The wind that night flew like a lost hurricane, carrying not water, no deluge to soak a parched metropolis, but speed and fear. The wind blew like something hunted, fleeing, leaving its black unease on the land as it passed. Thousands of men and women donned coats and helmets, shovels and axes in hand, riding trucks blaring their wailing horns toward a fire galloping after that wind.

From the hill we watched the night pop blue neon blisters as transformers exploded once, twice, three times on Mount Washington; the mountain flickering, going dark, coming back alive as though dotted not by homes and street lights but a thousand stubborn candles. Some ten minutes later the whole of Highland Park was bathed in its own electric aurora as a transformer blew somewhere around 57th street, our power lost, vanishing our sense of safety into an instance of black, only to return us the light seconds later. With it came nothing like relief, but the knowing of its preciousness.

This is the feeling of a fire. It is an uncertain, violent weather made up of many cruel fellows. The black wind, the flames thirstier than this Californian city, a braggadocious smoke signalling 'here, here is where we burn', and the dark—the dark worst of all. When a fire comes at night, it makes all the black matter blacker; not just the cobalt night darker, but our thirsty fear needing so much light to be quenched.

We couldn’t see the flames burning the Palisades that night. We couldn’t see the edges of Altadena just starting to burn. But we watched what others saw through the lenses of their phones: saw the homes dripping with flame, witnessed the wind whipping embers like molten snow, saw the country’s frame of reference melt like plastic backyard swing sets in the comment sections of every app and every platform online.

Some say fire cleanses, but this is a nothingness of pith. Oh to burn a grievance or pour love letters into the safety of a hearth, to take down your grandmother’s termite-eaten home piece by piece and build a bonfire out of it, to cauterize a wound with laser or lighter or white hot knife blade—these can be healing, yes. To burn can treat some part of you which needs something to end.

But cleansing? Western spiritual nonsense. Fire is only sterile once the spring comes after the last of the burnt trunks has fallen and are swallowed by all those thriving, aliving, crawling things. Before the healing comes the weeping blister. Before the healing is ash, it is smoke. It is all of us breathing in, not the final page of a burnt something’s story, but some still-burning page right in the middle of a story in progress.

Still burning and people across the country were trying to figure this whole wildfire thing out. Still burning and points were being scored in this forum and that, on X and Instagram and through the comments section of the crime-capitalization app, Citizen. This need for justification, to always win the high ground on every issue, is a wildfire all its own, and it’s been burning long before Santa Ana came blowing through this January. We burn hot at one another, stoke each other’s flames, burn, burn, burn each other down, and then fall apart like logs in a wood stove—smoldering, raging, cooling; all out of fuel.

The herd of wild flames lit into the Palisades, then Altadena. Some strays went bolting into Burbank, into the San Fernando Valley, into Topanga, into West Hills, sprinting and leaping from canyon to hill to home. All of Hollywood could see Runyon burst into flames, a colt of a fire whipped and corralled by a wind that felt like it’d never quit.

And in the comments of it all, that fire spread faster. Some said God or Allah was punishing the wicked. Some were looking for information. Some wanted to know where to go, when to flee, if the air was okay to breathe. Some blamed this or that politician. Some pointed toward the very real and scientifically proven rise in catastrophic weather patterns driven by a warming planet. Others set tiny fires of conspiracy all their own. “Isn’t it suspicious that multiple fires started all at the same time?” was a common refrain. “This is just the government trying to control us, to set the table for a military takeover” was another.

Yet if they had been there as I was, so much would have been made so obvious. The same way it was when I was a child in Virginia and the then-rare hurricane would come barreling deep into the East Coast. What was obvious then, as we huddled away from the windows, lights whimpering off and on until trees went down and power lines were ripped to the ground, was revealed to be just as obvious during these fires: man’s power pales in comparison to that of a planet's.

More than cleansing, what fire does is reveal.

Locally, it reveals the level of drought a land is experiencing. It reveals the inequity in the distribution of resources. Fire reveals to us the courage in those who run toward it with no hope of containing it until the wind dies down. It reveals how those of us who care to help do so with desperate speed, racing against the pain of loss as much as the terror of disinformation.

Nationally, fire reveals much more convoluted themes. It reveals that we’d much rather watch things burn on our screens than see resources distributed. It reveals just how thoroughly we’ve been trained to establish sides, teams, enemies, to find targets, to heat seek and destroy the nearest flippant response with our quickest flippant quip. It reveals that credit and blame is more important than charity and unity.

Would that we could all get burnt by the fires we so rapidly comment on, to be burned back alive and awake to the pain and reality of this very real, planetary event; to realize how far we’ve been pushed from analyzing context and developing our perspectives before making absolute declarations. How would we react if the flames flared out from our phones onto our hands, to reveal the pus we don’t believe we’ve got? Would we look at our own reflections in our burnt out screens and consider why it is our thumbs are so quick to set fires in the eyes of our fellows?

Ultimately, what these fires have revealed is how captured our minds are by algorithms and politicians, by platforms and identity politicking. Captured so completely by an economic machine upon which the sticker of democracy is peeling away, adhesive dry and flapping in the metaphorical Santa Ana winds blowing through the dried out canyons of our thought processes. We have been so fully captured that we cannot even see how deep into this maze we’ve stumbled, taught to point out winners and losers while sprinting deeper toward the promise we can become the former if only we can identify, hate, and punish the latter.

No flame is put out by winning a duel within the comments section of a single post from a single source on a single platform against an anonymous opponent. No rivers run more fully, no rain comes waltzing, no system is shifted. Nothing is cleansed. Nothing is healed. Nothing, in fact, happens at all, save for the chemistry in the brain popping like a transformer in a windstorm.

Where things happen is in the world of the real, on the streets which the citizens of Altadena and Pasadena and Los Angeles and Alhambra have descended with brooms and water and food and clothes. Things happen in the physical world, where homes are open and baths are taken, and the soot is washed clean. In community, where hands touch hands and resources are packed and passed and delivered, where words are passed like gentle showers from lip to ear, where seeds of aid are sown and trust is grown like wildflowers blooming after wilder fires—that is where things truly change.

As for cleansing… it comes in the long green after; when all the flames have been put down to ash, after someone has come with the gauze and ointment, after all of us have learned to spot a spark in the dark, to rush toward it together, to smother it before it erupts into something so uncontrollable only our fear can match its intensity.

What strange things did you witness online during the fires? What did you feel inside as you felt compelled to comment, or not, as the wildfires were still cropping up?