California Triptych

I. Air

Even on a clear day, I didn’t know how my mom and dad could navigate the San Fernando Valley without looking at a map. There were a thousand streets, five hundred intersections, half a dozen freeways: How had they memorized each turn to take between our house and the grocery store, our house and my school, our house and doctor’s office, our house and the airport, which was not in the Valley at all, but over a mountain, in the city, near the sea?

I could navigate as far as the Taco Bell on Ventura Boulevard, two blocks north of home. From there I often wasn’t sure if my destination was left or right or straight. I didn’t even know that the Valley was a valley because most days were not clear. Standing in the parking lot under the desiccated bleached-beige sign on nearly any afternoon in 1997, you could look up and down the street and see only a basin, extending every way in asphalt, sometimes interrupted by squat buildings or bad stucco or the concrete walls of the 101, but otherwise just shimmering hot toward the horizon, until the streets and buildings disappeared in a brown haze. The Valley did not have snow days, but it had smog days, when several times each year the city deemed it too arduous for children to see their way to school, or breathe there.

Fifty years before, on the morning of July 26, 1943, the sky went slightly dim outside the Hotel Alexandria. Residents of downtown Los Angeles wondered if they’d missed predictions of a solar eclipse. Others suspected a chemical attack by the Japanese. But over the course of several hours, the haze moved north-northwest through what is now Echo Park and Silverlake and Hollywood, toward Pasadena and the San Gabriel and San Fernando Valleys. It had been five years since the city had poured concrete into the bed of the Los Angeles River, and some wondered if displaced mud had somehow found its way into the atmosphere.

The strange air dissipated, then returned. Over the following months and years, the intervals grew shorter: a day on, then a week off. Two days on, then two days off. Soon, off days were the strange occurrence; then they disappeared almost entirely. Locals woke up to find their walls covered in what looked like soot. Household pets sometimes did not wake up at all. Asthma rates increased. Windows were kept closed. Lungs and eyes and any soft, exposed, wet tissue itched. For decades, American doctors had sent tuberculosis patients to Los Angeles; brochures evoked the curative airs of “California—the Sanitarium of the World.” But by the late 1940s, a popular joke around the city—apparently based in fact—had a one-eyed man walking into his doctor’s office to ask for a new glass eye. “Why?” the doctor asks. “Your glass eye looks fine to me.” “I know,” the man says, “but I need one that looks bloodshot to match my real one.” Around the same time, a Harvard sociologist declared Los Angeles “completely lost,” unable to survive its own air.

In 1946 the state legislature established its first pollution management district around the greater Los Angeles area and appointed Louis McCabe, a retired army officer, to be its first director. When he arrived, McCabe was told that the problem was “smog,” the same pea soup of factory smoke and fog clouds that had swallowed much of London in 1905. But the immediate cause was unclear. “The citizen whose house turns black over night believes the ‘smog’ to be the fumes which react with lead paints,”read an early report. “The resident of the foothill cities . . . condemns the refinery which spews mercaptans into the atmosphere,” while “the downtown shopper whose eyes burn and tear is bitter against any sources which produce lachrimating substances.” Officials initially blamed the oil industry, then the many weapons manufacturers and industrial plants built over the preceding decade to fight the war in the Pacific. McCabe briefly blamed a single rubber factory, notorious for the fumes it emitted every day. No matter: he promised the city they would “lick smog” soon.

When I imagine the flora of the Valley, I see yarrow, sage, and coast live oak, but mainly I see pink and purple bougainvillea climbing up the sides of fat houses on small lots. I didn’t know until I was an adult that bougainvillea is an opportunist. It grew where pepper trees and Carolina cherries and gladioluses and chrysanthemums all died. I have never seen those flowers in Los Angeles.

Early in the smog years, florists reported that the smog put flowers “to sleep.” Even those that bloomed developed white and silver streaks. In 1945 LA County still farmed on nearly 700,000 acres; the Valley was the largest orange grove in the world. I have seen photos from the 1950s of sullen farmers holding ruined crops, peeling off the skin to reveal oranges half-rotted from the inside. In the years following World War II, the county’s agricultural commission developed a schedule of sustenance crops ranked by their resistance to smog. Spinach, beets, lettuce, alfalfa, oats, and celery were particularly vulnerable; onions, turnips, cabbage, broccoli, and carrots were more reliable. Safest of all were radishes and tomatoes. The Valley’s residential sprawl grew up where the orange groves failed, and in the 1990s only a few dozen acres remained, by that point sufficiently unusual to serve as a destination for elementary school field trips. One grove in the western Valley was among the first landmarks I could recognize as a child. It meant we were now closer to my grandfather’s house than to my home, so it was time for me to start getting nervous because my grandfather was blind and his messy silver hair and white eyes scared me.

In the Pasadena Star-News, in 1948, a former city councilmanalleged that ten thousand residents of Pasadena had suffered heart and lung failure as a result of smog. In 1970 the New York Times reported the surrender of a thousand acres of ponderosa pine forest, “fatally afflicted by smog” from the city, to commercial logging interests. These trees were nearly a hundred miles from Los Angeles. The three million ponderosas once found within the city limits were already dead. “The needles gradually turn brown, starting at the tips,” the Times reported. The silver streaks appeared, then the needles fell off in clumps. Aerial photography revealed that over 160,000 acres of Southern California forest were dying. The photographs themselves were possible thanks only to the era’s innovation in instrument-only navigation. Without it, flying low would have been impossible. At altitudes between 2,000 and 200 feet, all visibility was lost.

My childhood was filled with diseases of the lungs and throat. I did not develop asthma like so many of my friends, but I suffered recurring bouts of strep and bronchitis nearly every year that I lived in the city. Once, I was swimming during the hot stretch of weeks between Halloween and Thanksgiving when I discovered a hard mass on the right side of my neck, like a smooth pebble between my skin and throat. My doctor diagnosed a blocked salivary gland, clogged up by some unknown pollution. As a teenager, I began to suffer from such intense recurring headaches that they occasioned a visit to a neurologist, who could not decide between migraines or cluster headaches. Within three years of leaving the city, I never suffered one again.

I was never afraid. The emergence of symptoms was only the first step in a process that inevitably ended with a visit to the doctor and a speedy cure. Like many children, and many people otherwise, I believed that my life was inviolable. Any crisis was temporary and governed by an inexorable narrative logic. First, the sudden appearance of an emergency. Then, the routine search for a solution. Somebody would know what to do; if the problem was novel or particularly menacing, a fix would be invented in time. Finally, the danger would pass, and I would return to homeostasis ante bellum, precisely as before. This was more or less what happened in books and movies and on television and in all my other experience of real life, and it happened every time I fell ill—every time anything went wrong in my childhood world.

Thirty years after the first smog haze appeared outside the Alexandria, Los Angeles officials finally concluded that the crisis was not caused by factories or rubber plants or displaced mud but by oxygen and car exhaust and sunlight. Ground-level ozone, both naturally occurring and man-made, is particularly abundant in Los Angeles. It is swept in by winds from the Pacific and becomes trapped in the basin between the ocean and the mountains, where it has circled and stagnated each day since long before the appearance of human life. But when millions of people did appear, they came in combustion engine cars. By midcentury those vehicles belched close to 13,000 tons of exhaust per day. When exposed to sunlight, exhaust and other pollutants undergo a violent chain reaction, producing still more ozone. The resulting gas turns the sky indigo and orange and descend in a brown haze, provoking car crashes and sealing up hospital windows and keeping schoolchildren indoors. Like the whole city basin, the Valley is an inversion trap, but it sinks particularly deep: once the smog settles in it just swirls and swirls and swirls. Of course, “smog” is a misnomer, easier to say than “the result of a toxic chemical reaction of nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds when exposed to sunlight.” Like many errors, that name is just an article of misplaced faith converted by habit into fact.

Despite resistance, California implemented aggressive emissions standards and gasoline quality controls in the 1970s and 1980s. These led almost immediately to a marked reduction in smog levels. Born at the tail end of the crisis, I didn’t know that the air in Los Angeles was clearer than it had been in fifty years. By 2010 the trouble was largely resolved. Driving to high school on the 101 each morning, I could see the Valley for a valley. I knew how to get to the freeway and knew where to get off without a map. I knew the way to the houses of my friends, and my doctors, and even to the airport in the city. Respiratory complications declined and bloodshot eyes cleared. Crops might have grown again if there were any room left to plant them.

It is strange to remember it now, but this is how we knew it would be at the end of the twentieth century: after decades of warnings, we were finally taking it all seriously. The crises of our industrial excesses would be solved, were already being solved, by the next frontier of ingenuity. The air was clear. We would handle recycling, endangered species, and global warming next. Water-supply issues, of which even the most disengaged Californians were at least dimly aware, would be controlled through rational planning until the imminent realization of scalable desalination technology allowed us to drink directly from the ocean. Like my childhood visits to the doctor, any emergency would prove temporary, destined to be resolved by a similar narrative logic. We believed that every scare would give way to reassurance, and we were not delusional. We possessed a faith, one so totalizing that it scarcely bore articulation. We were optimists, not of utopia, but of things just going on, of the present folding toward the future as it was, unaltered, of certainty that the child who finds a strange lump in his neck will return from the doctor all better, get back into the pool and play forever in the unchanging pleasure of a Los Angeles suburban swimming pool in autumn. I think that if you were born in the twenty-first century then it is impossible to believe that we ever felt this way, but we did, and not without experience to prove it. Look up and down Ventura Boulevard. You can breathe the air, and see.

I grew up around kids who hated the city. The line was always that Los Angeles was fake—the culture was fake, the people were fake, the permanent sunshine the fakest of all—and they couldn’t wait to go to college in a real city like Manhattan. But I loved Los Angeles. I loved the sprawl and disorder of the neighborhoods, loved the stupid culture, loved the heat. I loved, even, the hours spent too hot in cars sitting in traffic, waiting to get somewhere or see someone who would say how much it sucked that I lived in the Valley, such an uncool place to live, although I loved the Valley too. Visitors whose experience of Los Angeles is limited to the airport and Hollywood often fail to appreciate how the city encroaches on and is pockmarked by the wilderness, to see the sudden shocks of forest or mountain or the way the city can feel overstuffed, unplanned, decaying and growing over itself across a thousand square miles.

I left for college in a real city in the frigid, seasonal Midwest. But I maintained for years that Los Angeles was my real home, the setting of my real life, the city where I would inevitably return and feel at peace in my native ecology. With the air cleared, planes no longer lose visibility when landing, and when I flew home each December and for long stretches in August or July, I would wait until our passage over the San Jacinto Mountains and into the basin, then watch the whole descent into the city from the sky. I looked at the roads and the small squat buildings, curving on the mountains to form their ozone trap against the sea. I looked at the highways, bleached and cracked, so natural in their environment that you might believe they had emerged like stones out of the ground. I looked at what was once hidden under haze: brown and barren hilltops, palm trees sagging, blank patches from recent fires, the desert peeking through. It was very, very dry.

Conventional wisdom holds that children are more adaptable than their elders, that they are best-equipped to navigate a rapidly changing world. But childhood is the belief that history happened to grownups and ended at birth. Adulthood is the preoccupation with adaptability, worry over a rapidly changing world.

II. Fire

Around 6:30 p.m. on December 4, 2017, a brushfire broke out near Santa Paula, a small town sixty miles northwest of Los Angeles. At 7 p.m., four miles further north, a faulty power line exploded, setting off a second fire near upper Ojai. On the strength of sixty-mile-per-hour winds blowing through the mountains, the fires merged into one. It traveled twelve miles west and south until flames crested the last ridges at the edge of the Pacific and poured into the coastal city of Ventura, where my parents, having sold their home in the Valley, had retired five years before.

My mother saw the fire coming down the mountain, a fuzzy red glowing behind the house across the street. When the phone rang with an automated message advising residents to evacuate, my parents were already half-packed. They called me in the middle of the night from the county fairground on the beach, where the city had urged evacuees to congregate. My father told me they’d looked at the cots set up by the county and elected to sleep in the car, in shifts. There were thousands of people gathered, all of them peering back up toward the hills overhanging the city, squinting to see if their homes were still there. In the dark, they couldn’t see anything but an orange haze, the shifting borders of black smoke churning against black sky.

Like all Californians, I grew up with the specter of wildfires. Even in the 1990s, a week or two each year saw the smog replaced with real smoke, and ash rained down from the hills into the Valley. The fires rarely reached the densely populated areas or the immense basin of the greater city beyond the hills. Ordinary urban fires were far more deadly; the most violent wildfire in the history of Los Angeles broke out in 1933 and claimed only twenty-nine lives. But wildfires burn longer and loom larger in the imagination. They are inevitable in a way that fires caused by human folly are not. Overgrowth and dry winds make the city liable to combust. Los Angeles burns, and has always burned, because life grows there, and dies.

What has changed is that fire no longer comes for a week or two a year. Once, the period between August and October marked what Mike Davis called the “infernal season in Los Angeles” when the earth was fully parched and the winds blew dry. Now the city might burn at any time.

When my parents evacuated, I had been out of California for a decade, living in Chicago and Washington, D.C., and Iowa under blizzard and tornado warnings and the wafting smell of summer pig farming. I resented that I no longer came home to the Valley, but I liked my parents’ new place: it was bright and well-insulated, not even requiring air conditioning, and from the back you could look directly out to the Pacific. They weren’t so far from LA. When I visited, I drove the hour down the 101 as many days as not, seeing the friends I still had in the city or driving around on my own, retracing the sentimental, memorial geography that develops after leaving one’s original home. I liked to sit in bad traffic in the Valley en route to the small museum where I worked as a teenager and, my face unknown to the current staff, pay the entry fee. I liked to call around, see what was going on. I luxuriated in the particular sprawlingness of Los Angeles, which is difficult to describe to Midwesterners. I felt right in the particular dry heat. I had a car when I visited because sometime during my final year in university I’d developed a sudden and unexpected fear of flying, so I avoided airplanes whenever I could. I drove three nights, four nights, five nights from Chicago or Iowa or D.C. once or twice per year until I crossed the Mojave and turned southwest at Barstow and passed through the mountains toward home.

By the morning of December 5, there were over a thousand firefighters in Ventura battling what was now being called the Thomas Fire. But the fire resisted containment, jumping across the small valleys of the interior near Ojai and engulfing the western ridge of the city. Ash rained down for weeks. By the time the fire was finally under control, on January 12, 2018, as many as 200,000 people had been evacuated. Exactly 281,893 acres had burned. Over 1,000 buildings were lost, and the cost, including extraordinary expenses incurred by the fire department, exceeded $2 billion. Incredibly, only two people—one firefighter and one civilian—had died.

Optimism faded. The belief that the only possible outcome was salvation—rescue from the spoils of a warming Earth but also the myriad other consequences of urban planning, industrialization, the general business of human life insisting on itself in places ill-suited to host it and in numbers inconceivable only a century before—no longer held as it had. If in the past it had been simply obvious that the natural course of civilization was to surmount every challenge, now we believed that course led to calamity. We would need to choose another. This required insistence, or persuasion, or something ambiguous called action. Among those inclined to worry about ecological calamity, the default attitude was that the major impediments to our survival were those who were not inclined to worry about it, who kept the old faith in inevitable solutions—the stubbornness of those who either through stupidity or willful apathy would allow us to keep on barreling toward catastrophe. Climate talk got righteous and then anxious: earnest pleas, dire warnings, films and speeches and demonstrations, mockery in the last resort, all aimed toward an insistence on the urgency of the situation: Please, look. Please, believe. Please, act.

The future was contested. It required intervention, predicated on the possibility that we could change our fate in time if only we reached a quorum of believers in the Inconvenient Truth. And we would. I think many people would not admit now how fervently their hearts still believed this, even a decade ago.

I drove to California a few days before Christmas while the Thomas Fire was still burning. When I arrived, the sky was no longer dark, but almost misty white with ashes. This is not what I imagined I would see. Despite having lived my whole life in sight of fires, it occurred to me only when I looked around the hills in Ventura that I had been mistakenly expecting a solid wall of marching flame. This confusion had animated everything I’d anticipated in the days before my arrival—I envisioned, depending on fate, arriving either to a pristine street or to a row of smoldering bricks and warped metal, like the aftermath of aerial bombardment. But a fire is not a phalanx of soldiers. It doesn’t march from here to there. It grows by spewing embers. This is why the direction and strength of the wind dictate so much of a burn: the center is totalizing, but the wind carries seeds from the edges and scatters them. An ember hits a wooden house and it bursts into flames. That house throws embers of its own into the air, catching a car, a tree, a patch of yellow, dying grass. The fires multiply and merge, separating and then spreading, dying down and then popping up again hundreds of meters away. A wildfire is a rhizome, not a wall.

Several doors down from my parents’ house, what was left of a two-story home built into the hillside was still smoldering. A giant crossbeam had collapsed across the wreckage, half-disintegrated and black. In the outline of what was previously a garage, only the washing machine remained upright. A brown burnt car frame, sans car, sat in the sooty driveway. The house next door was untouched, its windows opened to the breeze. Even the white paint on the door was scrubbed down and shining. Down the block, a thirty-unit apartment complex was in ruins. My parents’ house survived. But one morning, I stood outside, looking down at the Pacific Ocean, and saw where an ember had passed through an awning on the porch. I saw the soot spot on the ground where it had landed, no more serious than the aftermath of a cigarette.

In the final days of the Thomas Fire, and in the weeks after it was contained, enormous rainstorms descended on Southern California. One day, at 3:30 in the morning in nearby Santa Barbara, nearly a full inch fell inside fifteen minutes. The rain was greeted as a relief at first—If only it’d come a week ago!—but within hours it transformed hillsides into mud, and the mud carried debris down toward the ocean. By late January, over one hundred homes were lost to mudslides and twenty-three people had died. During the weeks I was there, it was common enough to hear the cliché that this too shall pass. But looking at one of the barren hills, littered with displaced stones and the husks of dead trees, it was easy to imagine a shrub turning to another as the flames came over the mountain and saying this too shall pass only to find that when the fire comes, the brush passes with it.

Six months after the Thomas Fire, the Mendocino Complex Fire burned 459,000 acres of California. Three years later the August Complex Fire became the largest in the history of the state, burning over a million acres around Shasta County.Some 90 percent of the largest fires in the history of the state broke out in the twenty-first century. Half have burned since 2020 alone.

After fifteen years without missing Christmas in Los Angeles, I spent the whole of 2024 embroiled in a medical mystery. An abnormal test result escalated into a complex investigation involving multiple specialists and a biopsy of my liver in early December. I could not leave town until I received the results, which would not be known until the new year. I had lived in New York for five years and it was the first time in any city that I believed the mundane fact that I could receive a phone call and find out that I was dying.

The day before I was expecting my doctor’s call, in January 2025, a rash of fires broke out across Los Angeles. Two of them, in Pacific Palisades and Altadena, rank among the most destructive in the history of California. These fires received an unusual degree of attention in the national media, and friends began to call and text to ask if my parents were OK. I can’t even imagine, one said. But it is easy to imagine a catastrophe, like a Gulf Coast hurricane, that occurs with regularity. When the Thomas Fire had come close to destroying my family’s home seven years before, it almost felt like a novelty. When I got texts and calls back then, at least I had something to say beyond, Oh no, it’s nowhere near them, it’s fine.

I was not dying. I had an unusual but manageable condition—nothing urgent. On January 10, without time to drive across the country before classes began at the public university where I now teach, I flew home for the first time in a long while. The plane was half empty. When we passed over the mountains and into the Los Angeles basin, the woman seated next to me asked if I could see the fires out the window. But there was no black, no great fire, no inferno. It was white and grey. The city looked as if enveloped in a mist. In the distance, a faint orange blob—perhaps the Palisades Fire—appeared murky, as if seen through a greased pane, visible but softened and smudged. In the terminal I smelled smoke. It would vanish here and there behind the scent of a Cinnabon or McDonald’s, but whenever I passed one of the large windows looking out over the airfield, it was acrid, ash, and sour.

I rented a car at the airport and drove north. The route from LAX to Ventura took me past two sides of the Santa Monica Mountains. From the ground, the column of grey black smoke was visible from the east and north, but I couldn’t see the fire. Heading west across the Valley, the smell of smoke returned. There was no traffic. It was the fastest drive I’d made to Ventura County in years.

The next morning, I drove back down to the city to deliver bottled water and respirator masks to a relief center at the foot of the Pasadena hills. Near the edge of the evacuation zone, the familiar signs of a wildfire were unavoidable: the grainy air and smoke taste, the signature red sun. The relief center was run out of a disused bicycle repair shop. Cars came around the corner, stopping as they were swarmed by a gaggle of volunteers who unloaded the offerings as quickly as they could before reminding drivers that this was still an active street—please pull away as soon as we’re done. I dropped off what I’d brought and parked a few blocks away.

The difficulty encountered by these relief centers was keeping track of what they had, what they needed, what they might need, what they couldn’t take much more of and needed to send somewhere else. They had too many diapers, not enough water, then the diapers got picked up, so they needed more of those, and also some contact solution, but not socks—check a few miles down the road, they might still need clothing. Another volunteer and I went to a nearby Target with a list of current needs and filled two shopping carts with over $2,000 worth of underwear, shampoo, Tylenol, tampons, baby wipes, Lactaid, masks, diapers, socks, tissues, water, contact solution, Home Depot gift cards, a dozen other things. One shopper offered us more money. Another, realizing how long it would take to ring all of these items up, tapped her foot and rolled her eyes before moving to a different checkout line. The trip took hours, by which time the bike shop didn’t need most of the stuff anymore. They picked through it and took half; the rest would be sent up the road or down the highway.

Fires are the most obvious and spectacular of calamities; they erupt and consume. They are not like smog, lingering and burning every lung and eye in the city. I stayed for a week and when the smoke was not visible, it was difficult to tell that anything was going on at all. Traffic levels returned to normal; most businesses reopened, if they had closed in the first place. Within a few days of my arrival, even the emergency relief centers shut their doors, surrendering their missions to the official agencies coordinating a response. With every fire, residents of LA are sentenced arbitrarily to mercy—the observation of tragedy from medium distance—or to the dashing of their homes and businesses and lives from the surface of the Earth. Some live for a while in uneasy suspension, barred from returning to their neighborhoods, awaiting an update from officials, not yet certain what verdict will be handed down. Most receive a phone call saying that the tests were fine. A few find out they’re dying.

In the weeks following the fires, residents and pundits in California and throughout the country debated several candidates for blame: insufficient water reserves, or insufficient infrastructure for obtaining the necessary water pressure; failure to corral the homeless who regularly lit fires for warmth; anarchists high up in the hills eager to burn it all down; a $17 million cut to the fire department budget by a reckless mayor (this turned out to be a myth). The wages of the sin of slave labor: prisoners sent to reinforce a fire department they’d never be allowed to join. The wages of the sin of climate change: the true secular judgment of the Earth.

No matter the culprit, I heard nothing at all to suggest that the fires were not inevitable. The climate interventionists, the good troublemakers—they had long since given up the expectation that they or anyone else could have prevented conflagration. They were not Mr. Smiths, softening the hearts of Washington, not even thankless revolutionaries. They were desperate Cassandras: righteous, then urgent, then panicked, then doomed. Bitter fights broke out over poisoned water and carcinogens in the air; activist organizations agitated over rent hikes imposed by landlords looking to exploit those desperate for new homes. Officials warned those who had lost their houses to be skeptical of any offers for their ruined land. Speculators would try to buy it cheap, confident that the new homes they raised in the hills would be worth tens of millions again. The remaining fight was over how justly or unjustly we would survive this fire and the next.

Within a week of my return to New York, new fires broke out in Brentwood and Oxnard and Santa Clarita, consuming thousands of acres and inspiring new evacuation orders. But these fires would not menace the city for long: after more than a year of clear skies, storms were predicted for the end of January. This would provide relief, but city officials implored residents to remain alert for mudslides following the rain.

III. Water

Water traveling the Los Angeles Aqueduct sees sunlight for the last time between two dams just east of the Sequoias. It emerges into the open air and waits, sometimes for minutes, sometimes for hours, depending on traffic in the pipes. Then it goes underground.

The aqueduct is made of granite and steel, and for much of the 233 miles by which it conveys some many billions of gallons of water per year between Owens Lake and the northern supply stations of the San Fernando Valley, it works entirely on gravity, passing through nine canyons and six valleys, beneath deserts and mountains, through tunnels blasted into granite bedrock. It is mostly silent and invisible, but there are exceptions. About five miles south of Red Rock Canyon Park, a siphon emerges suddenly from the northern cliff of a desert valley and plunges straight down. The steel pipe narrows to just 7.5 feet in diameter, the water inside it gathering momentum for an 8,000-foot sprint across the empty floor of Jawbone Canyon. Upon reaching the far side, the pipeline climbs one hundred feet straight up the southern wall, then hurls the water into another tunnel. The aqueduct is the only thing in Jawbone Canyon that cannot trace its citizenship back some eighty million years. Even the trees descend from the late Paleozoic.

From Jawbone, water rushes south through the California hinterlands, south of Yosemite and west of Death Valley. It builds pressure through thin channels beneath the Antelope Valley. It curves around the buried sewage network of the city of Mojave, where it is often exceeds one hundred degrees in summer and rarely falls below sixty, even in January. In the quiet of the California Poppy Reservation, you can fool yourself into hearing the current coursing underfoot. The water passes RV parks; it passes Cal Arts; it passes Six Flags Magic Mountain. It crosses the Green Valley and hooks west at Palmdale. It crashes against underground mechanisms, moving turbines up above. From the surface you might mistake these towers for windmills but they’re not. It passes through Angeles National Forest off the 405. Finally, over the peak of the Sierra Madres, the water comes up for air. It rests for the first time since Haiwee in the Pyramid Lake reservoir, overlooking the San Fernando Valley. It waits in traffic. Then a trapdoor opens.

Summoned, the water goes down and branches out into a million pipes. It divides, smaller and smaller across the city, emerging out of garden hoses, fire hydrants, faucets, sinks, and showers. Sometimes the water comes to a sudden ninety-degree turn and is pulled straight up forty stories or more to reach a toilet in a skyscraper. The water passes over chests and legs and teeth, onto cars and into glasses. Then it goes into the sewer, then the sea. Once salt gets in, the water isn’t any use to anybody in the city anymore.

Los Angeles tells its water story through the life of William Mulholland. Born in 1855, in Belfast, Ireland, he arrived in California in 1877 on horseback. The city was still small then, and all water came from the river. A private corporation called the Los Angeles City Water Company (LACWC) held a thirty-year lease and provided all irrigation and piping in the area. It hired Mulholland as a ditch digger.

Mulholland read books: on geology, architecture, and civil engineering. He got promotions: foreman, captain of a piping crew, overseer of the construction of a new five-mile water conduit below Griffith Park. In 1886, when the superintendent of the LA water system suffered a fatal heart attack, the man initially tapped to replace him suggested a different candidate for the job. “What about William Mulholland?” he asked the company board. “That man knows water.” In 1898, Los Angeles reclaimed public ownership of its waterways; by 1902, Mulholland was superintendent of the Los Angeles Water Department, which purchased LACWC that year. Newspapers, then coworkers, then citizens began referring to him as the Chief.

When he first arrived in LA, the Chief found a town of fewer than 10,000 people. But the Santa Fe Railroad soon reached the Pacific Coast. By 1890 the population had risen to 50,000; just a decade later it exceeded 100,000. That decade, Mulholland and Frederick Eaton, once a fellow employee of the LACWC and more recently the mayor of Los Angeles, took a train trip to the southern tip of the Sierra Madre Mountains. They traveled a further hundred miles on mule and foot until they reached the Owens Valley, an agricultural settlement known then as the Switzerland of California. Standing at the edge of a great lake in the well of Mount Whitney, they conceived the most ambitious civil engineering project in American history.

Within a year, Eaton began purchasing vast plots of cheap ranchland in the area. He said he was interested in cattle, but the acreage corresponded perfectly to areas identified by the Federal Bureau of Land Reclamation as promising water-collection sites. The next year, the City of Los Angeles announced plans to construct an enormous aqueduct to feed the growing population. It purchased all of Eaton’s land at a premium, then acquired more from the federal government on the cheap. Land prices in the Owens Valley, already low, bottomed out; private farmers sold to Los Angeles at a loss. Mulholland assured Owens residents that his aquifer would take only unused flow from the local rivers and melts and there’d be enough water for everyone. The aqueduct was completed in 1913. On opening day, Mulholland addressed a gathering crowd. “There it is!” he said, and says in every telling of this story, “Take it!” By 1920, the Owens Valley’s annual water supply had dropped so low that federal surveyors reclassified the area as a desert.

Over the next decade, the population of Los Angeles grew to a million. Streets spread out in all directions: Los Feliz, Brentwood, Larchmont, Boyle Heights. Beverly Hills grew up out of a bean field. Santa Monica, previously a small coastal town, lurched east. Los Angeles lurched west until they met. Two more coastal towns, Malibu and Venice, came after. Asphalt unspooled over the mountains. Laurel Canyon, Cahuenga Canyon, Topanga Canyon, Coldwater, Beverly Glen—every canyon is two lanes wide at least. A real estate company, hoping to attract buyers to cheap housing in the east Hollywood Hills, commissioned an enormous sign in bold white letters: HOLLYWOODLAND. The last four letters were later removed. In 1924, a new road was constructed through the hilltops, beginning at the easternmost inlet of the Pacific and extending to the limit of the Transverse Ranges, the mountains just north of East LA. The road wove around hilltops, sometimes above the city, sometimes above the Valley. On both sides you could look down and see the city spread, watch the flow of surface-level traffic. At the apex of every canyon pass between the city and the Valley, the road became famous as a lookout point and teen hangout, known as well for risky driving and frequent crashes. They named it Mulholland Drive.

One day in mid-March, 1928, the foreman of LA County’s new St. Francis Dam called Mulholland and told him that the water wasn’t settling right, overrunning the dam’s spillway. There might be a crack in the foundation, he speculated; the west flank of the dam might be on the verge of blowing out. The Chief took him seriously enough to drive out and inspect St. Francis, but after two hours examining the scene he told the foreman that there was no cause for alarm and went home.

Late that evening a motorcyclist smoking a cigarette on the side of the road a mile and a half from St. Francis heard an immense rumbling sound. He imagined a landslide, got back on his bike, and drove on. Thirty seconds later, at precisely 11:57:30 p.m., the Bureau of Power and Light in Los Angeles noted a sharp voltage drop from the hydroelectric plant nearest the dam. At the same moment, in the California Edison Company’s Saugus substation, a transformer exploded. Two minutes before midnight, the Saint Francis Dam collapsed.

More than twelve billion gallons of fresh water poured into the streets. Within three minutes, the water was 140 feet high and traveling at eighteen miles per hour toward Los Angeles. The foreman’s house was among the first obliterated. His body, and the body of his son, were never found. The wave surged down the San Francisquito Canyon, carrying a 10,000-ton chunk of the ruined dam and depositing it three-quarters of a mile away from the reservoir. Around 12:03 a.m., the water hit the St. Francis power station. The sole survivor was found clinging to the canyon wall, his mutilated fingers jammed into the rock.

Where the canyon empties, the water spread out over the county. It dropped to 120 feet, then 55. But even at this diminished height, the surge swallowed the town of Castaic Junction. When the water finally petered out around 1:30 a.m., nearly 500 people, including many children, had died. The city lost power for several days. Appearing before a coroner’s inquest, Mulholland asked that the city not blame anyone else for the catastrophe. Within a year, he had retired. He said that he envied the dead, and a few years later, he joined them.

In 1956, Los Angeles constructed a second major aqueduct at a cost of $89 million. The population of Los Angeles County had grown to around 4 million, and by 1970 it was 7 million. Like Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, and New Mexico, Los Angeles began to rely on subterranean aquifers, the remaining melt trapped underground from the end of the last Ice Age. The county population reached 10 million at the last census, and annual water usage now routinely exceeds 100 billion gallons. I have difficulty with such large numbers. How is there so much water in the world? Walter Benjamin says that the way the world just keeps going “is the catastrophe.”

The story of water in Los Angeles has been folded into the story of water in California at large, the story of water everywhere west of the Rocky Mountains and south of the Cascades. Drought years, worsened by climate change, have begun to outnumber “ordinary” ones. In 2011, California recorded its driest year since the state began keeping track. That record was broken the following year. On April 1, 2015, Governor Jerry Brown visited Phillips Station, a ranger outpost in the Sierra Nevadas used to measure annual snowpack in California. Surrounded by photographers, Brown took a yard stick and thrust it down in bare dirt.

That year, an El Niño season was meant to end the drought. But above-average ocean temperatures failed to generate the requisite large storms.  When the rain finally came in March 2016, it overwhelmed the system. Lake Shasta, California’s largest reservoir, threatened to overflow and flood nearby houses, prompting state officials to dump 20,000 cubic feet of water per second into the salt of the Pacific Ocean for a week. The rain was gone by May, and the drought was declared over in 2017, but 2020, 2021, and 2022 were drought years too. In 2015 alone, some 12 million California trees have died of thirst—even the palm trees, which do not need very much to drink. You see bald patches everywhere, puddles in place of lakes, the red-iron circles halfway up the shoreline marking where the water used to be.

Drought is catastrophe by absence. It does not appear, consume, destroy, or burn like smog or hurricane or fire. It just is, while the sun shines. I think it is the right catastrophe for where we’ve found ourselves, after optimism and interventionism, after faith and debate and warnings. We are all fatalists now. I have students who were born a decade after I stood at the corner of my street, outside the Taco Bell, unable to see the hills around the Valley. They were never optimists, but in many ways they are closer to what we were back then than they are to who we became during the years of urgent warnings and battles to be won. They too have a faith, so obvious that it scarcely needs articulation: it will only get worse from here. Even the most dedicated partisans of our delicate ecology do not believe that we’ll change in time, that we could change, even if we wanted to. Now we talk about surviving, and even that seems hard.

Perhaps Walter Benjamin was right. I was born and lived and will die in the interstices of everything just going on. There is still action, of course, and it is still urgent, but the last decade has settled largely into affect, into urgency as an anxious feeling, into an ouroboros where acceptance is adjacent to denial. A book, a film, a conversation, a debate about climate change once meant a question about what to do and how to do it; now, as often as not, these things are about how we feel about what won’t be done, what we cannot do, even if we want to. In 2020 a collection of poetry was published, much of it by children, “to help Californians face uncertainty and express their personal responses to the climate crisis.” But the uncertainty does not concern what is happening, only what to do. Expressing our personal responses is all we believe we have left.

My personal response is this: I would like to believe that the world can still be saved but I know that if it is, it can’t include Los Angeles and I’m left cold about the rest. The mechanisms of a sustainable world may save what is left of the ice caps, may mitigate the islands and the coastal cities drowning in the South Pacific and the western edge of the Atlantic, may spare the Europeans heat waves and the vast majority of the living world from hunger and disease, but it cannot include a city of ten million people living in a desert traversed by so many cars that they once blotted out the sky, a city that wants to burn, a city that never had enough water and never will. But that is the place I love. The planet is too abstract. Save the world sounds like a joke. Lose my city sounds like the end of the world.

In 1986 Marc Reisner wrote in Cadillac Desert what we knew about the American Southwest even in the age of optimists: One does not really conquer a place like this. There is “too little water to begin with, and water in rivers is phenomenally expensive to move.” Even John Wesley Powell, the nineteenth-century director of the U.S. Geological Survey, knew that “if you evenly distributed all the surface water flowing between the Columbia River and the Gulf of Mexico, you would still have a desert almost indistinguishable from the one that is there today.” Powell did not know about the underground aquifers, Reisner notes, but those will be gone within a century. The West was never possible—not at scale, not even if we never allowed a single molecule of carbon dioxide or methane to escape into the atmosphere. The California reserve system can supply the population with six years’ worth of water. No drought since 1851 has lasted that long, but researchers studying sediment and tree rings have discovered evidence of several historic droughts in the region of Southern California, each lasting an average of twenty years. The longest, believed to have begun around 850 AD, lasted two-and-a-half centuries.

In 1781, forty-four settlers founded El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles. Los Angeles as I’ve loved it was delivered by William Mulholland in 1913. While climate change may hasten the catastrophe, the water should last at least until the twenty-second century. That’s long enough for generations to be born and die, to live entire lives inside Los Angeles. There is of course the political question of how to mitigate the end, of how to welcome the triumph of the desert without the depraved immiseration of many millions.  But what we have always wanted—what I have always wanted, at least, what undersigned my optimism then my politics then my panic then my sense of doom—was for Los Angeles to last forever, saved, precisely as it was. And there are no politics, no campaigns, no future for that.

Of course you only need a city to last forever if you believe that you last forever living there. I only need Los Angeles to last forever if I believe that I will live forever and need Los Angeles to still be home. In 1,000 BC, the deserts of southern Libya were settled by the Garamantes, who squeezed the sand for food and water until they collapsed in the seventh century AD. Los Angeles was always a fake city—those kids were right. We are all fake, impermanent things, bodies and cities and all. Los Angeles is not one of the things that a viable future can save. It’s what a viable future must lose.

My parents still live in their house in Ventura. Every time I visit, I drive down the highway to Los Angeles as many days as not. I will always say “the” before the freeway number—the 101, the 405, the 10, the 110, the 15, the 2. It has been nearly twenty years, but I still feel out of place in the ecologies of the Midwest and mid-Atlantic. My home has bougainvillea and mountains and bad air. The Palisades and Altadena fires caused smog levels to rise higher than they’d been in years. Another round of fires is predicted for the autumn, and the latest drought, declared in 2024, may last till 2030. But I am planning to go to Los Angeles this summer. I want to show a friend who has never been there around the places that I miss. The summer has not yet seen another devastating wildfire, though images of Waymo cars set ablaze during protests this month provoked hysteria far in excess of anything liable to make some future obituary for Los Angeles.

Drought is not the condition of being out of water. No water is the heart attack, the bad blood test result, the catastrophe that means things will not just keep going on. Los Angeles is not a ruin or a graveyard yet. The drought is just the knowledge, acute and ineradicable, that the water is running out, like hours.

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