Before it burned, Charlie Springer’s house contained 18,000 vinyl LPs, 12,000 CDs, 10,000 45s, 4,000 cassettes, 600 78s, 150 8-tracks, hundreds of signed musical posters, and about 100 gold records. The albums alone occupied an entire wall of shelves in the family room, and another in the garage. On his desk were a set of drumsticks from Nirvana and an old RCA microphone that Prince had given to him at a recording session for Prince. A neon Beach Boys sign—as far as he knows, one of only eight remaining in the world—hung above the dining table. In his laundry room was a Gibson guitar signed by the Everly Brothers; near his fireplace, a white Stratocaster signed to him by Eric Clapton.

Last month, the night the Eaton Fire broke out, Charlie evacuated to his girlfriend’s house. And when he came back, the remnants of his home had been bleached by the fire. The spot in the family room where the record collection had been was dark ash.

I’ve known Charlie for as long as I can remember. He and my father met because of records. In the late 1980s, Charlie was at a crowded party in the Hollywood Hills when he heard someone greet my father by his full name. Charlie whipped around: “You’re Fred Walecki? I’ve been seeing your name on records.” Dad owned a rock-and-roll-instrument shop, and musicians thanked him on their albums for the gear (and emotional support) he provided during recording sessions. Charlie was a national sales manager at Warner Bros. Records and could rattle off the B-side of any record, so of course he’d clocked Walecki appearing over and over again. Growing up, I thought every song I’d ever heard could also be found on Charlie’s shelves; his friend Jim Wagner, who once ran sales, merchandising, and advertising for Warner Bros. Records, called it the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame West.

Charlie’s collection started when he was 6. He had asked his mother to get him the record “about the dog,” and she’d brought back Patti Page’s “(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window?” No, not that one—he wanted a 45 of Elvis’s recently released single, “Hound Dog.” He’d cart it around with him for the next seven decades, across several states, before placing it on his shelf in Altadena. At age 8, he mowed lawns and shoveled snow in his hometown outside Chicago to afford “Sweet Little Sixteen,” by Chuck Berry, and “Tequila,” by the Champs; when he was 9, he got Ray Charles’s “What’d I Say.” And when he was 10, he walked into his local record shop and found its owner, Lenny, sitting on the floor, frazzled, surrounded by piles of records. Every week, Lenny had to rearrange the records on his wall to reflect the order of the Top 40 chart made by the local radio station WLS. Charlie offered to help.

“What will it cost me?” Lenny asked.

“Two singles a week.” Charlie held on to all of those singles, and the paper surveys from WLS, too.

When he was 12, he bought his first full albums: Surfin’ Safari, by the Beach Boys; Bob Dylan’s eponymous debut; and Green Onions, by Booker T. and the M.G.s. He entered a Wisconsin seminary two years later, hoping to become a priest. There, he and his friends found a list of addresses for members of Milwaukee’s Knights of Columbus chapter, and sent out letters asking for donations—a hi-fi stereo console, a jukebox—to the poor seminarians, who went without so much. Radios were contraband, but Charlie taped one underneath the chair next to his bed, and at night, while 75 other students slept around him, he would use an earbud to listen to WLS. “And I would hear records, and I would go, Oh my God, I gotta get this record. I have to. ” Seminarians could go into town only if it was strictly necessary, so he’d break his glasses, and run between the optometrist and the five-and-dime. That’s how he got a couple of other Beach Boys records, the Kinks’ “Tired of Waiting for You,” and the Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Daydream.”

Charlie dropped out of seminary in 1967, at the end of his junior year. All of those five-and-dime records had been in his prefect’s room, but when he left, the prefect was nowhere to be found. So, Charlie got a ladder, wriggled through a transom, and got his collection, stored in two crates which had previously contained oranges. (“Orange crates held albums perfectly,” he told me.) Then he hitchhiked to San Francisco and grew his hair out just in time for the Summer of Love. He moved into a commune of sorts, a 16-unit apartment building with the walls between apartments broken down, and got a job hanging posters for the Fillmore on telephone poles around the Bay Area. He’d staple up psychedelic artwork advertising Jefferson Airplane, Sons of Champlin, the Grateful Dead, or Sly and the Family Stone. (He still had about 75 of those posters.) He worked at Tower Records on the side but would hand his paycheck back to his boss: The money all went to records. Anytime one of his favorites—Morrison, Mitchell, Dylan, the Beach Boys—released a new album, he’d host a listening party for friends. When he moved back to Chicago, his music collection took up most of the car. The record store he managed there, Hear Here, would receive about 20 new albums every day to play over the loudspeakers. When Charlie heard Bruce Springsteen’s first album (two before Born to Run), he thought it was such a hit, he locked the shop door. “Until I sell five of these records,” he announced, “nobody is getting out of this store.”

Next, Charlie worked his way up at a music-distribution company, starting from a gig in the warehouse (picker No. 9). Later, at Warner Bros. Records, he’d work with stores and radio stations to help artists sell enough music to get, and then sustain, their big break. To sell Takin’ It to the Streets, he drove with the Doobie Brothers so they could sign albums at a Kansas City record shop; to help Dire Straits get their start, he lobbied radio stations to play their first single for about a year until it caught on. He was also on the shortlist of people who would listen to test pressings of a new album for any pops or crackles, before the company shipped the final version. Charlie held on to about 1,000 of those rare pressings, including Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours and Prince’s Purple Rain.

He moved to Los Angeles in the ’80s to be Warner’s national sales manager, and in 1991, he bought his home on Skylane Drive, in Altadena. Nestled in the foothills, the area smelled of the hay for his neighbors’ horses. Along the fence was bougainvillea, and in his yard, a magnificent native oak that our families would sit beneath together. He started placing thousands of his albums on those shelves in the family room, overlooking that tree.

In Charlie’s house, a record was always playing. He had recently papered the walls and ceiling of his bathroom with the WLS surveys he started collecting as a child, in his first record-store job. Every record he pulled off the shelf came with a memory, he told me. And if he kept an album or a memento in his house, “it was a good story.”

A gold record from U2, on the wall next to the staircase: “All bands, when they first start off, they’re new bands, and nobody knows who they are, okay? … I went up with U2, on their first album, from Chicago to Madison, and they played a gig for about 15 people, and then we went to eat at an Italian restaurant. I went back to the restaurant a couple years later, and the same waitress waited on me, and I said, ‘Wow, I remember I was in here with U2.’ And she goes, ‘Those guys were U2?’ I was like, ‘They were U2 then and they’re U2 now.’”

In the kitchen, a poster of Jimi Hendrix striking a power chord at the Monterey Pop Festival: “Seal puts his first record out, and I have just become a vice president at Warner Bros. And I go to my very first VP lunch, and I announce, ‘Hey, this new Seal record is going to go gold.’ The senior VP of finance says, ‘You shouldn’t say that. Why would you make that kind of expectation?’ And I’m like, ‘Because I know with every corpuscle in my body it’s gonna go gold’ … So we make a $1 gentlemen’s bet. About six weeks later, it’s gold.” At the next lunch, he asked the finance executive to sign his dollar bill. Just then, Mo Ostin, the head of the label, walked in and heard about their wager. “Mo said, ‘So Charlie, is there something around the building that you always liked?’ I was like, ‘Well, that Jim Marshall poster of Hendrix.’ And he goes, ‘It’s yours.’”

*Illustration sources: RCA / Michael Ochs Archive / Getty; Stoughton Printing / Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times / Getty; Warner Brothers / Alamy; Sun Records / Alamy

When David Lynch died last week, it was almost hard to know whom exactly to mourn. He was a Renaissance man: musician, painter, meditation instructor, YouTube personality. Most, of course, mourn him as a filmmaker, the medium in which he left his most indelible mark. But I mourn him as a neighbor.

I grew up down the street from David. Three doors down, to be precise. My parents owned a big blue wooden house in the Hollywood Hills, a stark contrast to David’s pink, brutalist box just up the lane. The neighborhood offered me a relatively normal childhood. There were kids to play with right around the corner. I learned to ride my bike in the street; I trick-or-treated. But I was also raised in a place organized by celebrity: by palatial homes, by immense creative success, by privacy as a hallowed virtue. After two decades in the big blue house, there were still neighbors within eyesight of my bedroom window whom I’d never met.

David wasn’t one of them. Though he ranked among the bigger names on the block, and his hermitry was legendary, he let us in. Our lives overlapped a good bit: His son Riley was in my sister Anna’s elementary-school class (they were good friends), his granddaughter Syd in mine (sworn nemeses, though we grew out of it). We went to David’s for the occasional pool party, where we kids were warned to steer clear of his workshop: the so-called Gray House, where the mad scientist conducted his experiments. He introduced my parents to transcendental meditation, a practice they maintain to this day. We attended his Christmas parties annually; he came to ours a grand total of once (in his defense, we required caroling). I knew David like I knew others in L.A.’s upper crust, as separate from his work—though, granted, I’m unsure how you introduce a child to his résumé in good conscience. To the extent that I knew him, I knew him as a neighbor.

It being Los Angeles, I mostly knew him in the car. David drove me to school a handful of times, along with Riley and Anna. Though he was more dad than director to us, David did carry a certain air—he was a tallish guy with a weird voice and weird hair and a weird house, and we were certainly quieter when he was on carpool duty. He once commented as much, pulling up to school after we had spent the ride in a cramped, adolescent silence: “You kids are so quiet, I can barely think.” For all his idiosyncrasy behind the camera, David could be disarmingly plain in conversation. Another morning, he quizzed us on the rules of the road with utter sincerity: “So … if I’m putting on my right turn signal … which way do you think I’m turning?” (Anna, in perfect deadpan: “Right.”)

Once, David appeared at my family’s front door after hours, excited to share a new toy: a Scion xB, a truly hideous vehicle of which he was particularly, oddly proud. He whisked me and my parents through the neighborhood, showing off the wheeled toaster oven as though it was a Model T. Every time we hit a dead end—and there were many in our neighborhood—David would throw the thing into reverse and exclaim with delight: “Scion backing up! Scion backing up!”

As the years passed and we children learned to drive ourselves, I saw less of my neighborhood and far, far less of David. Only after leaving his orbit did I get to know his work. I didn’t become a die-hard fan, but certain creations seized my heart with a pitbull’s grip. I’ll never forget my petrifying first viewing of Mulholland Drive, during which, in a truly Lynchian turn, my friend’s little brother sleepwalked into the room and started speaking to me. My dad, also a filmmaker, was thrilled to screen Eraserhead for me one night, cackling through the baby scenes.

And then there was Twin Peaks. During my last few months living at home, my whole family gathered weekly for a profoundly un-family-friendly viewing of the third season revival, dubbed The Return. I was so infuriated after the final episode that I stalked up the hill in the dead of night and urinated on David’s retaining wall. Though I have warmed to it since, at the time I raged that The Return often felt more like a raised middle finger than a story. But part of my reaction may have also been a childish denial of the point David delivered so effectively in that finale, as Dale Cooper knocks on the door of what he’s sure must be the Palmer residence: Try though you might, you can’t go home again.

[Read: How Twin Peaks invented modern television]

A few years ago, my parents sold the big blue house. They had their reasons: Without kids to fill it, the space was too big; after 30 years in Los Angeles, they wanted to finally live by the beach. But beneath this was a much more practical motivation. Climate change had become undeniable, and they couldn’t shake visions of our neighborhood in flames.

It was a prescient move. Mulholland Drive—the actual street—abuts the back of David’s property and threads through the hills that bisect Los Angeles. It snakes past the entrance to Runyon Canyon, which recently caught fire about a mile away from my old house and David’s. The blaze was contained relatively quickly, thanks in part to the oasis of the Hollywood Reservoir. David evacuated, though neither his house nor the big blue one burned. Not this time, anyway.

Months before the rest of the city sealed its windows and fought to catch its breath, David was doing the same. Last year, he publicly disclosed his emphysema diagnosis. I had hoped to interview him: I reached out to Riley, asking whether David might be up for a chat on the record, neighbor to neighbor. It wasn’t to be. David’s weakened lungs made even crossing the room exhausting and COVID a grave risk, further isolating him from the outside world. I can’t remember the last time I saw David—it would have been many years ago now—but before my parents sold their place, I would visit home and picture him above me somewhere on that dark hill, shuffling through the Gray House, still tinkering.

I have always struggled with Los Angeles. Every time I go back, I confront a cocktail of familiar feelings: nostalgia, frustration at the city’s bad reputation, a sense that Hollywood’s long-dangled, covetous promise of “making it” is alive and well in me. In a lifelong attempt to make peace with one’s home, who better to turn to than a neighbor? Perhaps more than any other director, David rendered Los Angeles fairly: the glittering sprawl of the flats and the freeways, the canyons’ serpentine darkness. He understood the city’s hellish side. His films may have never depicted the place in flames, exactly, but more than one framed Hollywood as a surreal and monstrous syndicate.

Yet his love for L.A. still shone through. In Mulholland Drive’s most arresting scene, the protagonists find themselves at an otherworldly club in the middle of the night. As haunting music emanates from behind a red curtain, an emcee emerges and announces that all the sounds are prerecorded; the entire show is an illusion. But then an entrancing singer takes the stage, lip-syncing so convincingly that the audience’s disbelief is suspended all over again. It’s a tribute to my hometown as critical and unsparing as only true love can be. The whole city, this vast, thirsty project sprouting from the desert, is contrived—and no less beautiful for it.

Like all neighborhoods, mine used to be a lot wilder. When David and my parents first bought their property, about a decade apart, there were still vacant lots in the canyon, and the streets were a patchwork of homes and chaparral scrub where deer and coyotes roamed free. (One of my parents’ favorite stories from my childhood, for whatever reason, involves me nearly getting trampled by a wild buck tearing through our yard.) Years later, my dad found himself catching up with David at a graduation party for Riley and Anna’s class. One of the neighborhood’s last wild tracts had just sold, a fact Dad was bemoaning.

David was unsentimental. He was far more impressed with the element of human craftsmanship than conservation, marveling that anything, with enough ingenuity, could be sculpted from the sandstone. “Oh, yeah,” he replied with his signature squawk and an unmistakable pride, “it doesn’t matter how steep it is. They’ll figure out a way to build on it.”

Photographs by Daniel Dorsa

One of the worst-kept secrets in Los Angeles is a 130-acre swath of chaparral. On perfect weekend afternoons, I have walked my dog among the crowds at Runyon Canyon Park, a piece of rolling scrub nestled in the Hollywood Hills. I’d go more often if finding parking on Mulholland Drive wasn’t nearly impossible. In a city that loves the outdoors, Runyon is the premier Sunday-afternoon trail: a dusty-chic destination for after-brunch hikers, families, couples on first dates, and everyone else from around the city to get in steps, spot movie stars, or both. What makes the area so popular is that it’s a mountain hike in the middle of the city—across the freeway from Universal Studios and over the hill from the Hollywood Bowl. Rugged paths lead downhill to meet Hollywood Boulevard, close to the Walk of Fame.

As colossal wildfires have raged across L.A.—the most destructive in the city’s history—Runyon Canyon has not been spared. Last week, a blaze erupted in the heart of the park, forcing some nearby Hollywood residents to flee. Mercifully, firefighters halted the march of the flames before they turned into another major fire. But the blaze still left a 43-acre scar across the expanse. Treasured trails are charred.

Photographs by Daniel Dorsa

Compared with all that has been lost here in L.A., the devastation of Runyon Canyon and other hiking trails is trivial. Colleagues of mine have lost their homes. Entire neighborhoods have been wiped out, and winds threaten to keep fanning the flames. At least 25 people have died. Against the grim scale of this disaster, those ruined trails are a quieter kind of loss that the city will have to reckon with. Core to L.A.’s identity is easy access to nature—wild trails and canyons and vistas—along with perfect weather for visiting them almost any day of the year. Even the Hollywood sign is at the end of a hike. Just like that, many of the signature places to get outdoors have been wiped out.

The city burns because the city is wild. Multiple mountain ranges that demarcate the disparate communities of Los Angeles County create picturesque settings for homes—in dangerous proximity to scrub that is prone to catching fire. Those same areas house an ample supply of easily accessible trailheads that make these peaks and canyons our backyard. On the trails, dadcore REI hikers like me intermingle with athleisure-clad Angelenos who look like they started walking uphill from an Erewhon and wandered into mountain-lion territory. We cross paths with flocks of students carrying Bluetooth speakers, 5 a.m. trail runners, and tourists who underestimated the ascent to Griffith Observatory.

Any given morning in the secluded heights of Pacific Palisades, you would have found hikers on the hunt for a precious legal parking spot between the driveways. From there, well-worn paths lead through Temescal and Topanga Canyons, up to lookout points where hikers could watch the city meet the sea. It now appears this beloved area is destroyed. The horrific Palisades Fire may have started at a spot near the popular Temescal Ridge trail. Despite heroic, lifesaving firefighting, the fire continues to burn deeper into Topanga State Park. Gorgeous hiking country above Pacific Palisades may be closed off to the public for years as the area recovers.

Photograph by Daniel Dorsa

The Eaton Fire, the other major blaze, has also claimed some of the most beautiful spots around L.A. The fire’s namesake, Eaton Canyon, is home to a waterfall so photogenic that you once had to make a reservation to hike its trail. The blaze has burned up that walk, along with so many more in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains: trails that take you to Echo Mountain, Millard Falls, or toward the historic Mount Wilson Observatory that overlooks the city.

These bits of the outdoors have defined my life here, as they have for so many others. Those San Gabriel hikes are where my wife and I spent much of our time during the pandemic. The month after we got our dog, Watson, in 2020, the world shut down. There was nothing to do but hike. We drove to the trailheads that dot the Angeles Crest Highway, where hikers’ dirty Subarus dodge the gearheads who test their modified racers on the mountain curves. We parked in now-devastated parts of Altadena to get lost in the stunning foothills. We walked among the yucca all spring until Southern California’s unrelenting summer sun forced us indoors.

Much of L.A.’s nature still remains intact, of course. But even before the current fires, the sprawling Angeles National Forest that houses those peaks and trails of the San Gabriel Mountains has had it tough. In the autumn of 2020, the Bobcat Fire burned all the way across the range from north to south, torching 100,000-plus acres. This past fall, the Bridge Fire burned new patches of the mountains, with flames creeping toward the mountain town of Wrightwood and the ski slopes. Some of the areas my wife and I would traverse during the pandemic were decimated during these previous fires, and they are still recovering.

Photographs by Daniel Dorsa

Los Angeles County was ready to burn. The wet winters of the past two years helped keep the big blazes at bay. The current mix of drought and ferocious winds have proved to be prime conditions for a major fire. These conditions will inevitably return, and they will bring more flames that scorch L.A.’s trails. Yet the growing incidence of wildfire, and its threat to our most loved natural spaces, is far more than a California story. Forest fires are getting worse all around the globe; nearly a third of Americans live somewhere threatened by wildfire. National parks, forests, and other irreplaceable places for communing with nature are under threat. Last month, a 500-acre fire sparked by a downed power line burned up a big chunk of a national forest in North Carolina. In November, a brush fire broke out in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park.

Here in L.A., the city has only started to contend with the toll of these wildfires. On top of the lives, homes, and businesses, the legacy of the destruction will include natural areas. Los Angeles is hiking to Skull Rock just as much as it’s rolling down Imperial Highway. It is the studio lot and the Santa Monica Mountains. The open spaces all around us invite Angelenos to ditch the concrete grid for the wandering switchbacks. With so many trails that are damaged and closed, the mountains aren’t calling quite as loudly as they used to.

Photograph by Daniel Dorsa

In Los Angeles, we live with fire. There is even a season—fire season, which does not end until the rains come. This winter, the rains have not come. What has come is fire. And Angelenos have been caught off guard, myself included.

Tuesday mid-morning, a windstorm hit L.A. In the Palisades, a neighborhood in the Santa Monica Mountains that overlooks the Pacific Ocean, a blaze broke out. Over the past two days, it has burned more than 17,234 acres and destroyed at least 1,000 structures. The Palisades Fire will almost certainly end up being the most expensive in California history. It is currently not at all contained.

By Tuesday night, another fire had sparked—this time in the San Gabriel Mountains, near Altadena, where winds had been clocked at 100 miles an hour and sent embers flying miles deep into residential and commercial stretches of the city. By mid-morning yesterday, the Eaton Fire had consumed 1,000 structures and more than 10,600 acres. It, too, is zero percent contained. Together, the fires have taken at least five lives.

Last night, just before 6 p.m., another fire erupted in Runyon Canyon, in the Hollywood Hills. Like the Palisades and Eaton Fires, the Sunset Fire seems to have first broken out in the dry chaparral scrub whipped by the roaring winds. The hillside there is particularly dense with homes, and the neighborhood is jammed up against the even denser, urban L.A., where apartment buildings quickly give way to commercial blocks. One of this city’s many charms is its easy access to nature, but nature is also the cause of its current apocalypse.

Living through these fires, I’ve struggled to understand the scale of the event; to see the threat for what it is and respond appropriately. My family lives in Eagle Rock, a neighborhood 20 miles from the Palisades with a whole mountain range in between. On Tuesday, while driving on the freeway, I saw the colossal thunderhead of gray smoke of the Palisades Fire erupting from the Santa Monica Mountains and decided: This is fine. I finished my errand. I went on with my day.

When I got home, I turned on KTLA, which was broadcasting live from Palisades Drive, where dozens of cars, trapped in evacuation traffic, had been abandoned by their fleeing owners. A man ran up to the reporter, removed his face mask, and spoke into the microphone. Looking directly at the camera, he implored viewers to leave their keys in their car if they were going to flee, so that the fire crews could get to the fire unimpeded. The guy looked familiar. The reporter asked him to identify himself. It was Steve Guttenberg. Mahoney from Police Academy! Only in L.A.

The wind was making a constant low, terrible moan through the trees. Every few minutes, a violent gust would blast through and rattle the house. That afternoon, I went to pick up my kids, who had been kept inside their school all day. At home, I let them run around outside, but everyone’s eyes got itchy. There was so much dust in the air. Still, the only fire I knew of was all the way across town, so I went out again that evening to see a movie.  

At intermission, a friend returned from the restroom and told me that my wife had been trying to reach me. I turned my phone off airplane mode and called her; when she picked up, she told me a neighbor had just knocked on our door to tell her that a brush fire was burning nearby. It was close, she said. How close? I asked.

Across the street, she said. Like, can you see it? From our house? She said no. I’m coming home, I told her.

Driving back, I saw a huge, glowing gash in the San Gabriel Mountains—the Eaton Fire. I thought about what needed to happen when I got home: the go bags we should pack, the box of birth certificates and Social Security cards. A photo album or two. I’d park the car facing out, for a quicker exit. I’d move some potentially long-burning objects (trash cans) as far from the house as possible.

I knew what to do. I knew the procedure. I’d reported on fires before. Hell, the home I’d grown up in was nearly burned down by wildfires twice in 2017, and my aunt and uncle had lost their home in Santa Rosa that same year. I’d interviewed firefighters about days just like this one—when the Santa Anas howl and it hasn’t rained for eight months or longer, the chaparral is a tinderbox, and fires begin popping up everywhere.

And yet, I hadn’t thought that it could happen down the street. I hadn’t considered that it could happen to me and my family.

[Read: ‘I’ve never seen anything like this’]

I arrived home just after 9 p.m. First neighbors with hoses, then the fire department, had doused the blaze nearby. I worked through my checklist, packed the kids a bag of clothes, then my wife and I packed small bags of our own. A thought nagged at me: All day, I’d been looking at fire—why hadn’t I seen the immediacy of the threat? I pulled out a book called Thinking in an Emergency, by Elaine Scarry, which I find extremely calming in intense moments because it presents an extended argument for the benefits of thought and practice during emergency situations. “CPR is knowable; one can learn it if one chooses,” Scarry writes. “But one cannot know who will one day be the recipient of that embodied knowledge … It is available to every person whose path crosses one’s own.”

What we do during emergencies, when the habits of the everyday (getting out of your car, keys in hand) come face-to-face with the extraordinary (a fire by the side of the road), requires extraordinary thinking. And we would be wise to insert these acts of thinking into our everyday habits. We perform a version of this constantly: We call it “deliberation.” Mostly, we spend very little time between deliberation and action. But emergency-style deliberation is difficult, because true emergencies are rare. It is hard for us to conceive of them happening until they are.

The drivers who locked their car doors and left with their keys were not thinking within the framework of the fire as a threat. A fire doesn’t steal one’s car; it burns it down. I had been no different in my thinking that day. Maybe I was worse: I had the knowledge of what to do in a fire, but I hadn’t even considered the realistic possibility that the fire presented a threat to my family.

I spent most of Tuesday night awake. The wind remained terrible. The smell of smoke began to fill the house. I rolled up towels and stuck them at the foot of the doors. Yesterday morning, just after 7 a.m., our phones buzzed with an alert: an evacuation warning for our corner of the neighborhood and much of nearby Pasadena. We hustled our kids through breakfast, packed up, and got out. Our going was optional, but at least 100,000 other Angelenos are under mandatory evacuation, a number that is surely growing higher as all of these fires continue to burn.

We left with the little we’d packed in our go bags, which was clarifying. I felt a weight lift. This was everything that truly mattered. Rereading Scarry had reminded me: I did not learn to perform CPR until I was about to be a father, until the possibility of having to perform it seemed a bit more real. I still, thankfully, have never had to. But will I retrain myself? Should I be practicing? We motored on through traffic. After a while, the smoke began to clear, just enough to see patches of sky. I will schedule that CPR retraining, I thought. That’s something I should do. When we can get home and catch our breath.

People are running away from their homes as the Sunset fire sweeps through Hollywood Hills.