A Letter From My Friend In Los Angeles

As many of you know, I started out in California. As a young adult, this mountain girl from Austria raised in a village in Tyrol with a strong population of 250 (give or take), managed to survive three years in Vienna, the Capital of Austria. The old beautiful, historical city, full of wine and castles, became my new home in 1981, and I was a proud student of the University of Vienna, founded in 1365.

After falling in love, and the shortest engagement I had ever heard of, I agreed to move to America with my new husband. After all, at the tender age of now twenty-two, I considered myself an experienced globe trotter. I wasn’t scared of anything. Los Angeles, the city of angels, could not be very different from Vienna. Right?

1985: In my first four weeks in LA, I nearly got arrested because of a lack of knowledge of the law, I almost got mugged, but the guy didn’t know that my purse was empty and that I was strong. I ended up in an area we like to call THE HOOD and a group of black young gentlemen made sure I found my way back to my bus stop unharmed. Back then strangers and tourists were recognized because they carried a fold-out map everywhere they go. My accent helped!

Vienna, Austria, and Los Angeles, USA! So different, yet so similar at the same time. Diverse and open, welcoming, with lots of singing and dancing, restaurants, bars, nightclubs, and concerts. At any university, the students are busy managing adulthood and learning. The colleges are like a bee hive and so are the cities.

In the first four weeks in LA, I fell in love with the city and I made a friend for life. A very special lady who still as of today lives in LA and who wrote the following letter, which I will now copy into this post -uncensored and not edited.

First, on Friday morning a week ago, it was only a cloud of smoke behind the next mountain range, then the smoke suddenly exploded, just like you imagine a nuclear cloud after a nuclear detonation – and the wall of fire raced closer at a crazy speed. Now it had to be done quickly. I threw some T-shirts and the bath bag into a bag, threw the dogs into the car and off I went. Only to spend three hours in traffic jams with thousands of others on the Pacific Coast Highway, while behind us the cloud of disaster grew bigger and bigger.

The number of fires in California has hardly changed in recent decades, but their strength has. Driven by hot desert winds, the fire eats its way through the waterless landscape at up to 80 kilometers per hour. The firefighters speak of a fire hurricane that devastates everything in its path at incredible speed – an area the size of a football field per second.

Anyone who has ever stood in such a firestorm never forgets it – not only the brain remembers, but the skin remembers the thousands of tingling hot stones, the eyes remember the tearful stinging, the lungs remember the poisonous, painful breathing, the whole nervous system is overwhelmed by a tornado of flames.

This is my second Californian inferno. With the first one a few years ago, I thought it was cowardly to evacuate because in my naivety I couldn’t imagine that I could really be in danger right on the Pacific. At the request of my landlady, who was no longer allowed into our neighborhood by the firefighters, I kept her frenetically barking terrier next to me on a leash, wet the wooden beams with the water hose – only to find that after 20 minutes everything was bone dry again. The damp cloth I had tied to my mouth dried within seconds. It’s like standing in a gigantic high-performance hair dryer with turbo speed. Within ten minutes, the fire ate up eight houses on my street, ten houses in front of me, the fire stopped.

This time I was lucky too. Today I was allowed to go back to my neighborhood through the police checks and breathed a sigh of relief. The apartment complex where I live is still standing. Black dusted by the ash rain, but otherwise intact. In front of the entrance lay a half-charred songbird – even the birds could not fly fast enough to escape the fire. The fire came close to our house, then it was stopped by firefighters, who are venerated here like saints.

The fire follows its own rules. A mile and a half away, good friends lost their entire house, nothing but a puny pile of ash remained, but the sunny yellow seat cushions on their iron garden chairs were not touched by the fire. They look as inviting as ever – right next to the smoldering chunks that were once house walls.

Fires have always existed in California, and there always will be. What has changed is its impact. Because the violence with which they race through the canyons is favored by climate change. Since the early 1980s, the area devastated by fires in America has grown by 1000 percent every year. It is exactly the scenario that climate scientists have been predicting for years. But if you don’t recognize (or acknowledge) the cause, you can’t find a solution.

It would be important to tackle the causes at the root and combat climate change, but we really don’t have a plan against global warming? Nothing or not much is done.

As I write this, breathing the smoky air, the fires are still raging. I am safe, many are not. The fires will continue as will hurricanes and tsunamis, they will get bigger and louder, because we are quiet.

The fires in California tear my heart out. I often wonder if we could have prevented these disasters and if we will ever be prepared. I am glad my friend is safe, so many are not.

What can I do? What can we do?

I am afraid not much can be done, other than unite and help. We should have changed our ways decades ago, yet we didn’t. Now we are forced to live with the consequences.

I am left with opening my wallet, my home, my heart.

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