Photo essay · Malibu · Thanksgiving

Fire-Torn Skies

A Malibu Thanksgiving, and what a household saw when the canyon burned to the sea.

Photographs by the author.

These photographs are not evidence. They are witness. My family and I have survived seven California wildfires and have never lost a house. That fact is experience, not proof of anything except human resilience — and, on the nights the wind is right, a great deal of luck. I include the pictures here because the images are older than the argument I have since learned to make about them, and because a photograph, honestly taken, sometimes remembers what analysis forgets.

The fire came down the canyon at three in the morning and ran toward the ocean. By afternoon the sky was a different substance. By evening the Pacific below us had turned the color of a bruise.

A masked figure on a deck rail as the sun burns dim through wildfire smoke, the Pacific glowing copper below. — The ocean as a bruise — the day after

The column built through the afternoon on the eastern ridge. From a distance it read almost like weather — a pyrocumulus with its own shoulders and its own quiet. Up close, the sound was not quiet at all.

A towering pyrocumulus smoke column rising against a clear evening sky over silhouetted trees. — Pyrocumulus over the eastern ridge

The same smoke column later in the evening, darker underneath, with a faint ember glow at the treeline. — Later — the column, from the same window

When it was time to leave, the fire brigade drove the line ahead of us and we followed them out. There is a particular sound a car makes when the air outside the glass is hotter than the air the engine is breathing, and there is a particular quiet inside the car when the people in it have chosen not to say anything about it.

View through a car windshield of an orange flame-field on both sides of the road during evacuation. — Driving out, behind the brigade

Evacuation road at dusk under an orange sky — cars lined on the shoulder, headlights on, palms in silhouette. — The road out — the civic image

We came back the next day, to the house still standing and to neighbors whose houses were not. There is nothing in that arithmetic to be proud of. The wind decides. The site decides. The years of reading slope, aspect, fuel, and prevailing wind decide a little at the margins. Mostly the wind decides.

I keep these pictures here for one reason only. The landscape was saying, all afternoon and all night, exactly what it was going to do. It is the argument of the book that the land keeps trying to tell us, in a language older than our instruments, what it needs and what it will do next. The photographs are the part I could hold in a camera. The rest is still being written.

Companion reading: the wildfire chapter of The Compassionate Universe, where the argument these images cannot carry is finally made in prose.