How to Charge Your Phone in a Disaster
A small journal during a big fire.
First of all, yes I’m fine. We’re fine. We have friends who aren’t, but we are fine. I am writing something far longer and more comprehensive about these fires and what they mean for the future of this fascinating, uncanny city. In due time. Meanwhile, I won’t ask you to sign up for a paying subscription like I normally do in these preambles. I will, however, ask you to look over some good and honest relief funds, like those being organized by the LA labor movement. This city’s going to need it.
On Tuesday night, our electricity went out. With winds up to a hundred miles per hour, we knew it could be in the cards. We swerved a couple of times during the drive home to avoid flying palm fronds and downed power lines. There are worse things than dealing with a power outage for a day or two.
It wasn’t back on the next morning, and our phones were on their last legs. In any other situation, a relief. A reprieve from the constant barrage of algorithms and comments and notifications, each one latching itself onto my brain, derailing every delicate train of thought and precious moment of psychological peace? Sounds fucking great.
On Wednesday, however, it was cause for concern. Everyone knew about the gathering inferno in Pacific Palisades on Tuesday evening. Given the speed of the Santa Ana winds, how quickly the Pacific Fire had grown to thousands of acres, it was clear this was going to be a big one. Still, living in the stretch of concrete and asphalt known as North Hollywood, it felt like one of the many disasters that happened to Los Angeles but not necessarily to us.
Like many wildfires over the past several years, this was clearly going to be one of those problems borne by LA’s better-heeled sections. The kinds of people we tend to associate with tony Pacific Palisades and Malibu. Judging from the number of people sharing “The Case For Letting Malibu Burn” online, I wasn’t the only one who thought that.
It does, however, seem that many of them are completely missing the point of Davis’ provocative piece, slinging it round with a sense of gleeful schadenfreude. His argument, for anyone who reads the full essay, wasn’t one borne of simple class spite, though he rightfly had plenty of that. It was far broader and more humanistic: it is the poor who ultimately bear the biggest brunt of natural disaster, and the very shape and design of Los Angeles ensures that.
Speaking of the poor, we had to go to work on Wednesday, even if the morning’s news greeted us that the Palisades Fire had spread, that the Eaton Fire had grown, that there was now a blaze in Sylmar, along with a smaller one at the Sepulveda Basin Wildlife Preserve just 3.5 miles away from us. I also needed my phone charged if I going to receive evacuation orders. Unfortunately, our building’s garage door was electric. This wouldn’t have presented a problem if there was another way in; we could simply go in and open the door manually. As it was, we had to wait for help to unlock and disconnect everything. No work for me today.
We got everything opened up a few hours later, with the help of a neighbor. By then, the Woodley Fire in Sepulveda Basin had been controlled. All others were spreading. This we learned with quick and efficient glances at our phones, either through friends’ and family’s texts, or through the Watch Duty app. At least we now had a car, and therefore a way to charge our only reliable connection to emergency news.
The past several days have left everyone speechless. The only word I can think of to describe all this is “awesome,” though even in its most cosmic-numinous sense, this falls short. In my long essay on Covid-era Los Angeles for Salvage a few years ago, I wrote “The city of late-late capitalism – of which LA is a prime example – plays a role less Promethean and more Lovecraftian: prone to release forces utterly indifferent to human life through its recklessness and myopia.”
That comes a lot closer. Wildfires spread with magnificent speed and unpredictability. That something without aim and purpose is capable of such absolute devastation doesn’t feel correct to the modern human mind. What arrogance. What foolishness. What better tragic display of how disconnected civilization is from the metabolic substrates that make life possible.
Now, instead of taking the necessary pause to ponder the series of utter travesties that brought us to this point, we are forced to think of the piddliest and most mundane matters for the sake of our survival. Charging our phones. Going to work. Past generations had air-raid sirens, could rely on neighbors and community to bang on their doors if things went too far sideways. They also had as many employers who couldn’t have cared less if our houses burned down, who would fire back their own versions of “but you’re still coming in, right?”
That anyone has to continue working at all through this, instead of finding safety for themselves, their families and neighborhoods, should be a ludicrous notion. Amazon is getting its share of PR by setting up relief centers, while still sending its drivers out as the fires rage. There are even reports (albeit unsubstantiated) of drivers discovering that the address their delivering to is in an evacuation zone. Given that some waited so eagerly for deliveries even after the evac orders had gone out, this may have been inevitable.
Not that I necessarily blame everyone who willingly went into work on Wednesday. Were my wife and I not a one-car couple, I might have been tempted to go in myself just to have something to occupy my mind. Our world makes it incredibly easy to bore ourselves to death. It’s why we tear each other apart so easily online. Not only do we have nothing else to do, our specific, algorithmic mode of existence has made it so we wouldn’t know how to do it if we did.
Conventional knowledge tells us that if we were somehow able to stop doing what we’re doing, then nothing would work. Ipso facto, the people who need the most help wouldn’t get it. Thinking of this, I find myself returning to the work of Max Horkheimer – who himself lived for a brief spell in Pacific Palisades during World War II, before the area was transformed into a wealthy enclave. Here he is in Eclipse of Reason:
The very idea of truth has been reduced to the purpose of a useful tool in the control of nature, and the realization of the infinite potentialities inherent in man has been relegated to the status of a luxury. Thought that does not serve the interests of any established group or is not pertinent to the business of any industry has no place, is considered vain or superfluous.
Another way to put this is that everything that serves a purpose must serve the purpose of the society that produces it. If that society deems it a waste of resources to stop everything and help everyone in the midst of a disaster, then the sane question would be to ask how worthwhile that kind of society has become. But then maybe I’m just vain…
My phone is several years old. It doesn’t hold a charge like it used to. I have an external battery, but even with, even with a few hours after spending all day in the car with the engine running (because that seems fucking safe in a fire), it didn’t take long for it to drain back down. With the sun setting and our power still out, and about to crawl out of our own skin from anxiety, Mrs. Daydream and I decided to head to a bar just a ten-minute drive away to get some warm food and find a free outlet. By this time both the Eaton and Palisades Fires had grown to well over 10,000 acres, but the evacuation watch for much of central LA was just lifted.
It turns out we had breathed too soon. The Sunset Fire had just sparked in the Hollywood Hills, growing from just 10 acres to almost a hundred within a couple of hours. In the heart of the San Fernando Valley, we were now surrounded on all sides by fire. While keeping our phones plugged in, we did what we could to make sure friends and family were safe. Many had to evacuate. We finally caught up with some friends who, as it it turns out, had already lost everything.
Still, they were alive, and for the time being had a place to sleep. Between this and the knowledge of our own apartment’s relatively safe location, we felt relatively lucky. And we probably still are. Still, we now know that we’re in the middle of “the Big One.” Los Angeles seems to live in a constant state of vigilance the Big One. Historically, the Big One has been an earthquake. After the heavy rains of 2018-2019, we were reminded of the floods in our past. I suppose the Big One in fire form was always in the back of our minds.
In other words, we’re in uncharted territory. Climate change is seeing to it in its cosmically horrific instincts. Then the news came in of a house fire in Studio City, just a couple miles from us and from our apartment. Embers? Arson? Who cares? Maybe the likelihood of it finding its way to us was still low. Again, who the fuck cares? We unplugged, ran to the car, and set off back to our dark apartment.
On the way we passed the new fire, now being referred to as the Sunswept Fire. It was about fifty feet up a steady incline, right as the Hollywood Hills first start to remind the Valley of their existence. The house was already starting to collapse. At home we threw clothes into bags, grabbed our box of important documents (passports, birth certificates, marriage license and the like), and pulled out the cats’ carriers.
We knew it wasn’t time to leave – and in any event, where could we go on such short notice that wasn’t equally vulnerable? All there was to do was sit and wait in the dark, and, eventually, try to fall asleep.
You might think it would be easy to feel sheepish the next morning. The Sunswept Fire had been easily contained, though not before it damaged several other houses nearby. The spread of the Sunset Fire had been stopped, and the Hurst Fire had shrunken down. Both the Palisades and Eaton blazes were more or less the same size. Our electricity had even come back on. There was no excuse to stay home from work, though driving into Downtown over the Hill, a thick canopy of orange-gray haze hanging overhead, was eerie. Perhaps the worst was behind us.
At work, it was difficult to focus. My gaze kept finding its way to the red-purple plume surging up from the northwest. The Palisades and Eaton Fires had started growing again. Combined, they had consumed almost 40,000 acres. That’s more than 60 miles, almost three times the size of the island of Manhattan. The deathtolls have started to come in.
As I write this, the Palisades Fire has extended into Brentwood, and evacuation zones into Encino and Tarzana. The Santa Anas have picked up again, and are expected to intensify in the coming days. Some friends have been able to return to their homes. Others have had to prepare to leave. Our car remains packed.
One wonders if today’s Big One is tomorrow’s new normal. Some say it’s vain to wonder if there’s a better and more rational way to run a city at a time like this. Personally, I think it’s unforgivably stupid not to.
Header photo is of the smoke from the Palisades Fire, taken by the author from Downtown Los Angeles.