours doomscrolling Twitter, wading through hateful misinformation spread by Elon’s army of fascists and obsessively checking @LosAngeles_Scan and @LAScanner for updates on whether my home is burnt to a crisp. In real time I witness the latter account become drunk with newfound clout and turn to denouncing ‘looters’ instead of just giving updates on the fires. So many of the “looters” are clearly racially profiled minorities saving whatever they could from their homes. Endless people who have never been to LA in their lives tweet about how little they care about a bunch of rich assholes in the Palisades losing their homes, receiving hundreds of thousands of likes as a reward for their boastful lack of empathy. It makes me so angry, but my days of telling people on Twitter to kill themselves are behind me (I have strong opinions what can I say?). I tell myself they just don’t know what they’re talking about; they don’t know that Altadena has such a rich Black history, that marginalized groups and the working class always bear the brunt of the damage of wildfires. Or maybe they do, and they just don’t care anyway.
When I can’t bear it any more and finally close that godforsaken cesspool of an app, however, I’m met with a bittersweetly, heartwarming reality that everyone across Los Angeles is banding together, organizing donation centers, free meals, anything and everything to help those in need. You’d be hard pressed to find an Angeleno who doesn’t know multiple families affected by the wildfires, let alone one. All we have is each other and hopefully that’ll be enough to get through this.
It’s the 11th of January and I’m at LAX airport ready to catch a flight back to the UK. I can’t help but feel guilty that I’m abandoning my city and community in their time of need. I should be out there at the impromptu aid center at my local gas station on the corner of Fair Oaks and Woodbury handing out toothbrushes and deodorant to the people in need. I have to remind myself that I am a person in need, who has spent the past few days sleeping on the pull out beds and sofas of family friends, and I’m lugging behind me a suitcase full of donated clothes. I know in my heart that I am one of the lucky ones, whose family is privileged to be able to rebuild. I know we have family and friends across the world all reaching out to help us. I also know that countless of my neighbors have lived in Altadena all of their lives, with their families living close by; so many of them will have lost everything.
It seems like a time appropriate as ever to guilt trip my way into a first class upgrade. I walk up to the check-in kiosk and ask if there’s any possibility of an upgrade, explaining to her that my whole neighborhood now looks like a fireplace and I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in days. I could be in a Tim Burton film, the bags under my eyes are so big. the lady chuckles and says “it wouldn’t be possible as that would be thousands of dollars worth of upgrades”. Are you kidding me? Did I mention that my house had burned down? Have you been outside recently lady? It seems I found the one person in all of Los Angeles entirely unsympathetic to the hell our city is going through. Even LAPD had shown evidence of humanity the day before, having let my dad off without a ticket for what they called “the worst piece of driving they had ever seen in decades of policing Los Angeles”. I considered causing a scene, yelling all sorts of things that would make a sailor blush, but decide against potentially being detained by security and reluctantly accept my boarding pass. It reads 36C – boarding group 9, leaving me ample time to mope around the airport. I’ve never seen LAX so quiet. Every person waiting for a flight looks like they’ve been up for 4 days, probably because they have. With every pair of eyes I meet (except the American Airlines lackey at the check in) there is a mutual assurance that we’re all going to get through this together, even if those in power forsake us. On the plane I browse through films and television shows for a minute, but instead feel compelled to open my notes app. The words come cascading out as freely as the waterfall once did in Eaton Canyon, where my family used to take long hikes on what is now scorched earth.
Words by Jasper Harvey
