"the smell of a campfire"

The end of the world and the beginning of a new one, over and over.

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The world can end in so many ways. That’s what I think as I watch the soapy, pseudo-sci-fi Hulu series Paradise. My husband and I watch the first few episodes of the post-apocalyptic-set show and try to uncover the mystery at the center of it by trading catastrophes. Meteor? Disease? Precipitous climate change? Despotic war-hungry leaders? Aliens? Some seem far away, and some seem far too close.

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It’s the beginning of a new year and the world is ablaze — at least my part of it. Fires light up the night sky, and during the day, the sky is tinged orange like a bad VFX filter. The air is thick, and we feel it as we trudge up our hill with our dogs, hoping their lungs are strong enough. At the top, we squint at the hazy view, hoping the fires don’t hop the freeway to us. We look at the WatchDuty app on our phones, hoping the fires don’t touch the houses of the people we love, even as the red border on the little pixelated map hovers just blocks away.

I can’t stop thinking about my first year living in Los Angeles, when I worked 10-hour days for a talent manager in NoHo and parked on the roof of the parking garage. It’s from that parking garage that I watched the city burn for the first time, watched clouds of smoke make their way toward me. It brought into stark reality for me the fact that LA is a city of both creation and destruction.

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The world is dangerous in so many ways. In Paradise, a cabal of billionaires builds a secret underground world cordoned off from the rest of society. They think it will keep them safe. The truth is, it does not. Because the truth is, there is danger hidden everywhere. When Sterling K. Brown tells James Marsden his cigarette will kill him, James Marsden responds, “Get in line.”

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About a week after the Palisades and Altadeana fires begin burning, they still burn. They won’t be contained until the end of the month, but we don’t know that yet. Right now, we keep our multiple air filters going at full speed, working overtime to clean the danger out of each room. Right now, the rest of life goes on, and they need to do construction in our apartment. Since the building is old, they do some environmental testing first, and they discover toxic materials in our walls and tiles.

Everyone in LA is worried about the air quality. And so everyone breaks out the N-95s when they step outside because the air is now full of smoke and ash and carbon monoxide and lead and benzene and asbestos…

I worry about the air, and I worry about my apartment, and I try to quell the anxiety with knowledge, so I do my research. I learn the discomfiting and yet somehow also soothing fact that most of us are breathing and touching dangerous things all the time. We drink from plastic bottles and idle too long at the gas station and pick at scabs with dirty fingers. The danger is always there. We just… live with it. We do the best we can, but we also just live.

Because of the issues with our apartment, we need to vacate it while they do the construction and make it as safe as possible for us. We won’t be allowed back for over a month, but we don’t know that yet.

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The world is ephemeral in so many ways. In one scene in Paradise, two characters sit across from each other in the ersatz bunker diner, eating ersatz bunker cheese fries while they reminisce about the things they miss from the real world. They are all fleeting things, sensory experiences that can only exist for one moment in time: Summer peaches, the smell of a campfire, a peaceful snowfall. “It’s good to remember the things that brought you joy.”

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During the month I am out of my apartment and out of LA, I spend part of it helping clean out my childhood home on Long Island. My parents are selling the house and they are separating. Things that I thought were permanent, things I thought I could take for granted, things I thought would always be there… well, they’re not, I can’t, they won’t.

Mt mom has saved everything. Stuffed animals. 3rd grade craft projects. Gel-pen coated journal entries. Photos, photos, photos. All in an effort to hold onto memories as tangibly as possible, to ground the past here and now so that maybe then we won’t have to say goodbye. The truth is, we have to.

At night we sort through boxes of memories and during the day we eat the same snacks we used to eat together when we’d watch Oprah after school. Oprah isn’t on anymore, but reruns of sitcoms are. Well, the sitcoms are streaming, and I can let them play endlessly, filling in the blanks with the commercials I miss from when the WB was still a channel.

My parents are splitting up, and my apartment may have been poisoning me, and my city is on fire. And I can barely watch the news because every day, it’s another rollback of another civil right, and I can only think about how easily things go away.

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The world is ever reborn in so many ways. In the penultimate episode of season 1 of Paradise, we learn that President James Marsden (Did I mention James Marsden is the president? This is a world where James Marsden is the president.) invoked a wild card to save the world from complete and utter destruction.

There are so many ways the world can end, it’s true, but in this particular case, it’s ending because a massive volcano set off tsunamis that flood every major coastal city, and the major international superpowers are nuking each other in a last-ditch land grab effort. It seems like the majority of the planet is headed for certain death… until James Marsden reveals he has a secret weapon, or non-weapon, rather. He can shut off all the electromagnetic energy across the planet and stop the nukes. It will destroy all modern technology and set civilization back few centuries, but it will offer an opportunity to rebuild the world. And so he takes that opportunity.

And maybe this is a world where James Marsden is the president, but just because it’s a fantasy doesn’t mean we can’t take a little something from it into our reality, right? Can’t we hope that there are people who do the right thing in our world, too?

I have to believe that’s the truth.

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My childhood home gets packed away, and my parents each talk about a new beginning. I am reminded that there is always time for rebirth.

We return to our apartment at the beginning of March. We slowly, carefully put it back together again. Books stacked on the shelf, art on the walls, knit blankets in a cozy pile. I am reminded that home is what we make it, where we make it.

The fires are out in LA and the air is fresh with rain. I marvel at the myriad mutual aid groups that have come to the rescue, providing so much to those who have lost everything. I’m reminded that it’s community that saves us.

I drive on the freeway along the LA River and am reminded of how this is a city where the industrial meets the natural, where people create and plants grow.

The world ends and it begins. It has to, as we fight for a world better than this one.

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