Years ago, I watched my hometown burn. This song gave me hope.

USA Today

28-01-2025

I, like many, share in the delusion that the place I grew up is unlike any other. Even now if you told me that the suburban magic of Santa Rosa was easily replicable across the American landscape I wouldn't believe you.
The biggest in a family of small cities that make up Northern California's Sonoma County, it has a faded, art-deco quality to it, with a big clocktower downtown that looks straight out of 'Back to the Future."
I spent my childhood there in a house with a green door off Fourth Street. There was a Foster's Freeze less than 1,000 feet away where you could buy the cure to many of life's evils for $2.50 with sprinkles at no extra charge. My mother marked our heights in pencil on the closet door and my father yelled at the radio when Barry Bonds struck out. Not unlike you, I would guess, or someone you know.
It was there that I burnt my wrists under hot plates of chilaquiles waitressing at the Omelette Express and stood with my head bowed at Temple Shomrei Torah every year during Yom-Kippur, echoing the refrain of atonement: who by fire and who by flood, never thinking our changing climate would make such a question legitimate.
Then eight years ago it burned. The 2017 Tubbs Fire incinerated nearly 37,000 acres, marking the start of a new era of disasters for the state not unlike the one currently ravaging Los Angeles. Two years later the Kincade Fire devastated the county again, burning upwards of 77,000 acres.
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I was off at college the first time my parents evacuated, giving me a safe enough distance to only really contextualize it when I returned home for the holidays and saw the empty lots where housing tracts used to sit and the scorched hills rising up on either side of the highway.
While our house survived, the Tubbs Fire destroyed 5,636 structures − both commercial and residential − and 22 people died. Photographs out of Los Angeles show a similar picture. Likely a worse one, in fact, as both the Eaton and Palisades fires burned through dense neighborhoods, already dwarfing Northern California's statistics and joining several other smaller blazes to devastate much of the southern section of the state.
Wildfires prompt evacuationsnear San Diego amid relentless Santa Ana winds
In wildfires, memories burn with the land
There used to be an abandoned area between mini-mansions in my town that high schoolers called 'Top Of The World.' We would sneak there in the evenings to have some wide-open space to ourselves. It burned in the Tubbs fire and with it, all the moments we stood perched there feeling bigger than it all.
An invisible symptom of this particular type of tragedy, when a place burns it's not just the land that's incinerated, it's all the memories that land holds. Like a shot receptor, residents may find it difficult to connect the now ashen terrain to the live stories that once played out there.
In the years since Tubbs, my parents have called a few times to tell me they've packed up and are headed to my aunt and uncle's place in San Francisco as evacuation warnings for nearby neighborhoods have already been issued. Before retiring, they would have weeks off at a time for fire closures at the school where they worked, and Pacific Gas & Electric routinely shut down the power during dry and windy spells 'just to be safe'.
The new normal happened more incrementally for them, but for me, it felt fast. When I returned home and the sun was blood orange or the summer's heat was blocked out by a thick layer of smoke it felt kind of like seeing an old friend whom life had been cruel to. I felt lucky to have known them when everything was sweet, to have learned to ride a bike with lungs filled up by fresh air, and cut out construction paper shapes for all the different holidays during school years spent uninterrupted by air-quality closures.
Tom Waits, and fighting the fire in front of you
In recent years I have found no better conduit for the specific sense of mourning produced by the fires than Tom Waits − one of Sonoma County's most famous exports.
A sort of whiskey-dipped Springsteen, his song 'I Hope that I Don't Fall in Love with You' perfectly befits the complicated grief I feel for my hometown.
In March of 2017, The New York Times ran an interview with Waits in which he shared an anecdote about his brief stint as a firefighter. He had gone through intense training and prepared for every scenario, only to have the first fire be a chicken ranch set aflame.
Waits describes this comedy sketch of a disaster – the farmhouse in flames, the smell of fried chicken, and an American gothic couple watching it all burn. Then, using it as a metaphor to describe where inspiration comes from Waits writes: 'It was an emergency… and when dealing with emergent behavior there is nothing to do but respond. I was in the moment. And it was not the fire I imagined or dreamed of. It was the fire I got.'
Waits's words, just like his music, are steeped in practical poetry. They tell with extraordinary emotion, stories of ordinary blues.
Wyatt Mason, the author of that article wrote: 'Waits's body of work has the remarkable ability to clear a space, to usher you into a very different field of emotion from its first chord.' I know that to be true because every time I hear it, it brings me back to Santa Rosa; my mother on the front porch waiting for the newspaper with her hair wrapped in a towel, my first slow dance in a midnight blue hand-me-down dress, not a trace of smoke in the air.
"Well I hope that I don't fall in love with you\ falling in love just makes me blue," Waits croons, his signature melancholia laying out in plain terms the pain of loving something that doesn't make it easy. Like, say, a state whose natural beauty makes it vulnerable to disaster and a globe that is sick but refuses to heal itself for fear it will cost too much.
His is a voice of somber know-how, of the love we settle for when we outgrow poetry and the ache of repeated unluckiness. It's the only voice that can capture a nostalgia that's been stained by soot.
There used to be a sign southbound on Highway 101 through Santa Rosa that read 'From the ashes, we will rise.' That proved true for the city and it will be true for Los Angeles too, though not without unimaginable loss.
And so I turn again to Waits, mythical steward of the Sonoma Coast, urging us to fight the fire we get, and not the fire we dreamt of.
Because make no mistake, as the climate crisis bears down heavier than before, the children of Sonoma County and all the counties that line the Golden State will dream of fire, whether we fight it or not.
This story, the story of the disappearance of a place as it once was, is the mildest kind of loss that comes from a planet defined by extreme weather. It serves as a reminder though that the climate crisis is not a single-pronged tragedy. It will touch not just the practical but the emotional engines of human life. It is emergent behavior, as Waits would say, back once more to offer advice, to me and whoever else is listening: fight the fire you get or it will consume you