“I think it sort of gives people a sense that they are part of the story of California,” says Dana Goodyear, the poet and journalist, who has spent 15 years in Los Angeles and nearly that much time covering fires. “It does not make people say, ‘We’re going to pick up stakes and reverse–Dust Bowl move to Oklahoma; we’re going to retreat from this climate disaster to a safer spot.’ Oh, no. It is the opposite. It is, ‘We’ve been tested by this fire.’ They think of themselves maybe as those native trees whose potential is unlocked in a disaster like this. The Woolsey fire only affirmed, for people who stayed and survived it or who lost their homes and came back and rebuilt, how much it is their destiny and fate to be linked to that place, that this is the history of this place and they are entering that history in moments when they experience these things. I tend to feel it more as entering apocalyptic history — Oh my God, this is what it’s all going to be like. It all feels like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road to me.”

posted 1801 days ago