L.A. Affairs: My ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ life failed. Would returning to L.A. work out this time?
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I had just slipped back into bed after our infant daughter’s 4 a.m. feeding when my partner, Sean, turned over and said, “We should go now. I smell smoke.”
Our air-quality monitor leaped from green to yellow. My breath dried my throat.
We hadn’t gotten an evacuation notice yet. “Let’s wait a bit,” I said, as if staying in bed meant the Eaton fire wasn’t real.
In L.A.’s brittle landscape of concrete rectangles and choking freeways, Eaton Canyon, just seven miles from where we live, was a sanctuary to thousands of people. It saved my life many times. And it was now ablaze, with the fire spreading rapidly.
L.A. Affairs is a first-person column in the Los Angeles Times chronicling romance and relationships. We are looking for original essays. Here’s how to send us yours.
From our dark bedroom, we scanned our phones for information, zooming in and out of the slow-loading Cal Fire evacuation map. The red perimeter pushed against the yellow warning zone that our Eagle Rock house fell under.
The evening before, I’d reported the burned acreage aloud to my partner as LAist updated its website: “400 acres, zero containment.” Then, “800 acres, zero containment,” my voice trembling as if the burn map was of my own skin. The next morning the number of acres on fire had reached the thousands.
I looked at pictures we’d taken at Eaton Canyon on New Year’s Day, a week before the fire: Our baby wrapped against my chest smiling her toothless grin; my feet planted in the stream.
The Arroyo Seco, “dry stream” in Spanish, comes down from the San Gabriel Mountains in Angeles National Forest and runs along the two-lane freeway in Pasadena. In the last few years, this oft-parched waterway gained depth because of unprecedented rainfall. Three inches of water became three feet, and swimming holes appeared.
Eaton Canyon trail hikers showed up in their bathing suits, carrying towels. A waterfall and swimmable creek nestled in a shady canyon is a Southern California unicorn. And it welcomed dogs!
My date was eight years my junior. He was handsome, quiet and polite, with an endearing Oklahoma twang. But he also had a big red flag in his family: his father.
During the pandemic, families, tiny day-camper explorers and the public en masse hit the trails in their masks and basketball sneakers; it suddenly felt like Disneyland. Portable speakers drowned out the creek music. The litter irritated me, as did waiting in line to log-cross the creek. But the crowds also meant something important: Eastside Angelenos had a place to put their fear and worries during a time when we were afraid just to breathe.
I’d started hiking the Altadena trails after my divorce a decade earlier. I offered my loneliness and heartbreak to the live oaks and sycamores, refuse they could make into something useful the same way they convert carbon dioxide into oxygen. Nature became my refuge. It gobbled up my sorrows with its gaping mouth of everything-ness.
I’d start on a trail, breathe in the sweet sage brush and dust and feel myself fall into a harmonic unfolding that had nothing to do with me personally.
With the end of my marriage, California’s raging drought and wildfires and the impending 2016 elections, I fled to Berlin. At the time, I didn’t know how to grow a new life for myself in L.A. The brown hills past the 134 Freeway made me lonely. I bolted to a city of more verdant environs. Green meant hope.
When I returned a year later, the man I had not voted for was still president, my “Eat, Pray, Love” experiment had notably failed and I was certain that, at 38, I’d never find love again or have children. I showed up at the Arroyo most days, sometimes to a half-dry, cracked creek bed. I realized then that nature feeds us in two ways. The first is through recreation and adventure. The other is when we are grappling with the unknown and surrounded by chaos. Then, nature presents its cycles as consolation, reminding us that, whatever is happening, we can rely on things to change.
Before he left, my ex told me I was bad in the kitchen and in the bedroom. Would I find my passion again after a night at a strip club?
Eventually, the drought passed, as did the one in my heart. The waterfall went from trickle to spout. I baptized my pregnant belly in the Arroyo waters. I would bring my new-mother-overwhelm there. And 12 days after her birth, I introduced my newborn to the Arroyo, beaming as though she was meeting a grandparent. I wanted to show her what I learned: that we are never alone among the tadpoles, silt and stones, that we belong to nature too.
As the Eaton fire raged, lashing palm trees and devouring the Craftsmans of our L.A. neighbors, our daughter slept in her bassinet, unaware of airborne toxins. Sean and I shoved her rompers and sleep sacks into a backpack, rummaged through our clothes and grabbed enough underwear for an indeterminable amount of time away. I scooped my jewelry into a shoebox with my passport. We dressed for the day, then returned to bed for a couple of hours of fitful sleep, ready to go when we needed to.
Sean looked at me as if I had lost my mind when I grabbed the dog’s leash at 7 a.m., opened our door to a screen of tawny haze and pulled our confused pet behind me. A thin, rusty coil of sun smoldered through a patch in the clouds.
The nursery rhyme that goes “Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home, your house is on fire, your children are gone” cruelly repeated in my head. It’s all going to be gone, I thought with a shudder.
By 9 a.m., we were sitting in evacuation traffic on the 5 Freeway, heading to family in Orange County. The fire had not jumped the freeway into Eagle Rock, but an evacuation warning appeared on my phone beside dozens of frantic texts from my San Marino moms group: “Don’t come to Joshua Tree! Power’s out. No gas or groceries!,” “Unsafe water alert for Pasadena!” and a slew of links to resources for formula, diapers and wipes.
My ex ended things with me and started dating someone new — someone I knew from CrossFit. So why did I feel like I was competing with her?
With our daughter and dog, Sean and I shuttled back and forth between my mother-in-law’s and parents’ houses for the next two weeks. I downloaded the Environmental Protection Agency’s air-quality app. I still keep careful watch on the stats. Now we’re back in our house and the fires have ceased, but we no longer open the windows when cooking for fear of polluted air. Instead of off-leash sloshing up the Arroyo, I take the baby and dog to the park and worry because neither of them can wear masks. Once again, life feels chaotic. I’m afraid to breathe.
I know healthy forests need regular burnings, but it is not natural for whole communities to be leveled overnight, for fire insurers to abandon their patrons and for people to lose their homes and what they love most about living in them.
I tell myself that nature’s gift in hard times is to remind us of its perpetual cycles. Today it is raining. The air will be breathable again one day. Spring will come, but I don’t know if there will be green leaves this year in the canyon.
The author is a writer, educator and mother who’s working on a memoir. She’s on Instagram: @sophiecsills
L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.
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