I LOVE L.A.

Most of us didn’t grow up in Southern California. We were raised expecting snow drifts or pissing-down rain outside the window on the first of January. But through that other window—the TV—we glimpsed the blue skies of the Rose Bowl. At the Rose Parade, sunlight bathed fantastical conveyances made of flower petals that glided down the gilded streets, cheered by crowds clad only in windbreakers.

How the dream of this place beckoned—surfing, driving convertibles, lunching al fresco in the temperate winter months as beautiful people swanned by. Perhaps they were on their way to a gorgeous hilltop party humming with sweet chords and sweeter wine, or to make the movies and shows that warmed the chilled hearts of the hinterland. Dreams, the tube confirmed, could come true. You just had to get here.

Thousands of dreams that had come true went up in smoke over the last week.

They’re calling it California’s Katrina, one of the most devastating natural disasters ever to befall an American city. Swaths of homes embodying the California idyll are now ruins, smoked like a cigarette by the rapacious infernos that have prowled the landscape for days and days, the flames borne aloft by relentless, whipping gusts and turned into fire-breathing dragons. A small shift in their direction meant destruction here, salvation there.

It’s 2025 but our fate still hangs on the wind.

As in every industry, ours is populated by people who like to win. Sometimes we like it too much, and occasionally we like it to the exclusion of all else. But the ultra-competitive quest for #1s and the breaking of the next superstar is at the heart of what drives us. Yet people driven by the need to win, who do win, can be struck dumb by real loss.

We are faced with friends and colleagues who’ve lived through this unfathomable calamity, many weathering the unbearable anxiety of not knowing if they have a home to go home to. We’re now a city swarming with climate refugees and the scorched remnants of their dreams, and we are struggling to shelter them. Many of these, in turn, are struggling to explain to their children the annihilating reality of what just happened, is still happening, and wondering how to tell the unwritten story of what happens next.

From Pacific Palisades west to Malibu, north to Topanga and east to Brentwood’s Mandeville Canyon, from Altadena south to Pasadena, east to La Cañada Flintridge, west to Sierra Madn flames are all around, you find out what kind of people you’re really dealing with. People who can not only survive in the face of tragedy but can lift one another up. That is the generosity of spirit we’ve seen this past week, the messages of support, the donations, the extraordinary kindness from so many directions, the resilience born of shared crises, reminders that there is genuine community here in La La Land.

It’s a community that is also home to countless first responders. Their heroic work knocking down the flames, hour after hour, in unspeakably difficult circumstances, will surely resonate in the hills and valleys and canyons of our community forever after.

The true emotional toll of the fires will come into sharper relief as the immediate danger subsides. So many questions hang in the smoky air: Where will we live? Where will the kids go to school? How will we find new furniture, new clothes, a new car? When, if ever, will we find a new normal?

We have a long, long, long period of rebuilding ahead.

In the meantime, there is wine to drink. Let’s drink it. There are stories to tell. Let’s tell them with all the gusto they deserve. There are songs to sing—let’s belt them out. And let’s toast to this place, our fabled town that for all its gossamer delusions and bubbleheaded babble is real and beautiful. Let’s toast to a day when we are made whole again. It’s a faraway thing, but we’ll dream it into being.

Photos: Yannick Bera, Tom Briskey, Carol M. Highsmith