Grief blew in as the fires continued to rage. Many people have lost everything; the rest of us mourn with them for lives shaped by the routines of mortgage and rent checks, chores and yard work, meals and pets. Even now, the smoke, the flames and the barricades have prevented us from seeing the extent of the catastrophe. That awful reckoning is coming.
Homes will rise anew. Hard webs of urban and suburban infrastructure will be replaced. But we must do more than simply replicate what was there. We must not stop at structures and electrical wires. Many other strands in the intricate webs that connect us, providing meaning and grounding to our everyday lives, have been lost. Rebuilding our soft infrastructure, the network of social ties holding communities of people together, must be just as high a priority as wires, wood and steel.
Evacuation orders generate patterns of response amid rising panic. Grab the dog. Pack the prescriptions and the laptop. Find the deeds and the titles, the passports and the credit cards. If there’s time and space, take the photo albums. If they go, history burns up. Already we’ve seen images of family photos blown far from where they have meaning to people. But it is always only a few: All the others fell to the fires.
The fires have taken homes, and they have taken what binds us together outside our homes. I live in Pasadena. Just north of my home, our neighbors in Altadena lost a church, a mosque and a temple. Firestorms operate with agnostic efficiency.
Context died in the flames, our communal ties to a shared past. We hear it in the chronology that attaches to their loss: a hardware store in business for 80 years, which was first a World War I-era grocery store. A community parish active since before World War II. A beloved restaurant, locally famous for its “Noah’s Ark” breakfast pairing of two eggs, two pancakes and two slices of bacon, which dates to the mid-1950s. A quirky 25-year-old museum devoted entirely to bunnies. Over in the ash of the Palisades fire, a bungalow “auto court” that goes back a century, as well as the 1920s ranch home and stables built by Will Rogers.
Repair and replace roads and water lines, yes. Fill the reservoirs. Fix the energy and communication networks. Help people construct lasting shelter. But also reweave our singed civic fabric, the places of daily life that make a vast city meaningful and manageable: businesses, public parks, houses of worship, schools, libraries. Part of the rebuilding task must include marking and remembering, trying to retie threads that connect us to history and place.
When they are ready, this will come from people in the communities battered and burned, but those of us outside the zones of flight and flame can help. Marking where this or that beloved local institution once stood. Finding meaningful ways to remind people what once was, to remember and to honor through that remembering. Eventually, when the pain subsides somewhat, telling stories of what happened, interviewing friends and neighbors who went through it all and creating archival spaces to protect those memories. Local governments or philanthropic institutions can help support those at the grassroots. Shared history is powerful; it can be restorative. Those of us who have been spared have a special obligation to be of service.
We have examples to turn to right here in Southern California. In the 1871 Chinese Massacre, a mob of 500 Angelenos killed 18 Chinese men and boys in a spasm of horrible racial violence. Too long forgotten, save by way of an obligatory plaque in the sidewalk, it is currently the focus of a concerted memorializing effort, one that will mark the sites of violence with stark sculptural beauty and didactic interpretation. This collective endeavor will ensure that, even in anonymity, the victims will not be forgotten. More hopeful is that perspective gained on historical heartache will offer the possibility of social repair.
The Civic Memory Working Group that has recently furthered this effort left the city with a list of other historical obligations as yet unmet, challenging issues in the region’s past that remain unresolved.
And now the list is one task longer.
The past is behind us. History is not. What Lincoln called “the mystic chords of memory” will help hold stricken neighborhoods and neighbors together and will, over time, help knit together connections beyond roads and pipes and power grids.
This should be a priority before fires come again, because they will. The obligation to community, place and history ought not have any boundaries of geography or disaster.
William Deverell is a historian at USC and co-director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West.
