LA Forever

By T.M. Brown

Jan 30, 2025

LA Forever

My favorite plants in Los Angeles are the patches of dryland chaparral and shrubs flanking the ramps that lead up to and down from the highways that crisscross the city. They’re sad, blown out little creatures. The color of the desert mixed with a century of smog and asphalt dust. In a city blooming with palm trees and emerald green lawns and manicured flower beds, the pale rugs of manzanita and stonecrop spread across landfilled slopes and are the ones I identify with California the most. They are home to me.

The last two weeks have made me ache with homesickness. I moved more than a dozen times before I turned 18, but southern California was always the one place where my family had an anchor. I’ve now lived in New York for more than a decade longer than I’ve lived anywhere else, but when news of the wildfires in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena started breaking, I felt a westward drag that hasn’t quit. I can feel myself slouching towards the sun set every evening, an invisible force pulling me back home.

There are odd things I miss about my life in California, like the traffic. What no one tells you about sitting bumper-to-bumper with a million other drivers is that it can be a place to focus the mind. Unlike the subway, you have to think about what you’re doing as you’re navigating the 405 or 110 or 101 or 5. But I found that an almost Zen-like experience, where controlling my car was the only thing I had to think about and the distractions of the world started getting blacked out. The rare times I’d have the road to myself were almost disorienting in their freedom of movement and thought.  Late at night, driving back to Orange County from Pasadena or Santa Monica, I’d put a single record and float home doing 90.  

There are more things I miss—the morning sourness of salt air by the ocean, the inevitability of sand, how good my Spanish used to be—but traffic is how you make memories in Los Angeles. I still remember the shape of the exit ramp flyover off the northbound 101, a soft curled hump like you were driving over the back of a giant whale. Sure, the thing about Dodger fans is that we get there in the 3rd inning, but there was a certain bliss being in that stacked column of cars slowly climbing towards the stadium, radios all tuned to one station, waiting for Vin Scully’s honeyed voice to drizzle out of the speakers and tell us that it was time for Dodger baseball.

I can use the hours I spent sitting on the thin aluminum benches in the Dodger Stadium bleachers to mark out moments of my life, like when parents mark their kids’ heights on door jambs. When we rolled up to the parking lot in my brother’s 1965 Ford Galaxie, more yacht than coupe, and bought $6 tickets the day of because the team was so bad. When I skipped class to watch Clayton Kershaw pitch his first game, knowing I was witnessing something but unsure of what. We’d go to Guisados for tacos before the game, The Short Stop for Tecates after it ended. (And sometimes also before.) I remember the blazing days that gave way to cool breathed evenings, when everyone puts on their jackets in unison and made the stadium look like a metal terrarium full of ice plants closing their blooms for the night.       

Like traffic and chaparral, wildfires are part of the bargain living in southern California. I remember the first time I felt the full blast furnace heat of one. My brother and I were driving from LA to Santa Barbara, and a small area of brush on the side of the 101 had ignited. Traffic moved slowly; they closed the lane closest to the flames but kept things moving. I rolled down my window as we crawled by. The heat hit me immediately. When you’re that close, you can feel the heaviness of combustion. It can make it feel like the air has a blazing heft pushing onto your skin.

Ten years later, I was at my tiny boarding school nestled in the Ojai Valley, where, we were always told as if it was some earth-divine intervention, was one of the only regions in the world where the topographic grade ran east-west instead of north-south. It’s why the sunsets are so breathtaking. It’s also why cults love it so much. The dense, dry shrubland was a rich fuel deposit for wildfires, and the Santa Ana winds showed the flames which direction to go. Every year, the fire line would move closer to the school. Some years, we would delay going back for fall classes because of how close the burn was to campus. Other years, we would be asked to ready ourselves to leave at a moment’s notice if the air currents changed or the fire jumped. The entire campus was evacuated as ash rained down on the roofs of the dormitories a year after I graduated. One friend’s house near the school’s front gates burned to the ground. 

Those moments were on my mind as I scrolled through the news night after night. The smoke from wildfires can blot out the sun even in southern California. When I saw the scenes from burnt out houses and abandoned cars being pushed aside by bulldozers to clear paths for firefighters, it was disorienting on the eerie side of familiarity, like a palimpsest the size of a neighborhood. Even with all that destruction, I have never wanted to run back to California more than I do right now, and see those roadside shrubberies laid out like a pale green carpet along the roads of the only place I’ve ever been able to call home.

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