You could lose everything tomorrow in a fire, flood or earthquake. Resilience is key to surviving

We needn’t imagine what it must be like for those fleeing wildfires; we see videos, hear panic, feel fear. In our culture, we believe there are four elements: fire, earth, water, wind. In November 2018, all four elements descended upon Paradise, California, with a destruction so profound that the area may never recover.

When catastrophic fire sterilizes soil, nothing can grow, not even with rain. Perhaps there is a fifth element, as many cultures believe. Events in Paradise might reveal that element.

I’ve been thinking about loss, especially since collaborating with a woman who lost five generations of memories from two homes in Paradise. Christy Heron-Clark grew up there; I was born nearby. Last January, we made what amounts to an archeological dig.

Walking carefully through debris that used to be her home, Christy remembered where things should have been, and triumphantly held something aloft that used to be precious. She poked through vaporized and toxic fragments with a steel pole, leaned on it when grief overwhelmed, and still, she persevered.

I found the head of a hammer that used to be a hammer. Remembering a hammer of my father’s, a man more intellectual than handy, this small object seemed to project some sort of totemic presence for me. I found the remains of her father’s antique rifle collection. In a burned fire extinguisher, I found irony.

We brought back simple, everyday objects. Only metal and porcelain survived, though distorted and transformed. We inventoried and photographed each object for four months. Christy addressed each from the viewpoint of her memories. I looked at each as each object exists now, from the view of an artist – before and after.

In June, we installed an exhibition, “Simple Objects: An Excavation,” at Archival Gallery in Sacramento. In September, we gave everything to the Sutter County Museum in Yuba City, for a second interpretation.

Until Paradise, my daughter thought I was an alarmist. She has five children and lives in fire-prone Marin. How could she save them all in such an emergency? Her husband works across the Bay. How would he get home? Swim?

In 2011, I interviewed the late Eldridge Moores, a noted tectonic geologist, about quakes and the Bay Bridge expansion. “I never drive to the Bay Area without a full tank of gas,” he said. This still haunts me. The reality is that all traffic would freeze. He should have worried about wearing a sturdy pair of shoes.

In Los Angeles in 1971, I was shaken awake, so terrified that I levitated off the bed as the earth vibrated, and as water leapt out of our pool. For months, each slight tremor brought panic.

Scientists make predictions about what could happen to Southern California if and when a major quake starts at the Salton Sea, the southern terminus of the San Andreas Fault. Geologic forces accumulate, and would accelerate by the time it strikes Los Angeles.

Every fall, coastal breezes are no match for winds that blast across Southern California from deserts in the east. Santa Anas have always been cause for anxiety. Just above lush urban areas, mountain landscapes shift to chaparral, an oily native that thrives on fire. Extreme heat, high winds and low humidity have always triggered short tempers and an uneasy feeling that, as a news story about the 1961 Bel Air fire said, are a “prescription for catastrophe.”

In Sacramento, we only worry about floods; we may now be the number one city in the US at risk of catastrophic flood. This entire region, a part of the Bay Delta before John Sutter arrived, flooded. Sometimes the entire Central Valley was one huge lake. The failure at Oroville Dam in 2017 is proof of our enduring vulnerability.

In California, when it rains, we believe droughts are over forever. We let water flow, believing that there’s enough water to frack the east side of the Southern Coast Range, believing that giant corporate farms can plant thirsty tree crops in that salt saturated land while sucking the earth and rivers dry. They grow pomegranates and alfalfa to sell to countries that have no water. We need to worry about water tables, subsidence, and the future of family farms.

People still come to California searching for a rush of gold that really only lasted one year, one-hundred and seventy years ago. What these seekers of opportunity don’t realize is that most of California isn’t, in reality, very habitable at all.

In a firestorm, whether in Paradise or Malibu, we race around desperately trying to decide what to save; pictures of our babies, legal documents? What?

Sometimes it seems like humans are racing nature to see which of the two forces is the most destructive. The recent rise in intolerance reflects this insecurity: about present and future, jobs, food, healthcare, housing, an endless list of bad news. We are all vulnerable, and yet, when were there ever guarantees? What we fail to understand is our own role, our passivity: to plan, prepare, educate, adapt. And if we do, where does that get us?

What if it’s not a house that can’t be saved, but an entire town, an entire state? Can we save a nation, or even a planet?

We desperately try to decide what to save, but all of us will lose. If not yet, then sometime. How do we cope? To hold what’s left in our embrace, to nurture resilience is the only way we’ll survive.

Perhaps there’s only one thing that’s certain, and that is the fifth element.

Change.