Facing the Fires and the Future Together

On the devastation in my hometown of Los Angeles and fire season as a call to arms.

An unedited picture taken by my friend Amy Silver from a rooftop in Los Angeles.

Welcome to 2025, a new year that has quickly let us know, in the most humbling ways possible, she is here, and she has something to tell you.

On Tuesday, I began writing a beginning-of-the-year letter to all of you with some thoughts on what I hoped this year might bring for us. I was about halfway done with it when my phone buzzed with a message from my mom in Santa Monica, California. She had sent me the below video of what the sky currently looked like outside her bedroom window in the apartment where I was born and raised: a dark haze over a blood red sun that looked like some angrier sister of the moon, ominously blazing through a cacophony of smoke-covered clouds. The image startled as my mom panned across it, a crystal clear blue sky in stark contrast behind it. The day had barely even begun in Los Angeles for my mother, and already the fires were making themselves known.

I’ve lived in New York City for the last eighteen years, but my bones were built in LA. I’m a third-generation Angeleno with deep roots across the entirety of the massive city that extend like freeway overpasses: from my first boyfriend in the valley, to getting a tattoo (and some piercings) way too young on the Venice Boardwalk, to walking red carpets in Hollywood. From late night poetry readings in Marina del Rey, and even later nights going to raves in the ’90s in San Bernardino. I know the city of Los Angeles inside and out, and the city knows me, outside and in.

As I watched the news report of multiple fires beginning to blaze all over, I started texting loved ones in the city to check in. Old West Coast text chains that had been inactive for years rose from the dead, and the horror stories began to pour in, one by one. A friend’s house in Brentwood teetered on an evacuation line, threatening her family for hours. One of my best friends, Eliza Clark, wrote to tell me her brother Spencer’s home in Altadena was devoured by flames in a flash, leaving only the chimney. One friend displaced, another just barely got her grandmother out of the house, while another had gone looking for his dog after it had been spooked by the sound of trees breaking their necks in the whiplashing wind nearby. A friend I went to high school with texted back, I just got out of my car. I’m just running. I don’t know where. I don’t know.

Familiar streets I have known my entire life looked like unrecognizable ghost towns on the news and in friends’ pictures. Streets my dad used to drive me down on my way to the set of General Hospital when I was a young actress, now covered in ash. Side streets that were my key to beating LA’s most notorious traffic light years before Waze was a thing, now closed and cluttered with burned out, abandoned cars. Streets where I drove to auditions, or where I’d meet a friend at our favorite bar. Streets where I’d drive to see the ocean at one end and hike through the Angeles National Forest at the other. All of it—the markers of memorable homes, of locals-only hidden gems, of parking lots filled with teenage secrets. Gone. In a matter of hours.

As an LA girl, I grew up with a love for the Santa Ana winds, otherwise known as the “devil winds,” which come every year, care of high-pressure air masses in the Great Basin. Since I was a child, they always felt witchy to me; the signal of a changing season, so uniquely belonging to this city. The winds felt like the announcement of something coming, like any moment something would arrive that everyone who struggled needed—that everyone in the city had been waiting for all of their lives. In my teens, I felt like the Santa Anas whipped for me and me alone, as unpredictable and moody as I was. Whenever they came, it felt like we were casting a spell together, like some teenage conjuring coming to life.

But the meaning of the winds changed as I got older, as the world warmed, as climate change took hold and the once beautiful California sagebrush dried up from chronic drought. Now the annual winds elicit a different feeling, one of a foreboding fear. As Los Angeles gets drier by the year, the Santa Ana winds don’t feel like the machination of a teenager’s imagination anymore, but an annual threat from a planet that is getting quite tired of us human beings, and honestly, I don’t blame her. This week, that threat became a promise.

Like many of you, I have felt helpless watching all the devastating destruction in California from the fires, with what feels like no end in sight. My parents are luckily safe in their home, but so, so many others are not. There have been some photos of the fires circulating across social media that were found to be AI-generated, but there’s no need for fake images when reality looks right out of a film. To wake up with your world on fire, to lose everything in an instant, it is unfathomable.

Since the fires began on Tuesday, I’ve been trying to meet my despair with some kind of proactive inquisition. Because all of this pain and suffering cannot be for nothing. And there will be more fires, literal and metaphorical, in 2025 and beyond, and learning how to be as prepared and community-minded as we can be for any of them is a critical next step. How should we think about the ways we will react to future emergencies, the personal, political, or existential ones? How can we best prepare ourselves now for what is to come, to not be caught off guard, to be as ready as we can when all else fails? What can we do for others who will face the future flames of so many different crises, the sear of loss, the disorienting pain of a country that grows more unrecognizable by the day?

The devastation on the West Coast of the United States does not have to be an apocalyptic omen, but maybe something that speaks to our greater purpose instead—one that asks us to open ourselves up to the bravery and courage needed for whatever disasters may lie ahead: those that are natural and the ones that are not. Something that reminds us, like it did this week in Los Angeles, that we can meet any moment of devastation, loss, and suffering, if we meet it together.

No matter where you are today, I hope you, your friends, family, and community are safe. Below I’ve shared some resources for folks who need assistance, as well as places in need of donations and other opportunities to support those impacted by the fires. Please feel free to add any other organizations, GoFundMe links, calls for volunteers, etc. in the comments below.

Love,
Amber

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Note for your calendars: Our first gathering of the year will take place over Zoom for paid subscribers on Saturday, January 25 from 2pm–3pm ET. More details to come.

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Resources + ways to help

Mutual Aid LA Network (MALAN) is regularly updating this Google sheet with information on PPE, shelters, animal rescues, and more. You can share their post on Instagram to spread the word. Shareable link (case-sensitive): tiny.cc/malan-fire

Gear drive and monetary donation directory (organized by Lagartijas Climbing Crú)

Disaster Distress Helpline (via SAMHSA) can be reached by calling or texting 1-800-985-5990. Assistance is available in English and Spanish.

Collected wildfire resources (via AAPI Women Lead)

Wildfire Relief Fund (organized by GoFundMe)

GoFundMe for Spencer Clark (brother of Eliza Clark)

Displaced Black Families GoFundMe Directory (compiled by People’s City Council - Los Angeles). Sharable link (case-sensitive): bit.ly/rebuildAD

If you are in need of masks or would like to donate masks, fill out Mask Bloc LA’s free mask request + volunteer interest form here.