Incendiary

Charley Burlock interrogates the myths surrounding wildfires, grief, and California's supposed “gasoline trees” in an essay from LARB Quarterly no. 45: “Submission.”

By Charley BurlockJuly 3, 2025

• LARB Lit

• Environment

This essay is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 45: Submission. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

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AROUND 2010, Peter Gray Scott bought a fan. It was an ordinary plug-in, 24 inches in diameter. He drove the fan, in the back seat of his car, through the winding hills of Berkeley, California, up Alvarado Road to a spot nestled among slender groves of eucalyptus where he had lived since 1968. I say “spot,” not “home,” because the original home that Peter built above the draft protests and the swelling Summer of Love, the home that he lived in with his mother, wife, and two daughters for nearly a quarter century, burned to a gray footprint of itself in 1991, along with the homes of 3,469 of his neighbors.

Peter parked outside his rebuilt house, carried the fan into the garage, set it down next to a power outlet, and closed the door. Alone in the whirring air, he unfurled a collection of leaves—bay, oak, acacia, pine, and, most importantly, eucalyptus—and tossed them one by one into the artificial wind, measuring where they fell on the concrete. He wanted to prove that eucalyptus doesn’t spread leaves—and, by extension, flame—farther or faster than other species, as has been vehemently argued in the days and decades following the 1991 conflagration. He wanted, and still wants, to exonerate the tree.

Eucalyptus goes by many names. There are over 700 species in the genus, almost all native to Australia. Roughly half of these species are represented somewhere in the California landscape. Still, if you point at a California eucalyptus at random, you are almost certainly pointing at a Tasmanian blue gum, which grows plentifully across the state and particularly densely in the Bay Area, where I grew up. The slender, almost Jurassic-looking trees can stretch nearly 200 vertical feet, their dusty blue-green foliage piercing the fog and dominating vistas. On the first day of the first job I took after leaving for the East Coast, I told a co-worker where I was from. He told me that he had visited California once, not San Francisco but nearby, Carmel and Monterey. “Everywhere,” he told me in his roiling Long Island accent, “the air smelled like eucalyptus.” He repeated this anecdote verbatim whenever the state came up in conversation, whether we were talking about burritos, the Lakers, Disneyland, or Schwarzenegger. California: Everywhere, the air smelled like eucalyptus. It felt like the warmest compliment.

To many, the tree is not identified by its smell but by its reputation for combustion. Some Bay Area firefighters refer to the Californian eucalyptus as the “gasoline tree” for the way it instantaneously ignites—supposedly—when approached by flame. Just three days after the 1991 firestorm, the chief of fire planning and research for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection told the San Francisco Examiner that the blue gum “sets up its own pyre”: oil-rich leaves and peeling, papery bark collecting at the base of its trunk, seemingly hungry for a spark. David Bowman, a professor of pyrogeography and fire science at the University of Tasmania has stated that blue gums “withstand fire, they need fire; to some extent,” he alleges, “they create fire.”

To Peter, these claims are absurd. “Untruths,” he calls them, and is determined to disprove every single one. Hence the fan. As he suspected, the leaves didn’t travel far in his garage breeze, only about 10 feet. They also burn out in about five seconds—so even if they did fly fast and far, any flame they held would have been extinguished by the time they hit the ground. Peter knew this because he had burned the leaves himself, igniting the foliage of this so-called “napalm tree” on his outdoor patio with a stopwatch and notepad. He also burned long strips of eucalyptus bark. In 2011, he traveled to Tasmania. He wanted to gain credibility, to be able to say that he had seen the tree in its native habitat, to prove that he knew what he was talking about.

After all, Peter Gray Scott is not a scientist. On LinkedIn, he describes himself as a “designer, architect, consultant, author, race driver,” although the second is his primary vocation. He has designed buildings for several UC campuses: Berkeley, Irvine, Santa Cruz. He also designed, on his own donated time and his neighbors’ donated land in the forested hills, a new fire station, which cut the neighborhood emergency response time from an “unacceptable” 11 minutes to an “okay” four. That difference of seven minutes matters: it took less than 10 for some of the structures caught in the 1991 firestorm to go from intact homes to leveled ash and mangled plastic.

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The fire that destroyed Peter’s original Alvarado Road home was not the first to reach it.

On a September afternoon in 1970, Peter stood on the roof of the then-fresh construction with a watering hose as an arson-initiated flame advanced toward him, driven by 30 mph winds. The blaze was so hot that some homes exploded before the embers even reached them; as one witness related, “it was just ‘boom,’ they were gone.” The fire came within a block and a half of Peter’s house. He sprayed the embers as they landed.

Peter was away when the Berkeley Hills ignited on October 19, 1991. He had been in Monterey at a fundraising luncheon for his friend’s upcoming Ford formula race and was exhausted, following taillights home on I-80, when his car phone rang. It was the caretaker he had hired to check in on his mother, Frances Scott. Frances, 85 years old, lived with Peter and his family. At the time, she was recovering from a knee replacement surgery.

“Your house is gone,” Peter remembers the caretaker telling him over static.

An hour after that call, 18 miles north of his neighborhood, Peter smelled smoke on the freeway. Five minutes later, he saw the eastern Bay Area hills that loom above Berkeley and Oakland outlined in a halo of red. At its peak, the fire was destroying one home every 11 seconds.

Peter spent the rest of the evening visiting hospitals. Then, the morgue. There was no news of Frances Scott.

For days after the fire, as the Pacific Gas & Electric Company cleared downed power lines, no one was allowed to return to the wreckage. Peter walked with his wife, Theresa, and daughters, Ginny and Kate, from barricaded road to barricaded road, trying to reach what was left. Peter wanted to look, he told me, for “evidence” of his mother—for the stainless-steel hinge of her replaced knee. He figured that if he could find that piece of metal, he would know.

The Scotts, who had been turned away at every entry point, were waiting at a bus stop when a gray, unmarked car pulled up beside them. “Get in,” the driver told them, before taking off, on the wrong side of the road, past the barricades.

“Can you do this?” Peter asked.

“I can do anything,” the driver replied.

To Peter, it was “pretty obvious he was a cop.”

Peter had been on the news, holding a picture of his mother and imploring the public for information. Without asking for directions, the gray car curved towards the Scotts’ neighborhood on Alvarado Road. The first few blocks looked as they always had: houses, trees, mailboxes, and cars still there, unscathed. Maybe, Peter thought, there was a chance that his mother and his home had also been spared. A few days before, Theresa had been permitted, accompanied by “some official,” to drive past their block and confirm that their house was indeed gone. But in those first, fresh days of loss, the string connecting what Peter knew about the past and what he believed about the present was thin, knotted. He was still, in his own words, “really crazy,” as his family and the cop rounded the bend and he watched a familiar street give way to “total nothingness.”

Stone chimneys and burned cars were the only recognizable artifacts of human life on their old hilltop. Everything else was flat, still. Silent. Out of frustration, Peter kicked a pile of warped black boxes, burned incarnations of the family’s appliances. Out scurried a brown rat. Days earlier, Peter had been under the house sealing up the crawl space against infestation. “You son of a bitch,” Peter screamed after the rodent, “how come you get to be here?”

Peter never found the hinge. It had, he told me, melted at 2,200 degrees. Peter gave me this exact number from memory, more than 30 years after discovering his mother’s remains: “2,200 degrees.”

It was Ginny who found Frances’s bones. She was 13. At 31, she would return to the exact spot where she had lost her grandmother and take her own life. Peter told me unequivocally that the trauma of the fire killed his daughter. When, on that October day in 1991, Peter picked up one of his mother’s bones, it dissolved into ash in his fingers. In 2016, as part of an interview marking the 25th anniversary of the blaze, he told NBC Bay Area: “You ask me if you get over this? It never goes away.”

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A eucalyptus can be felled, publicly, in an afternoon. As the smoke from the Oakland Hills cleared and the death count mounted, as construction teams worked to pry 2,000 melted cars from the asphalt and the city sought to relocate 5,000 homeless survivors, the foreign trees stood out sharply against the leveled landscape. On October 23, the morning the fire was officially declared under control, the San Francisco Examiner ran a front-page article headlined “Eucalyptus Becomes Bay’s Flaming Torch.” The piece began with the proclamation that the blue gums “played like giant match sticks in Sunday’s holocaust.” According to the Oakland Tribune, the species was a “major culprit,” not just in the East Bay firestorm but also in “every previous fire” in the state’s history. Within two weeks, Berkeley mayor Loni Hancock announced her plan to “chainsaw thousands of eucalyptus” and replace them with safer trees—trees, unlike the blue gums, that were native to the landscape.

The story of how the Australian eucalyptus came to dominate California ecosystems is, in many ways, the story of the state itself. It is a story of historical amnesia, unfathomable speed, short roots, dried wells, and, ultimately, a lot of cash in a few hands. As Jared Farmer explains in his 2013 book Trees in Paradise: A California History, the species was brought over in the wake of the Gold Rush, wooden seeds jostling in the roiling bellies of container ships bound for Pacific shores. They arrived at a landscape that had been stripped to the bone. The forty-niners reached California with dented pans, sharp axes, and nowhere to sleep. They built a city out of the bodies of ancient trees, watched it burn—six times, between 1849 and 1851—then rebuilt it again. San Francisco was the most wooden city in the nation in 1906 when the San Andreas Fault famously toppled the town and ignited the rubble. Ultimately, 96 percent of all old-growth redwoods in existence died in the city’s long and difficult birth. Facing an increasingly barren landscape and a nonetheless booming economy, Californians needed a quick fix.

Eucalyptus—even the word sounds crisp. Four syllables: A fingernail tapping the rim of a cold aluminum can, pulling the tab back against metal and cracking it open with a carbonated hiss. Tasmanian blue gum is among the fastest-growing hardwoods on the planet. The species springs from seeds in dry and degraded soils as fast, if not faster, than any other tree in any other climate. California’s native live oak has what arborists classify as a medium growth rate of 13 to 24 inches a year; over the same period, a Tasmanian blue gum can increase by the length of a U-Haul truck. Unless they’re doused in cobalt herbicide within three minutes of felling, blue gums can resprout independently, new shoots clawing out of an unvanquished stump like Hydra heads.

Eucalyptus became the tree of the future in the mid-19th century, an epoch when speed was synonymous with progress. Word of “instant” Australian forests came quickly to the golden and depleting coast. Trees followed rumors. Newly settled Californians envisioned the knobby foreign seeds as silver bullets, capable of blasting the state’s many maladies with a single shot. American farming magazines endowed the tree with multitudinous powers: the species was expected to immediately replace clear-cut old growths; protect crops; cure malaria, rheumatism, cholera, and gangrene; promote general health; eliminate crime; and beautify the “wasteland.”

The tree, it turned out, was useless. Its firewood sputtered, fizzled, and smoked. Its wooden railroad ties cracked “in an extraordinary manner.” Its telegraph poles rotted in the earth. With 90 percent of its roots growing in the top 12 inches of soil, eucalyptus has an unfortunate habit of toppling over in strong winds, a tendency that would eventually earn it the nickname of the “widow-maker.” Australian foresters recommended waiting up to a century for the wood to mature into functional timber. Oceans away, American timber start-ups advertised blue gum forests “GROWN WHILE YOU WAIT” with “ABSOLUTE SECURITY, ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY!” Botanical authorities consistently recommended seeding other species—slower growers with stronger wood. But nothing grew as fast as the blue gum. Californians, undeterred by the evidence in their mills and fireplaces, remained enthralled with the species’ exhilarating speed and size. They continued to seed the tree as lumber operations folded; as forestry reports decried the “folly”; as shallow roots, driven by an “insatiable thirst,” invaded municipal sewers and drained family wells.

Around the turn of the 20th century, foresters across the country announced that they had made a mistake: ravenous consumption of slow-growing hardwood, supplied mostly by Midwestern forests, had produced a “timber famine.” Within 15 years, experts anticipated that the United States would be wholly starved of lumber. Yet rather than cutting back, the wood-fueled American economy scrambled to allow business to continue as usual. Californians offered up a solution: a tree that could reach maturity in a decade; a crop that, after a half century of experience, they still hadn’t learned how to convert into profit.

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The “fail forward” attitude of the early timber entrepreneurs eerily mirrors that of the Bay Area tech bros who would, a century later, walk to work at yet-unprofitable start-ups under skies crosshatched by blue gum branches. The Orange County landowner Dwight Whiting planted close to a million eucalyptus trees between 1903 and 1905, all the while heartily admitting that he knew nothing of the tree’s “technical values for manufacturing into useful articles.” Whether the product was profitable—or even functional—was irrelevant to eucalyptus barons like Whiting. Growth itself was the goal. Perhaps technology would catch up to capitalism (investors promised that, unlike their predecessors, the new crops would be grown “scientifically” on “ideal” land); perhaps it wouldn’t. Either way, investors would be rich. Real estate companies could flip blue-gummed property, which appeared instantly green and impossibly fertile.

Californian eucalyptus did not cure the 20th-century timber famine, because the timber famine never came. The United States’ ecological shortsightedness and insistent overreliance on finite natural resources gave way to a diversified economy and technological innovations: steel, plastic, concrete, and chemically treated wood. Second hardwood growths slowly, surprisingly, replaced the first. California’s frenzied blue gum cultivation tapered off around 1913, most of the wood uncut. It was revitalized in the early 1970s in response to another famine: oil. The 1973 OPEC embargo laid bare the fragile political and environmental spiderweb upon which the nation’s economic and military dominance teetered. Concerned but not quite humbled, the Department of Energy looked for a band-aid solution. Absolute certainty, absolute security—again, eucalyptus. For another moment, “‘eucfuel’ promised to be the ‘energy for the ’80s’”—before it, too, was abandoned for the sake of progress under a fresher name.

The blue gums remained. Free from the insects and fungi that, in Australia, had evolved alongside the species to keep its populations in check, eucalyptus grew wild across the state. Though the trees do not bore deeply into soil, they are difficult to divorce from the land. Their ashen trunks and branches twist out at myriad angles, curling hundreds of feet toward the sky. As one Californian forester remarked in 1973, “they grow the way smoke goes.”

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It took a decade after the 1991 inferno for the anti-eucalyptus crusaders to cut through red tape and reach the trunks. In 2001, UC Berkeley, the Claremont Canyon Conservancy, and the City of Oakland launched a 10-year fire abatement program that promised to fell a thousand trees, “the majority of them fire-hazardous eucalyptus.” In 2004, the university launched an initiative to clear-cut an additional 25,000. Peter didn’t notice until he did, until the balding landscape intersected directly with his commute.

On a brilliant June morning in 2006, Peter drove down Claremont Avenue. He took the route frequently, the majority of his architectural projects sprawled beneath the hill’s base. Usually, as he crested Grizzly Peak, a panoramic view of dense forest and distant hills stretched across his windshield, houses thinning and giving way to wilderness. That morning, however, he carved his way around the hill to discover a view devoured. Severed blue gums clotted the road. The air was thick with the mechanical bleating of construction equipment, the wail of chain saws against the bone-white trunks, the smell of gasoline. “It was just hell on wheels,” Peter recalls.

Fifteen years after the fire that turned his neighborhood to a “moonscape,” once again and just as suddenly, Peter had turned a corner to discover an alien scene. He called his neighbors, other fire survivors who came down to witness the arboreal carnage themselves. “There were probably five of us who stood there together on this hillside and said, ‘We’ve got to do something about this.’” Peter and his small, noisy clan of blue-gum defenders started attending meetings, writing papers, testifying. At first, they were nothing but a smattering of concerned residents—“there wasn’t anything official about it,” but “we did everything we could do”—yet eventually they grew, donning a URL and an official title: the Hills Conservation Network.

Today, Peter speaks of flight speeds and ignition temperatures with the precise, catechismal confidence with which baseball devotees recite RBIs, batting averages, and on-base percentages. But when he first encountered the slain trees on his morning drive in 2006, he had not yet poured over forestry reports and fire studies. How did he know then—immediately—that the folks with chain saws were making a mistake?

I expected Peter to tell me something about how, in his decade and a half of fire-safety education, in his lifetime of living and designing homes in a chronically flammable landscape, he had gathered experiential, ideally teachable information about combustion or building codes. Instead, Peter laughed. He knew that the trees were not responsible for spreading fire because he knew the trees—“because,” he said, “I live amongst the eucalyptus.” The blue gums were far away when the hills first ignited in 1991—he remembers reading a report that there was not a single eucalyptus within a six-square-mile radius of the fire’s origin—and by the conflagration’s end, many were still upright and growing. In an email, Peter told me that “the eucs were the ONLY thing that survived, and they were still standing there above the ashes for all to see.” He asserted that the tall trees must have shaded the forest floor and blocked the wind, keeping the flames at bay. He equates this resilience with resistance. In other words, Peter chose to defend the trees because they kept living on land after it burned, when nothing and no one else could.

What inspired devotion in Peter provoked resentment in others. Some saw the invasive trees emerging from the smoke the same way Peter saw the rat scampering out from his burnt appliances. You son of a bitch—how come you get to be here? There is research to support this response. In his 1991 book Burning Bush: A Fire History of Australia, Stephen J. Pyne makes the case that eucalyptus evolved not to resist wildfires but to sustain and be sustained by them. Flames purify a eucalyptus’s habitat of bugs, disease, and competition for sunlight and water. The wooden seeds, Pyne argues, can essentially only sprout in scorched earth, naturally hailing down from a freshly charred canopy into the soft, waiting ash. The trees make it through fires because their bark is thick, tough, and able to shed as it burns—“like the ablation plate of a descending spacecraft.” The ribbons of burning bark, he contends, then take to the wind, bringing flames to new landscapes and leaving a burnt nursery for the seedlings of the “fire weed” to populate, an environment where only they can grow.

Eucalyptus advocates are quick to snuff out such accounts, pointing out that the trees sequester carbon, increase soil moisture, and provide a substantial windbreak, thereby potentially slowing the spread of a blaze. I’ve heard compelling arguments that eliminating the tree risks producing dry, windy grasslands that may be even more susceptible to wildfires, and that could not produce forests of slower-growing, potentially more fire-resistant species for decades. I’ve read debates over the high oil content of blue gums’ leaves, the high water consumption of their roots, their tendency to die and dry in a frost. Trent Penman, a researcher with Natural Hazards Research Australia and the leader of the University of Melbourne’s FLARE Wildfire Research group, told me that “eucalypt’s an extremely dangerous tree,” while also emphasizing that there are numerous context-dependent factors that might contribute to a tree’s wildfire risk. “You can’t easily say,” he concluded, “that one is worse than the other.” He also emphasized that change is a multigenerational commitment: removing a single California blue gum can cost up to $7,000. Any species brought in as a replacement will be extremely vulnerable to fire as it grows, close to the ground. “You didn’t want an easy answer to all this, did you?” Penman asked, chuckling.

“People are always trying,” Miguel Gomes Da Cruz, a principal research scientist for Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, explained when we spoke, “to find a species that’s at fault.” Gomes Da Cruz works with data gathered from wildfire observation, as well as controlled experimental burns—including those in which acres of dry eucalyptus forest are experimentally ignited on high-risk days during Australia’s fire season. His are arguably the most reliable findings on tree-burn behavior, as computer models often fail to predict the way that fire actually behaves. He described some of the primary claims fueling eucalyptophobia in the Bay Area as “fallacies”; others he dismissed as “just plain funny.” Gomes Da Cruz has heard similar arguments leveled against the tree in his home country of Portugal, where the eucalyptus was introduced in the 1970s and ’80s. In Australia, where eucalyptuses are native and where he now lives and works, it’s the Monterey pine—a species, ironically enough, from California—that is said to explode.

By definition, wildfires cannot be controlled. Still, we can prepare for them; we can better manage our lands, more consciously design our cities, more effectively educate and protect our public. “We can do all those things to mitigate fires, but we don’t,” Gomes Da Cruz told me. So, when a fire does burn through a town that was unprepared and kills people who were not warned, “we need to find some sort of justification,” he said. In an email, he added that “wildfires are dangerous and poorly studied phenomena, which give rise to extraordinary, or fantastic, claims.” The eucalyptus has thereby assumed a sort of supernatural power—“almost like a science fiction nightmare,” as one anti-eucalyptus activist told a Daily Californian reporter in July 2022.

Perhaps eucalyptus is, indeed, one twig on California’s increasingly precarious climatic pyre. Still, even by the direst estimates, any material risks the tree presents cannot account for the passion blue gum has ignited in the East Bay Hills. Viewed through the lens of its California history, the image of the blue gum that has developed in the decades following the 1991 firestorm looks at once inverted and familiar, like an old film in negative. The claim made in a 2022 op-ed that eliminating eucalyptus could “eliminate the risk of a catastrophic firestorm” is not so distant from the claim, made in a 1909 headline, that planting blue gums could be “the Timber Salvation of the Country.” Both perspectives endow the species with a science-fictional ability to annihilate history: a singular, ecological cure for decades of human myopia. California has always been a land of invention, of dreams—which is another way to say, of gutless optimism. Here, exaggeration is both a virtue and a birthright. Whether it be the underresearched and extravagant expectations of gold, start-up ventures, alien trees, or magic mushrooms, the state has long put its faith in innovation over reparation. We are captivated by silver bullets and the individuals who continue to load with them, even as their fingers go green from the alloy.

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In the final paragraph of one of his emails to me, Peter wrote: “I think it is significant, and worth noting, that the pro-deforestation people are generally not fire survivors.” This is a difficult point to confirm. The landing page of the Hills Conservation Network states that “many of us suffered personal losses in the 1991 Oakland Hills fire, yet we still choose to live in the wildland urban interface (WUI) of Claremont Canyon.” The network still has only five members. There are, of course, other survivors who share the group’s views about the tree and a collective history of loss. Peter is nevertheless a singularity. Of the 25 households whose “personal losses” included a family member, Peter’s is the only one to have returned to the hills.

Grief buckles time. On a shelf of Peter’s new home, which is no longer new but always newer, sit old, charred knickknacks recovered from the ruins. It may seem strange to an outsider, Peter acknowledged, but “a lot of fire survivors have altars.” Peter’s collection includes shards of glass melted into eternal icicles, molten silverware, and pieces of Ginny’s flute blackened by the heat. Other things, too, that had no business surviving: “Clear glass Christmas ornaments that you’d be afraid to hang on a tree, they are so fragile”—those also made it out, unbroken.

I asked Peter, in the fall of 2021, more than three years before Los Angeles was engulfed by some of the most destructive blazes in California’s history, if he was worried about another fire. I told him over the phone about the people I keep meeting and reading about, those who had evacuated and chose not to return to the state. I told him, quietly against the din of New York traffic outside my window, that I don’t know if I ever will. He told me about improvements: mundane, slow, overlapping, and vital. Three weeks after the 1991 blaze, a group of 12 of his neighbors, all fire survivors like himself, had knocked on the door of his temporary housing and asked him to lead a lawsuit against the city for the “deaths and damages [they’d] experienced.”

Peter was surprised. He thought it through. He thought about why he chose to live in the hills, above the city and the flatlands. He thought about why the fire department had failed to act on any of the changes the grand jury demanded in the 20 years following the 1970 blaze, why firefighters didn’t know the names of the streets that burned—why “human beings could be so completely negligent.” He concluded that “when you go up into the hills, what you’re doing is turning your back on the city.” The city, in turn, turned its back on him.

In the end, Peter decided not to sue. Instead, he decided to get “really involved.” He successfully petitioned for better communication between the police and the fire department, for ensuring that the size of public fire hydrant outflow corresponds to the size of the hoses used by mutual aid companies, and for burying reservoir pipes so those aren’t the first things to burn. He has spent 13 years on the task force of Communities of Oakland Respond to Emergencies (CORE) teaching his neighbors how to design a home for fire safety, how to evacuate, how to properly use a fire hose. He has chosen to live, for more than 30 years, on land that his mother and daughter died on.

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Living with grief, like living in an increasingly unlivable landscape, means having to negotiate, daily, with irretrievable befores and unimaginable afters, all condensed into an unruly now. It means building and tending to altars: finding beauty, or at least survival, in the wreckage. It means using less water, voting, pushing for parking bans and fire-hose compatibility and recurring evacuation drills, and recognizing, even as you do so, that it still won’t be enough. It means knowing, intimately, that there is no solution to grief, that there is no solution to the changing climate that wrought it—or rather, that there are hundreds: slow, concentric, and eternally incomplete; rings of a cleaved trunk rather than the line of an axe.

I do not know if I have Peter’s temperament: the endurance, patience, and flexibility to live in a landscape that would ask so much of me. My family has lived in the Bay Area for five generations. I no longer do. When asked if I will ever return, I speak emphatically about the wildfires of 2020, about the sky turning red and the smoke that scared me away—smoke from other people’s burning homes, burning miles and miles away from where I slept. I tell myself, sometimes, that the ash that snowed over the city resembled the ashes of people I loved and lost and still hadn’t learned to accept as forever dead. But I didn’t look too closely. In fact, I didn’t look at all. I left the day the smoke arrived. By the time the ash blew in, I was already gone.

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Featured image: Sharon Mollerus. Eucalyptus Tree, La Habra Heights, November 20, 2022. Flickr, CC BY 2.0, flickr.com. Accessed June 23, 2025. Image has been cropped.