To be clear, I’m just fine. So many Angelenos are not—thousands have lost their homes, everything in them burned. As of this writing, 24 people have died. I am sitting safely if ashily in the apartment I rent in midcity Los Angeles, with working electricity, my ginger cat, and all the other things that were here before the fires started. I am very, very lucky.
When you live in a place that faces sudden disasters—tornadoes and earthquakes and hurricanes and fires, climate emergencies, almost all—you’re supposed to prepare a go bag. It should be ready before the disaster hits, something to grab before you run out the door. It should have clothes for a few days, passport, birth certificate and other important documents. Your medications, kids’ stuff, pet stuff. In advance, load up the car, if you have a car, with water (1 gallon per person per day), a cooler, packed, plus food that doesn’t need to go in it. If you have to evacuate immediately, when your phone starts blaring that emergency alert sound, grab that last bag and your loved ones and creatures. Don’t equivocate, just go.
On Tuesday, January 7, the winds started. Dry winds regularly come to Los Angeles, the Santa Anas, and have always carried an undercurrent of doom. It’s corny to quote Raymond Chandler, but no one has gotten it better than he did in his novella Red Wind:
It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks.
Weather people told us the winds would be bad, much stronger than usual, and thinking I might lose power and internet I hustled to finish something. California power companies have lines that can blow down or be caught by trees toppling in the wind, so they go out. They will preventatively turn off some lines fearing high winds might cause a dangerous spark. (And indeed, in the case of the Eaton fire, sparking power lines might have been the source.) I then ran out to get supplies, because if I had no power I couldn’t open the fridge. Water, just in case, and shelf-stable food, including salty snacks, which, let’s be honest, was no hardship at all. It was very windy.
While loading the car and chucking my cat in the carrier, more than half-frantic, I decided to pack one bag of books. I have hundreds, thousands of books. I took seven.
When I got home from my errands I looked at Bluesky and saw that Benjamin Dreyer, author, famed copy editor and recent LA transplant, had posted a photo of smoke going up over the coast. I replied, with far less poetry than Chandler, “Oh geez.” In the past, the winds would come and blow for a couple of days and somewhere along the way there might be a spark in a remote hillside and then the flames might reach a few homes or devour the wild habitat instead. That all was supposed to happen later.
This fire had started right away. The winds were just beginning. And what I know now is that they arrived accompanied by an extreme dearth of rain, which in the two years prior had been plentiful. Scrub had flourished in the mountains, now dry and brittle. Los Angeles was a tinderbox.
The first was the Palisades Fire in Pacific Palisades, thundering through the tony neighborhood on the west coast. Then the Eaton Fire in the foothills of Altadena, a northeast edge of LA, and then another fire in Sylmar, in the Valley. I went to bed with the Watch Duty app newly downloaded, checking its updates each time I woke up with the wind. Around 3:30am, the air smelled like a campfire, so I got up and put on a mask. The smoke from these fires is full of stuff you don’t want to breathe. In the morning, a Cloud of Doom hung low over my central part of the city. Los Angeles is a basin, and the ash and smoke was hanging like a sooty pancake above us all.
All day Wednesday I watched the local news; three cheers for KCAL, which did a superb job. The winds were too strong to allow for the essential firefighting from above, and there were not enough firefighters on the ground. The air was so hot and the winds so powerful. The fires just spread and spread. I watched safely in my dense neighborhood, far from either of those fires.
Then around 6pm, the Sunset Fire broke out in the Hollywood Hills. This was closer to me, and the evacuation orders came swiftly, just 17 minutes later. I wasn’t in the evacuation zone, but it included a huge populated area near me. If it expanded south to where I lived, I’d be behind all those others trying to get out. I could wait but instead called friends to see if I could borrow their guest house in Joshua Tree. While loading the car and chucking my cat in the carrier, more than half-frantic, I decided to pack one bag of books. I have hundreds, thousands of books. I took seven. They were:
Me, Detective by Leslie T. White (1936)
White was a nerdy investigator with the LA district attorney’s office who wrote this book about high-profile cases he was involved in, including the murder-suicide (or dual murder) of Edward Doheny’s son, Ned. The book was a little trashy—it had photos of dead bodies—and the only one of its kind; White soon left his job to write pulp novels about pirates and whatnot. I bought my beat-up copy for like $10 years ago, now it’s rare enough that I can’t find any others for sale.
Great Jones Street by Don DeLillo (1973)
This is DeLillo’s rock-n-roll novel, about a star who gets so big he decides to disappear, then lives invisibly in New York’s East Village. (Think Jim Morrison, if he didn’t die). I’d read this in paperback then found this first-edition with its groovy 1973 dust jacket. It’s not valuable the way book collectors value books—the jacket is beat up and has a Goodwill pricetag on the front. But I love it and could not replace it, and know that it cost me 99 cents.
Henry & June from the unexpurgated diary of Anaïs Nin (1986 paperback).
In 1990, when I was canvassing for a nonprofit and learning quickly that I am very bad at knocking on doors and convincing strangers to give me money, one day my boss gave me a very nice route in Silverlake. These were relatively well-off people who’d donated before, easy to meet my quota. I walked down a long driveway to a kind of cedar-ish home and could hear NPR playing loudly inside. Eventually a man answered the door. He was white haired and in the middle of making dinner, and invited me to come in. I had to keep going, I told him, explaining the quota thing. He asked what that was—$100, I think?—and he said he’d just donate that amount, and to come inside. It didn’t feel creepy; it was a relief.
The galley kitchen was near the door, with a small table off to the right, on the edge of the great room. I didn’t know anything about architecture then, and couldn’t have come up with the words mid-century modern if my life depended on it, but the house was stunning and indelible, all wood with a shallow reflecting pool outside the huge window, surrounded by greenery, the Silverlake Reservoir below. It was designed by Eric Lloyd Wright, son of Lloyd Wright and grandson of Frank Lloyd Wright, for Rupert Pole, his half-brother, and his wife(ish) Anaïs Nin. Did I know about Anaïs Nin then? I can’t recall. He asked, because of course this was Rupert Pole, her widower, a spry but probably slightly bored 71-year-old who was eager to have a conversation. I think I talked, idiotically, about going to rock shows. We chatted for a while and he eventually showed me around the living room because I was clearly admiring it.
He asked something like, Do you like books? And then offered to get me one, cautioning that it was racy. I assured him with all the arrogance of a punk rock college dropout that I could handle racy. He went downstairs and came back with this book; the movie was not yet out. I knew nothing about who he was, or his life with a legendary literary figure. To me, he was just a kind old guy with a modestly stunning house who seemed to have a very good life. His inscription showed that Anaïs was still much on his mind. “For Carolyn,” he wrote. “Finally the real story—the missing Anais—the passionate woman. –Rupert Pole, June 1990.”
Goodbye Mr. Chippendale by T.H. Robsjohn-Gibbings with drawings by Mary Petty (1944).
I’ve never read this book; it was mailed to me as a gift by an LA Times reader after I wrote about sharing a birthday with Raymond Chandler. It appears to be signed and dated by Chandler, but who knows, right? Well after the recent Chandler auction I am convinced; Chandler did inscribe his name in his books, the signature matches, and it appears to have been given to him by a close acquaintance. So yes, this silly little book came with me.
A Cook’s Tour: In Search of the Perfect Meal by Anthony Bourdain (2001).
This book is signed “To Carolyn” by Anthony Bourdain, so it is precious to me, a dorky fan. For the life of me, though, I cannot remember the reading. Way back on the edge of my brain is the shadow of a memory of him saying to me that his other book—that would have been Kitchen Confidential—was better. But this was the one that was for sale, so here it is.
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon (paperback edition, sometime after 1986).
Signed? Of course not. I have several copies of this book, some more attractive and without the cover taped together, but this one has most of my handwritten notes, and also a folded paper towel with a faint trystero outline—it’s dried blood, and was taped on when I got my tattoo.
Zero K by Don DeLillo (2016).
I’ve been a fan of Don DeLillo for a long time, obviously, and when Zero K came out I was thrilled that he decided to finally do a book tour. This is a first edition with a nice jacket, like normal people collect; I have another copy that I marked up to review. It’s a terrific book about fathers and sons and rich guys trying to live forever; DeLillo is always a few steps ahead of the culture, and if you haven’t read this yet, maybe it will resonate more acutely now. I barely met him when he was in LA, but this is signed to me, and that is quite enough.
By the time I’d arrived in Joshua Tree, a water drop from the air had scored a mortal hit on the Sunset Fire. In the morning, I took a walk through the desert, admiring its clear blue skies, and got a tour of a new farm that’s blossoming there. When I got back to the cabin I realized the Hollywood evacuation order was lifted and the desert power was out. It didn’t take long for me to decide I should go back home. When I packed up and got back to the center of Joshua Tree, the power had just come back on. So I could get gas, which I needed. I headed home.
When it came to my books, I wasn’t good at grabbing what was valuable, I did take what was irreplaceable. I imagine you would do the same. I hope you don’t have to.
Featured photo by the author.
