Starting From Scratch

What do we take with us when the evacuation orders come?

Sunrise during the wildfires in L.A. Photo by Jessica Christian

The day after my daughter was born, I remember looking out of the hospital window from my bed and watching commuters surge through the crowded traffic lights on their way to work. It was inconceivable to me that people were just going about their ordinary lives when mine had completely changed overnight. Had they not been informed that the world had shifted on its axis? Did they not receive the memo that I would never be the same again?

When huge and consequential things happen in our lives, we are left to flail around for the language and meaning with which to haul ourselves out of the murky waters—even when countless others have thrown us a lifeline after being through it all before. Objectively we know that other people have experienced these kinds of things in their own lives, but the truth remains that no one has experienced it like I am experiencing it right now. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows proposes the word ‘sonder’ to describe “the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own”, but I think that only takes us part of the way. Despite knowing that other people have walked the path before us, we are still left reeling in the uniqueness of our experience when it finally comes. It’s like we all have sonder-solipsism. 

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, as the wildfires rage throughout Los Angeles and thousands of people have lost—and are continuing to lose—their homes. I am the commuter at the traffic light, this time—going about my ordinary life when the world has shifted on its axis. Birthing a child and losing a home are not the same thing, of course, but they both do a remarkable job of sifting the wheat from the chaff of life—what remains is what matters. I have not lost a home but I found myself sobbing at the loss of so many others, as the fires indiscriminately razed all kinds of buildings to the ground. 

This is not the first time so many people have lost their homes, of course. Over breakfast last week, my husband and I talked about when to pay this issue attention as writers—particularly given the focus of my work and my newsletter which is all about life at home. I think about it constantly. I thought about it when the fires started in L.A., just as I thought about it when Israeli missile strikes brought Gaza to its knees and millions of Palestinians were evacuated from one unsafe place to another. I thought about it when the war began in Ukraine and people around Europe opened their homes to thousands and thousands of Ukrainian refugees. I thought about it when the wildfires devastated homes and communities and wildlife in Australia, and when floods and landslides killed and displaced thousands of people in India, and when an earthquake in Turkey destroyed countless homes, lives and livelihoods. I think about it constantly because people are constantly losing their homes and—all too often—their lives, too. I think about it because so much of this loss is manmade. 

Breakfast continued. We cut our son’s toast into squares and helped peel a satsuma for our daughter. Once the dishes were cleared away and teeth were brushed and coats and shoes were located, I commuted my way through several traffic lights so I could drop my daughter off at kindergarten and get to work. At some point, later that day, I also sat down on our bed and wept. Now was the time for me to pay this issue attention. 

***

What is my business here? There is nothing I can say or do that will make the experience of suddenly losing one’s home any easier, not least as I have no practical experience with that reality. But I have spent considerable time immersed in the research and language of life at home, and I have surely spent many hours of my life making a home in various spaces and places that are unfamiliar or challenging. In fact, some of those hours were spent doing exactly that in L.A. I want to raise a collective conversation about what creates the feeling of home, and how we can preserve it when we are unable to alter the physical dimensions of home or they are suddenly taken from us. 

The urgency of this issue first became apparent to me during the Covid-19 pandemic, when billions of us stayed at home because of shelter-in-place measures, and I understood just how many people did not feel that their home was a sanctuary. This is why my upcoming book unpacks the emotional landscape of where we live, in a bid to ensure that no one is left living in a place that doesn’t feel like home. I have lived in those kinds of places far too many times to recall, and so I wrote the book from a position of knowledge and feeling. I truly cannot wait to share it with you all later this year.

If pandemics force us home, then climate change will force us out of them. By developing the skills to make anywhere feel like home, we’ll be far better equipped to deal with a future where the idea of a permanent, forever, physical home is no longer the reality for billions of people. I don’t say this to terrify or depress us, but to give us the wherewithal to sort the wheat from the chaff—to find what remains, and make it matter. These are not the first wildfires in California, and they certainly will not be the last. Just as we are not done with wars and floods and landslides and earthquakes and the other terrible, awful reasons for homes and lives to be snatched away with little warning. 

All of the messages that have come out of L.A. recently are heartbreaking. Often, they are also practical—links to GoFundMe accounts to help the countless homeless, and preemptive lists of what to take and what to leave. It’s extraordinary to me that people can write so eloquently and generously from the literal wreckage of their lives. I also wish they didn’t have to. Every time I look on Substack, I get sucked into reading another gut-punch piece from an L.A. based writer who looks life at home square in the eyes for us all, like this from

Priyanka Mattoo

, and this from

Ali LaBelle

, and this from

S.W. Lauden

. These are just the pieces I read between ordering and receiving my coffee this morning at my local cafe.

I looked up the Los Angeles Fire Department’s information on what to do in the event of an evacuation, knowing that these are words which many before me have read with churning dread and fear in their stomach. It advises on keeping the “6 Ps” ready, namely:

• People and pets

• Papers, phone numbers, and important documents

• Prescriptions, vitamins, and eyeglasses

• Pictures and irreplaceable memorabilia

• Personal computers (information on hard drive and disks)

• “Plastic” (credit cards, ATM cards) and cash

I suppose, in combination, these are both the sum total of life and the building blocks of making one from scratch. As someone who has spent many years researching and defining what creates a (good) life at home, I am fascinated with the idea that we can—and must—boil it down to six mnemonic categories when we are forced to put it all in a bag and leave. When push comes to shove, what would you remember to pack? How do you decide between a box of old photographs or your kids’ artwork when the alarms are blaring, the power’s been cut, the smoke is making your eyes burn and the fear is so almighty that you cannot hold the flashlight steady?

Yes, you will be grateful for the prescription which keeps the chronic disease you live with at bay when you’re sleeping on a friend’s sofa, but how can you ever replace the rug you bought on honeymoon in a tiny Middle Eastern bazaar or your grandmother’s jewellery or the drawing your kid made of you with pink hair and rainbow eyes or the pressed wildflowers you put in a frame to remember the baby you lost before the baby you birthed? I know this all comes under “irreplaceable memorabilia” after people and paperwork and prescriptions have been accounted for, but isn’t almost everything in a home that actually feels like home in this category? 

***

I stayed in L.A. for around six weeks in the early summer of 2004. I’d gone to wait out the tail end of my then-boyfriend’s final semester at UCLA, as my own university had finished up earlier. He was living in a two-bed, four-person condo, so we shared a single mattress on the top berth of some janky bunk beds, the lower of which was occupied by a man for whom my only memory is that he shaved every single inch of his body. Given the alluring dimensions of this home, I spent all of my waking hours outside of it.

I couldn’t drive, so I took the bus across the city or walked around Westwood, where the campus was located. Another friend of mine was studying in the same area, and when he came through to visit we’d wait outside the Westwood cinemas when they handed out free tickets for the movie premiers to see if we could get into anything interesting. That was how we ended up seeing White Chicks one night, and then being invited to the afterparty by a publicist who heard our British accents and thought we were “divine”. We drank copious amounts of free booze and I danced with Snoop Dog and pinched Shawn Wayans’ arse for a dare and we ended up begging a cleaner at a closed In-N-Out Burger for a bag of fries at 3am. At some point we also met a truck driver who collected snakes. I forget the precise sequence of events. 

Once term was finally up, we packed our rucksacks and took to the road for three months. North, first, through the redwoods and bears and glacier streams of California with some friends, camping in the wilderness and keeping raccoons at bay. And then south, through Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica. Towards the end of the trip, I briefly left my small rucksack unattended in a bus station and it was stolen. The bag contained almost nothing of value to a thief, and the most practical point of frustration was having to get an emergency passport for onward travel. But in the theft, I also lost my journal, camera, and bags of film roll from the last year of my life overseas. This is why I have no photographs from my time in L.A. or any of the places I visited afterwards. I cried for hours when I realised what had happened. And I am not exaggerating when I say that there’s probably not a week that goes by when I don’t still think about that loss more than 20 years on. 

Maybe that’s why L.A. feels so imprinted on my heart, because I have nothing to show for it. And why I sat on my bed and wept at the thought of all those places I’d visited in that extraordinary city being brought to rubble. I’ve been back to L.A. in the years after my first stint there, with the man who would later become my husband—he has family that hails from Oregon and California, and we have friends and acquaintances who’ve called L.A. home for as long as we have known them. One friend, in particular, runs a preparedness service with monogrammed leather evacuation holdalls for Hollywood types who are terrified the San Andreas Fault will finally unleash the mother of all earthquakes, but not even she was prepared for the scale of this. Noone was. 

I can’t help but think that those 6 Ps for a home evacuation resemble a birth plan expectant parents are encouraged to make. The plan I made before the birth of my daughter was filled with hopeful belief in my capacity for tolerating extremely hard things. The thing about these kinds of plans is that we seldom follow them. Following a plan for dealing with extremely hard things demands that you leap from theory to practice when your back’s against the wall, but you don’t know if you can actually make the jump or what awaits you on the other side. Plans like these are written by someone with a cool head in the cold light of day, and enacted by someone who is insane with fear—more often than not, they are the same person.

When I gave birth to my daughter, and then to my son four years later, I had to implicitly trust that Katie with the cool head in the cold light of day had made all the best possible decisions for me ahead of time, so that when I was Katie in the throes of labour I knew I’d be able to stick the landing. Likewise, we have to trust that the things we are advised to pack, when we must urgently leave our home, come from that same cool-headed place of good decision making. If we ever have to make that no-longer-theoretical jump from an actual burning building, we know exactly what we’d take with us. 

This isn’t a thought-exercise any more. This is reality. It might not be happening to you right now, but eventually these kinds of events will get closer and closer to home until—one day—you’re holding a trembling flashlight in the dark and trying to remember the 6 Ps. Like I said, I want to raise a collective conversation about how we create and maintain the feeling of home in this new reality. In the cold light of today, we must all make a plan for the uncertainty of tomorrow—I want that plan to take into account what home feels like and what it will take to emotionally build, or rebuild, a place to live.

I don’t want anyone to have to make a decision between different items of “irreplaceable memorabilia” mainly because I don’t want any more homes to burn to the ground or for people to be displaced because of the utter fucking chaos of climate change and war. But those things will not stop overnight—not because we don’t want them to stop, but because we have to make the jump from theory to practice and far too many people in positions of power are afraid they won’t stick the landing and look stupid. They’re just as likely to lose their homes, too, but I’m not having the conversation for them—I’m having it for you. So yes, we will still need to make those awful decisions about what to keep and what to leave for the foreseeable future, but if we have better conversations, we can make better decisions. 

The good news is that I’m in excellent company. There are many extraordinary writers and thinkers here on Substack who are tackling facets of this topic with knowledge, heart and conviction:

I find great companionship in the topic of feeling at home from the work of

Clover Stroud

,

Katherine May

,

India Knight

and

Michelle Ogundehin

who all produce fantastic newsletters and deep and meaningful books to take with us as we navigate the End Times.

For someone raising some excellent questions and provocations, I enjoy

Sarah Wilson

’s This is Precious (“We (must) create art in the apocalypse” and “What the world really needs? Some adults in the room”). I love the playful curiosity of people like

Auste Skrupskyte Cullbrand

who launched

Playground

as a way to redefine what innovation and creativity looks like; along with people like Julian Bleecker at

Near Future Laboratory

who reminds us that imagination is our evolutionary advantage.

Anab Jain from

Superflux

is also breaking down the standard template of what the future might contain so we can make better decisions in the present. And

Timothy Snyder

is examining our past so we can open up what’s ahead. I like this kind of time travel.

I also like a healthy dose of speculative fiction, and you can’t go wrong with Naomi Alderman (her latest work, The Future, is bang on the money) and

Margaret Atwood

(an original master who’s been writing about this stuff for decades).

This is just a very small handful to get us started. I look forward to learning about so many more. 

***

I don’t have a neat way of wrapping this up, because there isn’t an end—this is just the beginning, even if it feels like we’ve jumped in halfway through and the problem we’re riding is already fully up to speed. I’m sorry. More and more of us will have to reckon with leaving and moving home through circumstance, rather than choice. Making a decision between what to keep and what to leave—if we are even lucky enough to get to make that decision—will become a majority experience, and no longer a minority one. So let’s find our way home together, and create something meaningful out of the burning wreckage.