If you want to know where fire will go, look where it has been.
On the evening of January 7, 2025, as the Palisades Fire was taking hold, I walked with a friend at the base of the Santa Monica Mountains on the south end of the San Fernando Valley. As we walked, our Watch Duty apps—mine newly downloaded—kept sounding alerts, and we paused to take them in and maybe breathe a little. My friend had recently lost her brother to mesothelioma; her 99-year-old mother will shortly be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Our minds are on this fire, which has just erupted several canyons to the west of where we walk and live, but also, they’re on other things. The wind is bad, but not that bad quite yet.
Later, we eat at a woman-owned wine bar that’s crowded and noisy, so we sit outside and ask for a heater because it is cold. We always do this. Since the pandemic, outdoor eating is widely available and well-heated in Los Angeles. But by now the wind has picked up, buffeting the outdoor eating space, and, from time to time, the propane heater alarmingly rocks on its base, blue flames sputtering in all directions. Because I have often contemplated what might happen should the San Fernando Valley catch fire in a bad Santa Ana, my heart stops each time the heater teeters.
In 1991, 3,000 homes were burned in Oakland in a single afternoon. I know this too.
Nonetheless, when a neighbor calls my friend to ask whether she has her go-bag ready, my friend rolls her eyes and calls her neighbor a bit of a nut.
Everyone knows what happens next, but we remain in the present moment, now past and soon to be swallowed up in the maw of what was then still the future.
As large swaths of our Western landscapes are razed by wildfires, traces of my childhood dread revisit.
I grew up at the far north end of California on what we now know to acknowledge as the ancestral land of the Winneman-Wintu people. Other nearby tribes include the Yana, the Shasta, the Hupa, the Modoc, the Klamath, and the Northern Paiute. Somewhere, I once read the Hupa Indians believe that wherever you plant your feet—right where your feet meet the earth—marks the exact center of the world, or maybe universe.
I hope I’ve got that right. In the scrapheap of my brain, there’s no way of telling now.
I know this land I stand on is stolen. Of course, I do. And yet I also love it. Acknowledging the people who stood here first, I stand here standing.
Most of them we killed, one way or another.
Maybe our feet remember.
In the aftermath of firestorms like the one that took L.A., it’s hard not to wonder what happens when the earth you plant your feet on has been rendered toxic or turned to glass by heat.
As a child, I used to slip into the backyard every night just before going to bed. I want you to know this about me. I sneaked out when no one was watching, and then I stood there in the middle of the lawn, feet firmly planted, looking up at the night sky and offering up a little prayer for grace. There was a ritual to it, a taking in of things: stars, the quiet brush of water in the riverbed below, all the particular scents of the season. Everything felt connected then and beautiful and fleeting, for of course I knew by it could all be blasted to oblivion.
I don’t know how to tell you what this felt like.
“Were all the stars to disappear and die,” Auden writes, “I should learn to look at an empty sky / And feel its total dark sublime, / Though this might take me a little time.”
I did not know Auden when I was child, but I somehow knew sublime. Even though you couldn’t see it, once radioactivity got into the air, it was everywhere. The stars, of course, would still be there, but looking up at them would either blind or kill you. And then your skin would peel off and all your teeth fall out and if you had a baby, it would be deformed. In Japan, the bombs we dropped left children’s shadows etched in concrete. I thought about this all the time, and mainly, what I thought was that the best thing, when the time came, was to be at Ground Zero.
My own mother used to wonder how she could have produced such a peculiar child, but most of this stuff, I kept secret, even from her.
Now, at the far other end of my life, the stars remain constant, but as large swaths of our Western landscapes are razed by wildfires, traces of my childhood dread revisit.
The landscape imprints of my life map the iconographies of this inner being.
In the fall of 2017, I took up the practice of mindful meditation. I’d been thinking about it for years, but the classes offered near my home never fit my schedule. As the new administration began to settle in, I decided it was time to make my schedule fit with theirs. This decision could not have been better timed, but of course I had no way of knowing then what would be coming for me in the months ahead.
I suppose it can be said that already I’d been sitting all my life, mostly on rocks. As a schoolgirl, I used to plant my bottom on a boulder during recess and sit there staring off at the hills in what my mother called a dreaminess but what I have since learned to call the natural meditative state in which I spent much of my childhood. Between the mountains that surrounded my town and where I sat, a world of tree and rock and hill and sky and water.
Nature, like sitting, has always had the capacity to deliver me back to what feels like my true self, by which I mean a kind of dissolution of the boundary between the world and me, outer and inner, skin and air, bone and earth. The landscape imprints of my life map the iconographies of this inner being.
As soon as I got my driver’s license, I started using it to drive the seven miles out to Whiskeytown Lake every summer afternoon to swim. Whiskeytown is just another reservoir in California’s sprawling Central Valley Project constructed to move water from one watershed to another, but it’s still a great blue bowl of artificial lake nestled among oak and pines, so that’s where I swam, at four o’clock every afternoon for five consecutive summers until that part of my life would finally come to an end and I’d go out into the rest of it, which would not hold any more such lakes in it for me ever again.
In the year that followed my taking up a formal meditation practice, three fires would rage through that part of the north state. The last, known as the Camp Fire, razed the entire town of Paradise, where I once lived. But the first ravaged much of my hometown.
California is supposed to burn. I know that. I have known it—and written it—all my life.
Still, I wasn’t thinking fire when I headed north that summer for an annual family reunion near Mt. Lassen followed by an annual backpacking trip with other mid-life women, so the murky haze that greeted me as we flew into Sacramento was a disappointment and annoyance. Yosemite was burning too: How far was the smoke going to drift? Would it ruin our hike?
I didn’t yet know yet that while I’d been in the air, the Carr Fire had erupted on the edges of that blue, blue lake I’d swum in as a girl. This I would learn in the rental car shuttle when I turned on my cell phone and it exploded with messages. None of us knew yet that this fire would soon be burning hot and fast enough to spawn the second recorded fire tornado in human history, a pyrothermic event so powerful it spread out over more than 1,000 feet, rose to an estimated height of 18,000 feet, and generated winds approaching 150 miles per hour—strong enough to tear down tension power lines, uproot trees, and jump the wide river below my childhood home.
But this hadn’t happened yet. This wasn’t going to happen for another six hours. Between now and then, all I had to do was rent a car, drive three hours up the valley, return the car, and somehow find my way across town to rescue my parents, then 98 and 96 and still living alone in the house my father built in 1949. That fire was bearing down from the west. I drove hard. I drove fast. I drove ticking off the things I’d need to retrieve, over and over and over, heading straight into a maelstrom of darkening skies and billowing detritus every bit as ominous as if the world were ending now and all around me.
But my parents were not hapless fools, and by the time I arrived—having somehow convinced the Enterprise employee that my parents’ home was just outside the evacuation zone so he would drive me there, when in fact, it was not—they were packed and dressed for holiday and patiently perched on the living room couch, waiting to be saved, the car already loaded with important documents, all their medications, and the family silver, with a few paintings propped by the door for me to finish up.
Shortly after we drove off, propane tanks started exploding in nearby neighborhoods.
At the time, this fire would be ranked as the seventh largest wildfire in California history (now 14th), burning more than a quarter million acres, destroying 1,600 structures, scorching 97 percent of the Whiskeytown National Recreation Area and rendering nearly ten percent of it sterile. Gone, too: eight human lives, countless animals, and the most intimate landscape imprints of my childhood.
In a friend’s backyard, a large piece of drifting ash turned out to be a page from someone’s family bible.
The second fire—named the Delta Fire—crept a slow burn up the Sacramento River Canyon toward the cabin near Mt. Shasta my father built when I was in college and to which I’ve been returning most every summer since. When my sons were young, I took them there each August to escape both the city and my failing marriage, and now they, too, go back every year. If there is a place on this planet where I feel at home, this would be it.
Six hundred miles to the south, I followed fire maps for days. Would the cabin burn? Would the land? Would we find ourselves, like countless other fire victims, bereft?
Then I flew north on another already scheduled visit to my parents. Again, noxious smoke at the Sacramento Airport. Again, a mounting sense of dread. But this rental came with Apple CarPlay, a technology I’d never used before. New to audio books at the time, I wasn’t in the habit of listening to them and did so only on long drives, so I’d forgotten that earlier that summer, I’d made it six or seven hours into Thich Nhat Han’s The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching before the trip was over.
Not really wanting to think about the fire I was driving toward and vaguely curious as to CarPlay, I plugged my phone in just to see and, at once, the deep, sonorous voice of the reader filled the car, announcing: The Lesson on Impermanence.
This is the story of our best intentions, one that repeats itself through all human history.
A century ago, the German scientist Fritz Haber won the Nobel Prize for developing the technology to extract nitrogen from air and produce synthetic fertilizer, thereby averting global famine. Soon after, Haber would go on to use this same technology to develop mustard gas and unleash horrific death and suffering on the troops of the first great world war of the prior century. We call them troops because we cannot bear to call them boys.
In time, widespread availability of cheap synthetic fertilizer will lead to such abundance that humanity will soon exceed the limits of its growth and again face global famine.
This is the story of our best intentions, one that repeats itself through all human history.
Haber’s work will also later prove essential to the development of modern chemotherapy.
Probably everyone knows this by now.
Most of the time we are just doing what we think is right.
In the late 20th century, humanitarians routinely killed famine victims by feeding them protein; now we know to give them mush.
People think dams are beautiful because almost everyone is drawn to water, but a reservoir is just an artificial tank where all the good nutrients sink to the bottom, starving the rivers released from the dam to run through once fertile floodplains now so depleted we’re forced to use synthetic fertilizers on them to grow anything at all. Either that or just give up and build more subdivisions. Now that atmospheric rivers back up between our droughts, we’re starting to wonder if maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to build so many cities in our floodplains.
Today, our levies are old and in disrepair, and some of our dams don’t even reach the high-water marks of historic flood years because we didn’t keep official records then and human memory is selective. When all the dam building was being done, everyone said that couldn’t happen here, even though it did.
During drought years, farmers leach so much water from the ground their very towns are sinking. Farmers should know better, but farming is hard work, so they pick and choose like the rest of us. Along the interstate, handmade signs proclaim that dam water grows food. In the cities, we xeriscape our yards.
Little by little, the future turns into the past until, in our dotage, all we really want is a time when we knew nothing at all, a nothingness that binds us to the present moment and with it, the terrible loop of history, each breath.
Haber did not repent his work on mustard gas. Even the atomic bomb was said to save lives.
These days, people like to claim that everything is connected, the atoms inside me every bit the same as the atoms inside you or a rock, a bird, a distant star. Writing traces the arc from here to there and, in this way, can deliver us anywhere. I suppose God must work a little like that.
Time, too, is like an element, fluid and mercurial, in which, unbounded, things come together and apart, apart and together.
Once, long ago, a young man invented what has come to be known as an escape fire, which then was not a thing at all because no one had ever done it before. But a fire had blown up around him, trapping his crew of 15 smokejumpers and one Helena National Forest fire guard, all of them boys, in steep terrain. Behind him, the raging inferno; ahead, a swath of grass; beyond that, an impassable escarpment.
So, he set a second fire in the grass, and after it burned out, stepped into its ashes to lie down among the embers and wait for the other, larger fire to burn off around him. In the years ahead, this practice will go on to transform fire science and save countless lives, but to the boys running behind him, it must have looked incomprehensible. A forest fire like that is loud, like a hundred freight trains bearing down on you. How could they even have heard him, calling out: Come here, come here?
This is the tragedy of the 1949 Mann Gulch fire, a fire that consumed 3,000 acres in under ten minutes. The boys ran on, ignoring him. Thirteen of them died; another was horribly burned. And the man who invented the escape fire would drink himself into an early grave, not knowing—no one will ever know—if the fire he’d set in that terrible conflagration would have saved the lives of his crew had they joined him in it, or if it had, instead, cut off their escape.
Stuff like that, you think about. You can’t not.
And there is also this: escape fires are not foolproof. If the main fire gets too close or too hot, if it moves too slowly, you can roast or suffocate. The ground you lie down on can burn you. You have to pray the oxygen will last.
When Chatsworth burned in 2005, my students came to class with faces carved by worry. Would they go home that night or to a shelter?
As a child, when the fires came each summer—and they always came—I watched the skies darken over mountains to the west, to the north, to the east. We didn’t have GPS then to chart their progress on the internet, but we knew where they were headed and how they were behaving. It was all just part of the natural cycle. Mostly, they were started by lightning; eventually they would burn out.
In November 1993, when Malibu burned, I was writing a story about fire.
“You’ll never see these hills this green again,” I had written that morning. “This is as green as they ever get.”
That fire started just past noon; by evening’s soccer practice, the family car was gray with ash.
When Chatsworth burned in 2005, my students came to class with faces carved by worry. Would they go home that night or to a shelter?
Last summer, I flew home from a trip to South Africa with a research group studying the effects of fire and elephants on Kruger National Park and was lucky to be routed above Greenland and Canada on a rare clear day. As we flew over what the flight attendant told me was Saskatchewan, I marveled at the patchwork of its lakes so extensive that the entire territory seemed to be composed more of water than of land. Although, I know arboreal forests are prone to big burns, the first plume of smoke seemed anomalous in such a watery landscape. But soon another plume was rising, and another, until I couldn’t count them anymore and they stretched out as far as the horizon and all the earth below was obscured by smoke.
And then there are the firestorms of Los Angeles.
Before I left for college, my high school history teacher hired me to housesit because he knew I wouldn’t throw wild parties or loot his liquor cabinet. His home was in a brand-new subdivision just outside of town on the edge of the woods in what we now call the UWI. UWI stands for urban-wildland-interface, but it didn’t stand for anything then because we didn’t yet know how to think about that kind of encroachment. At night, trees pressed against the picture window in the guest room, rustling with wind and insects and sometimes, maybe, deer or bear, making me restless and skittish throughout the long dark.
By the time that fire blew our way and we got notice to evacuate, my teacher’s neighbors were all out waving garden hoses on their rooftops, so that’s what I did too. I climbed up on the roof and squirted water at it until the pressure dropped and everyone climbed down. Then I loaded my car with what I thought might be my teacher’s valuables—photos, artwork, and his favorite sweater, but what about the shiny new Mr. Coffee? the improbable golf clubs? our signed high school yearbooks?—and drove away.
These days, flash points are lower, making fires easier to ignite; fires are hotter, making them harder to extinguish. Megafires burn hot enough to sterilize the earth or alter its essential composition such that when the plants grow back, they’re not the right plants, not the plants that have been there for millions of years, but the plants that can survive in this impoverished soil. Botanists call this process of replacement “type change.”
And there is also this: because our homes are made of petroleum products, an intense enough fire can reduce them to ash in under five minutes.
If you want to know where fire will go, look where it has been.
At an artist’s retreat one summer, I looked out over hills above the Pacific shockingly lush at the end of years-long drought. Far below a swath of drying grass seemed, each day, to encroach a little more of yellow into the sea of green. Almost, it seemed, I could see it move, like watching time itself and our own irrelevance.
I breathed in. I breathed out.
Geologic time is slower, but no less certain or poignant.
Here, in the Anthropocene, it’s hard not to hold all this with a presentience of loss, although I don’t grieve the idea of our passing.
The UWI neighborhood where my high school history teacher lived finally burned down altogether in the Carr Fire. Only five houses were left standing, one being his. I don’t know why. People always think they did something right—cut their brush, invested in fire resistant construction materials, prayed—but mostly, it’s just luck.
That fire blew out all the records, but new records just keep getting set, scorching vast swaths of Western forests, and just this summer, half a national park, which has coined a new motto: Resilience.
And then there are the firestorms of Los Angeles.
My high school history teacher lived five years among the ruins before a tumor in his brain took him down. I don’t know how it was for him: Did he look out his bedroom window—the same window that had once spooked me—and see his blackened neighborhood as cosmic practice for his coming death or payback for his lifelong love of poetic justice?
Staring through my cracked windshield as the fires raged behind me that long night, it was clear that we’ve broken enough already.
After dinner the night of January 7, my friend and I hugged goodbye and went home to our separate canyon homes in their separate canyons. By the next afternoon, she will be evacuating and at least five of my friends and acquaintances will have lost their homes, among them, the older daughter and the former husband of a friend with whom I’d met for lunch just the day before. This friend is both a nurturer and a worrier, and her younger daughter had been cross with her that morning when she’d called to say the fire weather forecast might require flexibility in their babysitting schedule.
Well, the daughter huffed in anger she must surely now regret: If you’re so worried, just don’t come.
As for me, when my sister texted on the morning of April 8 to come north, I thought: But how can I do that? My home’s in peril. I’m due at another artist’s retreat in a week. There’s too much to do.
In truth, I’m not sure how much peril my home was ever in. It’s several canyons east of the canyons that did burn and often seems to be protected from the wind. But the constant threat of arson haunts everyone these days, and by late that afternoon, I was headed north, my car crammed with supplies for a month-long residency at Playa Summerlake in the Oregon outback, which will turn out to have been a staging center for the 2021 Bootleg megafire, its vast fire scar already waiting ahead to greet me.
In my car, I was also transporting to my sister’s whatever else of value I could stuff in, including my passport and other crucial documents; several paintings, one by an early California water colorist that had come into my family as a gift to my grandfather, a doctor, for saving the life of the painter’s wife, and that I had already packed up once before in the Carr Fire; two photo albums, one for each son; and three Winneman-Wintu Indian baskets that also came into my family through my grandfather, not as gifts but as payment for medical services rendered.
As I drove into the darkness some hours later, a rock flew up from the freeway and cracked my windshield as if not to let me go without a parting shot.
Half a century ago, I found a garbage bag full of such Indian baskets on the sand floor of my aunt’s garage—an old farm shed, dank with fog—on the Monterey Bay. There must have been 20 or more, all in bad disrepair. One had a rat’s nest in it. I lugged the bag into the house to ask my aunt, can I have these, please, and to my surprise and delight, she said yes. My parents paid to have them restored, although my father groused the damaged areas had not been rewoven, which is not something we do anymore. Most of the baskets have long since been donated to local museums, but I’ve held on to these throughout my life, and they’ve owned pride of place wherever I have lived, cherished artifacts of intricacy and beauty and daily reminders to remember, how to be.
But staring through my cracked windshield as the fires raged behind me that long night, it was clear that we’ve broken enough already: it may be time to give them back.
Katharine Haake’s most recent novel, What Happened Was (2024), inaugurated a climate change fiction series from 11:11 Press. An essay collection, The Heaviness of Ghosts, won the Wolfson Prose Prize and is forthcoming. Her other books include six prior works of land-based narrative. She lives in a canyon in Los Angeles.
Header photo of wildfire in California by Mikhail Roop, courtesy Shutterstock.
