Escape from Los Angeles
June 04, 2025 at 12:13AMFor Alta Journal, Katya Apekina recounts living through the Palisades and Eaton Fires that started in California on January 7, 2025. In a piece as evocative as it is apocalyptic, she recounts the flames through her window and the toxic smoke that blanketed the area during the fire and in the immediate aftermath. As a relative newcomer to Los Angeles, she finds that the disaster has forced her to reckon with the price she’s willing to pay to live in paradise.
Things are OK/things aren’t OK. The world is ending/the world is always ending. We go back and clean the ash out of our house where it blew in under the doors and on the windowsills. I’m in a state of hysterical terror. I want to go home. This is not my home. I fly to Boston with my daughter. I can see the fire from the airplane. My husband joins us, and we stay in my parents’ living room. My husband and daughter are not happy with this disruptive, unilateral decision I’ve made. I read a lot of think pieces that frame the fire as the price you pay to live in paradise. It seems presented like a moral question. Who would abandon their city when she is in need? Who would complain about her smoke? Her toxic ash? An extractor and a capitalist. I feel slick and slippery for the ease with which I can depart a place. I grew up in Boston, but I wasn’t from there either. I came there as a refugee, and then I left when I was 18, and moved and moved, going farther and farther west until there was nowhere left to go.
In L.A., it finally rains, the ash was less airborne now, and we need to go back, my husband and daughter say. So, we do. But Cal Fire releases a fire-hazard severity-zone map and our house is located in the highest hazard category. It seems a matter of time before we’re back again on the East Coast. But also a matter of time before there’s smoke and bad air there too—the forests in Canada will burn, as they already have begun to; there will be floods and hurricanes.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/06/03/escape-from-los-angeles/
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