The cruel reality of living through a moment of catastrophic change is that the knowledge of how many other people are also living through it offers no comfort. It is happening to you: Your house is gone. Your father’s paintings are gone. Your hundreds of hours of footage, meant to be your film, gone. Your family’s efforts, across a whole generation, to establish financial stability, literally up in smoke. That this is also happening to other people is awful. As is knowing that it will almost certainly happen again.

Los Angeles is still smoldering. The winds have died down, but the Palisades Fire is just 39 percent contained, and the Eaton Fire is 65 percent. Many residents are under instructions not to drink their tap water, which ash and melted pipes may have contaminated. Tens of thousands of people under evacuation orders are still waiting to return, perhaps to a burned-out lot, or perhaps to a house still standing but coated in the toxic remains of everything around it.

The fires were, at their worst, unfightable. But destruction at this scale was not inevitable. The question now is what measures anyone will take to limit the damage next time.

Because there will be a next fire. The vegetation—fire fuel—will grow back, fire season will keep lengthening into wind season, and the combination of drought and wind will nurse an errant spark. Fire is part of the ecology in California; a century of suppressing it has only set up modern blazes to be more intense.

The way places such as California prepare for these fires has to change, or more neighborhoods will end up in ruins. Insurance is meant to insulate people from bearing the costs of extraordinary events, but those are becoming ordinary enough that private insurers have been leaving California. The state’s FAIR Plan, a pooled insurance plan of last resort, is oversubscribed, and may not be able to cover the claims from these fires alone. If it exercises its power to demand that private insurers help cover the difference, that could send even more fleeing. These are all signs that the state’s magical thinking about fire risk has exhausted itself.

[Read: Are you sure your house is worth that much?]

“California is like a driver that’s had five car accidents,” Michael Wara, a former member of California’s wildfire commission who now heads a climate-and-energy-policy program at Stanford University, told me. The state is at proven risk of catastrophic loss. But because California has spent years trying to keep insurance rates somewhat reasonable, those (still high) rates don’t reflect the real risk homeowners face. This creates a problem further up the insurance food chain: Insurers rely on reinsurers—insurance companies for insurance companies—who, Wara said, “are supposed to lose one in 100 times … They’re not supposed to lose, like, four times out of 10, which is kind of where we’re on track for in California.”

If a few of those companies stop insuring the insurers, there aren’t necessarily others to step in. The state is trying to stave off a reinsurance crisis by allowing insurers to incorporate more risk probability and reinsurance prices into their rates, as of last year. But California could still turn into Florida, where all but the most local insurers are leaving the state, or going belly-up, and insurance in places can cost tens of thousands of dollars a year. Because coverage is generally required for anyone seeking a mortgage, soaring rates in California could drive home values down, threatening yet another crisis, this one in real estate. And if existing homeowners can’t get insurance, they’ll be left bearing the cost of catastrophes all on their own, like many in the burn area around Los Angeles are now.

If nothing changes, more people will get sucked into this doom spiral, because California cannot avoid some level of catastrophe. Wind-driven fires like the ones in L.A. throw embers far ahead of themselves, leading to conflagrations that firefighters can’t stop, and the fastest fires are growing faster now. Transferring those risks to insurance will become less and less affordable as the climate warms and more people live in the zone where cities meet wildlands, because the catastrophic risk to homes is high and getting higher. As Nancy Watkins, an actuary at Milliman who specializes in catastrophic property risk, told me, “That actually is not an insurance problem. It’s a risk problem.”

To bring down risk, she wants to see neighborhoods embark on ambitious missions to “harden” homes and the landscape around them, and then see insurance companies account for those efforts. If each homeowner has removed vegetation from the first five feet around their house, if the neighborhood has kept its roads clear and made firebreaks where fire would be likeliest to enter, a place has much less of a chance of burning down, even in major fires. Plenty of communities, even the most fire-prone ones, still don’t do this. Watkins imagines a future database in which each parcel of land is inspected for fire-readiness, so that each neighborhood can be profiled for fire safety and insurers can price rates accordingly. Creating this system would take major effort, she knows, but it would motivate collective action: If it meant the difference between your whole neighborhood getting insurance and being uninsured, you would probably clean up your yard and screen your vents.

Watkins herself lives in the Moraga-Orinda Fire District, a highly flammable area outside San Francisco, which Wara’s research has identified as one of the top three places where the worst overnight losses could occur, from an insurance perspective. (Another was Pacific Palisades.) She was one of many in her area who got a nonrenewal notice from her insurer last year. Now she’s making her plot as fire-proof as possible, in hopes of coaxing an insurer back. It’s like staging a property for sale, she said: “We’re staging our home for insurability right now.” She cut down a 10-year-old manzanita tree and pulled out her mint garden, but so far she’s kept the Japanese maple that came with the house and turns a brilliant red in the fall. Once she has fire-proofed the rest of the property, she plans to invite a fire-chief friend over for dinner and ask, How bad is the maple? “And then do what they say,” she told me.

But unless her neighbors make similar efforts, Watkins’s risk will still be elevated. And taking these measures can be politically unpopular. Dave Winnacker, who was the fire chief of the Moraga-Orinda Fire District until his retirement last month, told me about trying to pass an ordinance that would require homeowners to keep a five-foot perimeter around their house free of flammable material; the public comments were overwhelmingly in opposition, even though these borders are proved to cut a house’s risk of burning down, he said. Residents called it a draconian overreach that would make their home unsightly and bring down property values. He chose that moment to retire. He didn’t want to be held accountable for their failure to act the next time fire arrived.

When communities do act, it can save them. Crystal Kolden, a pyrogeographer at UC Merced, studied what happened to Montecito, California—the town of Harry and Meghan, and Oprah—after it decided in the 1990s to take fire prevention seriously. From 1999 to 2017, the town spent $1.6 million total clearing brush, maintaining evacuation paths, building fuelbreaks, and working with homeowners to make sure they’d cleared vegetation around their houses. When the Thomas Fire came through in 2017—a worst-case-scenario fire for the region, with wind speeds around 75 miles an hour—Montecito could have lost 450 to 500 homes, Kolden’s research showed. Instead it lost just seven. Yards in Montecito do look a little different from others in California. But “there’s a lot of really gorgeous landscaping that does not burn,” Kolden told me. Succulents and other fire-resistant plants—think giant agaves—can be close to houses; rock gardens can be beautiful. Palm trees are fine if they’re well-manicured enough that they wouldn’t throw off flaming fronds, as some in L.A. did this week.

For a wealthy community such as Montecito, less than $2 million across almost 20 years is by no means prohibitively expensive. And according to Wara’s research, the state could help fund projects like these at relatively low cost. By spending about $3 billion a year—less than Cal Fire’s total fire-suppression budget in 2020, by his calculation—the state could harden about 100,000 homes a year, starting in the most fire-prone areas, and build fuelbreaks in every highly threatened community. That would also cover preventive burns on every acre that needs them, to prevent larger fires later.

Of course, landscaping and building better-sealed homes won’t change the fact that the biggest California fires are getting more intense. Climate change is creating more suitable conditions for the worst conflagrations to arise, and they will, again and again, with greater frequency now. Slowing that trajectory is a matter of global action. But yet here Angelenos are, living at the scale of their homes, their parcels of the Earth. Fires in California are like hurricanes in Florida. They’re going to happen, and people will live in their path. Stopping them from happening is impossible. But minimizing the damage they wreak is not.

During the early days of COVID, I found myself living in Los Angeles, the city I grew up in, back in the San Fernando Valley, the flat sprawl of suburban conformity I’d run away from at 18. The Valley had always felt oppressively normal to me; it made me, as a weirdo, self-conscious. And now I was there again, this time missing the serendipitous weirdness of a New York City subway car, in which I could be subsumed. Trying to relax, I would drive around just to drive around, the palm trees and sun exactly where they always were, the strip malls endless. But one morning, I turned the radio dial, and on came the lizardy voice of David Lynch. And he was doing the weather report.

Lynch, the bizarro-baroque filmmaker who died this week, at 78, will be remembered for being a cinematic giant, for Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive as well as the warped TV soap opera Twin Peaks and its avant-garde sequel, Twin Peaks: The Return. But what I want to recall is a much smaller gift he bestowed on me and other Angelenos when he started airing weather reports every day on the local public-radio station KCRW in May 2020, just as life under the coronavirus was becoming a long-term slog.

These dispatches were quick flashes of absurdity, many of them lasting just a bit more than a minute. The Lynchean joke of it all was, of course, that in La-La Land, the weather is pretty much always the same.

He would start off with the date and day of the week and read off the weather (in Fahrenheit and Celsius), almost invariably saying that it was “sunny” and “very still right now.” And then he would ponder for a moment: “Today, I was thinking about …” What followed was a nugget from the man’s mind, almost always the title of a song, actually something you could imagine him thinking about as he brewed a pot of black coffee that morning—Mazzy Starr’s “Fade Into You,” or “Moon River,” or the Everly Brothers’ “All I Have to Do Is Dream.” Sometimes he would just narrate his plans for the day, but in surreal splendor: “Day two of weekend projects, and the fun work train is rolling. I’m going to get to the dining car and get a hot coffee, maybe a cookie, maybe some popcorn. Today I’m going to be working with oil paint, tempera paint, mold-making rubber, resin, and … varnish.”

But the pièce de résistance was the last 10 seconds of each broadcast, when Lynch described what the sky would look like that afternoon: “We might have some clouds visiting until lunchtime. After that should be pure blue skies and golden sunshine all along the way,” or “It looks like these clouds will evaporate by mid-morning, and after that we’re going to be having those beautiful blue skies and golden sunshine all along the way.”

“All along the way” became a kind of catchphrase. It always made me think of The Wizard of Oz, which was a Lynch touchstone—both the glossy campiness of Glinda and the sickly green skin of the Wicked Witch. And that was it: “Everyone, have a great day!”

(His other catchphrase was “If yoouu can believe it, it’s a Friday once again!” Especially during the early pandemic, this felt like a lifeline to normal times, with a strong undernote of irony.)

[Read: David Lynch was America’s cinematic poet]

I heard these dispatches on the radio every morning on my aimless drives, but I later learned that Lynch posted videos of the reports, and in these he appears in a black shirt buttoned to the top, his shock of white hair standing straight up, and—always, always—big dark sunglasses. Mel Brooks, who gave Lynch his first major-studio directorial gig (The Elephant Man, which Brooks produced), famously once called him “Jimmy Stewart from Mars.” It also seems true to say that if Mars had a weatherman, this is exactly what he would look and sound like. (Perhaps: “A blazing red sun outside, folks, but we’ll be down to –153 tonight.”)

David Lynch’s final weather report.

These daily moments of zen opened something up in me, and made the Valley seem a little less ordinary. After all, Lynch was manifesting in these reports the duality that was a hallmark of his aesthetic, a kind of excessive, pathological normalcy. It’s in his reference to many 1950s songs, his clothing and hair, the very idea of a jolly weatherman providing a tether to sunny, physical reality. And yet, the creepy, creaky edge, the excitement with which he pronounced “very still” every single day, pointed to something dreamier and much darker. It made me attuned to the freeway underpasses, brightly lit and menacing, to the sadness of the blinking neon signs on liquor stores, to the Valley’s surrounding hills, which grow shadowy and hulking at night. Listening to Lynch on the radio suddenly made me feel like I was inhabiting a noir of some sort, as if Raymond Chandler were narrating the events of my very boring and predictable COVID day of bleaching vegetables and washing masks.

There was a charm to Lynch’s weather reports. He genuinely seemed to enjoy embodying this role for a few minutes a day. And it came through. My editor told me that his then-7-year-old son thought of Lynch as his “favorite weatherman,” and it’s funny to think of a new generation encountering the director as a grandfatherly figure wishing them a good day as they opened up their laptops for remote school. Wait until they see Dennis Hopper sucking on gas in Blue Velvet.

The weather reports stopped in late 2022, just as the world attempted to return to its own version of normal—and around the time I moved back to New York. But I like to think of Lynch having grabbed that brief period to fulfill his own fantasy of messing with us all a little bit, and also providing something that he wasn’t always known for but should be: a kind of innocent joy. I know that I’m wishing him blue skies all along the way.

When my family returned to our home in Santa Monica last Sunday night, we breathed a sigh of relief. Our house was fine, and the air quality was in the “good” category. Schools would reopen the next day. But as we unpacked, I noticed what looked like salt-and-pepper snow delicately dancing over the street. Ash from the Palisades Fire, burning just five miles north of us, was descending all around, coating the car we had left behind. In the backyard, it gathered over the small patch of turf we played on and in small clusters all across the garden, where my kids had recently planted carrots.

The next morning, we walked to school, talking about the blue sky. My 8-year-old pointed out the piles of windblown ash by the curb. That day, the kids would stay inside so the school could clean the debris from the playground equipment and yard.

As I walked the four blocks back home, a city-owned street sweeper buzzed past. When the truck’s bristles hit the pockets of ash, they kicked up car-size clouds of dust, sending all the debris back into the air. I clutched my N95 mask tighter against my face, pulled down my sunglasses, and jogged away. I closed the door tightly behind me.

That night, a local bookstore and mediation space held a ceremony to “call in the rain for a land devastated by fire.” Rain would help keep more fires from starting, and it would also help wash the ash away. For now, we’re left to deal with it on our own, swabbing surfaces, clearing streets, wondering what we’re breathing in and what it will do to the waterways that absorb it.

On Tuesday, the debris was continuing to fall, so the school held a “walking-only” recess. When I saw gardeners arriving armed with leaf blowers, my heart sank. (Los Angeles County has temporarily banned their use because they throw up so much dust.) But no one knew exactly the right way to clean up the mess. One neighbor was vacuuming their steps with a Shop-Vac.

With smoke, the hazards are clear: You can see it and smell it, and get out of the way. Our phones have been vibrating with air-quality indexes, which measure pollution in the air, but not ash. With ash circling like toxic feathers, it’s hard to know what is safe. The residue from house fires contains far more toxins than that of brush fires. The PVC pipes, lithium-ion car batteries, plastic siding, flooring, and everything else that evaporated in the blazes launched a soup of chemicals—nickel, chromium, arsenic, mercury—into the air. Older homes can contain lead and asbestos. Until Wednesday, the day after walking-only recess, L.A. County had an ash advisory in place, which recommended staying inside and wearing a mask and goggles when leaving the house.

But our lives in Los Angeles are largely outside: This is a city that dines outdoors all year long, where winter temperatures hover in the 60s and surfers are in the water in January. With no rain in the forecast, how long will our lives be coated in a fine layer of toxic dust? Maybe a very long time: A webinar put on by California Communities Against Toxics warned that the amount of ash that the fires had generated would take years to excavate, and created public-health risks.

The prospect of continued exposure to airborne chemicals sounds ominous, but Thomas Borch, a professor of environmental and agricultural chemistry at Colorado State University, was more sanguine. After the 2021 Marshall Fire tore through towns in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, Borch studied contaminants in the soil at houses near the fire. Some of the properties had elevated levels of heavy metals, but most were still below levels of concern. And although living among clouds of fine debris might feel apocalyptic, Borch told me that the wind could be helping to dilute the contamination in my neighborhood. “A lot of these ashes spread out over a much bigger area,” he said, which helps mitigate their health impacts.

Once ash and soot creep inside homes—through doors and windows, on shoes and clothes—“it’s a lot harder to actually get rid of,” he added. Cleaning can reinvigorate pollution inside the home, so it has to be done carefully. Borch advised that we vacuum with a HEPA filter and wet-mop surfaces to keep pollution from building up inside the house.

But the real questions regarding human health and ash are still open. Researchers have only recently started to investigate how the ash from structural fires differs from that of wildfires. In Los Angeles, Borch’s colleagues have set up 10 coffee-bag-size samplers around the fires (as close as they were allowed to go). They also plan to collect ash from within the burn areas and from windblown dust to compare the different toxins in smoke and ash, as well as their concentrations in the weeks and months following the fires.

If rain does arrive, it will wash out much of the debris, and the city will feel clear again. But that rain could also carry contaminants into streams, reservoirs used for drinking water, or the Pacific Ocean. Perhaps by then the wind will have blown most of the ash away, or in places, such as my neighborhood, outside of the fire’s direct path—we will have cleared the ash on our own. (Clearing ash in fire zones is a regulated process.) My family is still waiting to pull up the vegetables in our yard, but I’m no longer worried about bouncing balls and biking. We’ve been slowly wetting down our stone patio and stairs and trying to gently sweep up the ash, while making sure we’re protected by gloves, goggles, and masks. Half of the neighbors are wearing masks outside. We’re still swirling around like ash from the crisis, waiting for the rains to put everything back in place.