Love from LA

Where we are safe, but the grief is staggering.

Hoo boy. How are you?

I’ve been a bit paralyzed, to say the least. The last time I sat down to really write was almost two weeks ago, on January 7. I had put my surfboard in the car the night before, despite the forecast for strong Santa Anas, the lip-chapping desert winds long familiar to LA residents and students of Joan Didion. Sometimes those winds are good for the waves, and it was my only free morning that week. I can’t remember if it was Monday night or Tuesday morning that Lua and I started discussing the Santa Anas. By the time we got to preschool she was proudly identifying the palm-rattling gusts: “It’s the Santa Anas! The Santa Anas!”

After I left her at school, I sat in my car down the street, checking surf cameras on my phone. The wind speeds in Venice—my usual spot on a school-day—already looked untenable. I debated driving up the Pacific Coast Highway (PCH) to Sunset: a favorite, easygoing point break named for the spot where Sunset Boulevard ends at the coast. It doesn’t usually work in the wintertime, but a swell over the holidays had brought big, beautiful waves up and down the coast—Sunset included. The wind there looked mellower, but alas, that swell was gone.

So instead, I drove to Venice to complete another favorite ritual on a free morning: I would walk to the end of the Venice Fishing Pier, a quarter-mile into the Pacific, and then back to a coffee shop where I like to sit with and write in an open window facing the sidewalk. I’ve enjoyed walking the pier in sideways rain and chilly fog, but that Tuesday was different. The wind was whipping the water into whitecaps; no one was surfing, and the surface of the beach was blurry with blasting sand. I didn’t even make it halfway down the pier before I turned around. Usually I snap a picture of the ocean, but that day everything—the air, the light, the water—just felt blown out. I hurried back to the coffee shop.

My little window-seat blocked the wind, and I sat there with my notebook reflecting on a period that had been unusually blissful. I started the month of December with a solo retreat that left me centered and energized. Then, our family of four spent winter break together at home—a staycation in west LA. We sledded the sand dunes at Venice Beach. Corey took Lua to the Santa Monica Pier. One day when he was especially flush with childcare energy, he watched both girls while I walked the length of Will Rogers Beach gabbing with a friend before we stole away for sushi in the Palisades (a two-event hang session!). On one of the final days of winter break, Lua and I went for her first real hike, summiting a sizable hill not far from our house, and refueled with tacos at the bottom. That afternoon, I escaped for a rare end-of-day surf session with my friend Minh at Sunset.

It had been a really good time.

sunset at Sunset (and PCH), January 2.

When I glanced up from my notebook in the cafe, I saw a big white plume. I thought it might have been a house-fire a few blocks away. Or a car that blew up. It looked huge, so I figured it must be close. Then I looked up at the TV in the corner over my head and saw the same plume, with a caption describing it as a fire in the Palisades. That’s more than 10 miles from where I was sitting. Our house is in between the two places, and inland from both. I packed and drove home, toward the growing cloud. I turned on the radio—KCRW, all the time—and they too were talking about the fire in the Palisades.

My view from the cafe, then driving home, on Jan.7

School messaged that they were keeping the kids inside to stay safe from windblown debris. That night while I was bathing the girls, a friend from my mom-and-me group replied simply to a check-in on our group text: “My house is on fire.” Corey was flying in from the Bay Area later that night. I told him the wind was howling, and that he may be able to see the fire from the plane—if it took off. It did, and he announced his arrival an hour and ten minutes later with a four-word text: “Just landed HOLY fuck.”

The rest, as you know, is—well, it’s not history. I wish it were, but it’s still happening.

It’s two weeks later and though containment of the Palisades and Eaton Fires is improving, the scale of the devastation is staggering, as I’m sure you know. More than 150,000 out of their homes, many of which are destroyed. Schools, libraries, entire communities are decimated—coffee shops like the one where I’m sitting, where you may not know anyone’s name but their faces and rituals are familiar. I saw one woman’s Instagram post referencing her local UPS store, grieving for the loss of an everyday place for an everyday errand—the people and places that make up our days. Altadena, which the Eaton Fire destroyed, was a rare place in the US: a neighborhood where Black families built generational wealth, along with their homes and community.

Our family is so lucky. We are safe. Our house and neighborhood is totally intact. But the air quality is debatable—and wow, you should see the debates. The water (both tap and ocean) is too. We’ve been minimizing the girls’ time outdoors, which is not easy. Our life here is largely designed to live outside. Nelle keeps climbing into her stroller and demanding, “OUT. OUT.”

I don’t know when I’ll get back up to Sunset to surf—when PCH will reopen, when the ocean will be safe after all that burned in Malibu. The images of PCH are the ones that really twist my chest. The road, with all its little stops, represents pure joy to me: the route to surf, to walk the beach, to Malibu, to Santa Barbara. I thought Lua’s next hike would be Inspiration Point, a little loop above Will Rogers’ historic ranch. That ranch is gone now, the hillside completely scorched. But again, we are lucky. So lucky.

I walked the Venice Pier this morning, in a mask, and am back at the coffee shop. Here, I’ve largely ignored the Inauguration, underway on the same television where I saw the fires start two Tuesdays ago.

I’ll write another letter soon with some notes about what’s been helping me along—and a lot has. But today’s truth of trying to Have a Good Day (the premise of this newsletter) is that fuck, man, this is very, very sad stuff.

I think acknowledging that sadness, and allowing oneself to feel it, is paramount to healing, and to helping. More on that to come soon.

Have a good day.

With so much love, from beautiful Los Angeles,

Jenni

P.S.

I mentioned that I’ve been ignoring inauguration on the TV at the café where I’m writing this. I’ve been helped in this effort by the incomparable Bill Withers, singing his beautiful song “City of the Angels” on repeat. Protect your precious attention, my friends.

LA, LA, find a place for me
Find a place for me
In your spacious wings
Is where I want to be