United by the catastrophe, Los Angeles cries and trusts

It took a windswept inferno to shrink L.A.’s famously sprawling geography; Somehow, when everyone knows someone who has lost everything, the place seems smaller.

Phones suddenly ring with false evacuation alarms, and then discreet chimes ring with messages from long-lost classmates and distant cousins ​​asking how you are. There are “you loot, we shoot” signs outside some homes, but donation centers are overflowing. Hundreds of residents living in some of the country’s most expensive ZIP codes have slept on cots in Red Cross shelters.

Entire blocks have been reduced to rubble covered in ash, while one house remains standing, and it is difficult to know if it was protected by private firefighters that only money can buy, divine grace, or the merciless whims of the Santa Ana winds. The fabric Civic feels tattered and tense at the same time.

Are fires the great equalizers, the great dividers, or the great unifiers of Los Angeles? Or, like so many other things about this catastrophe, are they all of those things at once?

Sitting in a wheelchair outside the doors of an evacuee shelter in the Westwood neighborhood of west Los Angeles, 85-year-old Jay Solton embodied this mix of personal and community trauma and resistance.

She was radiant, yet in mourning, and her life was on hold at a local recreation center. His career had touched on Los Angeles’ twin obsessions: real estate and Hollywood. He told stories about spending afternoons with Frank Sinatra and Doris Day in the 1960s, and how he had grown closer to his newer neighbors but distanced himself from their children.