Chris Badger, a professor at Santa Monica College and head of an architectural design and construction company, was at his Topanga Canyon home on Tuesday morning when he received a call from his children’s school, reporting a fire was in close range, suggesting to pick up his children immediately, though Badger was soon alerted their home was already in evacuation warning and contacted his wife to rush home from UCLA. After securing a temporary rental in Mid-Wilshire, the Badgers witnessed multiple other fires raging in the city, and by Thursday they knew they had to make further distance.
“At this point we just had to get out of the smoke. The LA basin was full of everyone’s refrigerator and fiberglass insulation, their Tesla batteries and everything else as a vapor in the air that you don’t really want to put in your lungs or your kid’s lungs. We had the good fortune of having a car and decided to come out of that smoke and go upwind. We booked a place in Yucca Valley and then we got news that there might even be a power outage up there. The host said, ‘there’s maybe or maybe not power with rolling blackouts.’ We looked around at what we were looking at and said ‘hey no power that sounds fine, comparatively right? Sounds relaxing.’”
When I asked Badger ‘why the hi-desert,’ versus anywhere else they could have escaped to, he mentioned they had been coming up here all their lives, then reminded me of the ‘Southern California Organism’ that the Basin plays a role in, regardless of our perceived isolated independence.
“The large megalopolis of Southern California is kind of one big functioning system, the different parts are different organs. Like the port does something, Wilmington does something really particular within that as an organ of the machine right? So what does the hi-desert do? I mean, it’s an extremity of the organism—it’s all the way out at the tip. It serves a role for the people of the whole region as a kind of mythic wilderness or at least portal to the mythic wilderness. This archetypal place on the outskirts of town that has a role in literature, music, and this imagination that we all have about our heritage and the American West. Then also, where can you go find a place to stay for who knows how long, that’s going to be more affordable? That’s a real consideration when you have to leave home on no notice and where you don’t know how long you’re going to pay for a place to be in. So we come to the hi-desert—it’s beautiful up here, we can get a simple accommodation. I took my kids up to Pipes Canyon and they played in the frozen stream in pristine wilderness at a time of high stress.”
Justin Maurer and Heather Rossi, two sign language interpreters from East Hollywood, were able to avoid the path of the Runyon Canyon Fire yet had to escape to the hi-desert for Heather’s personal health reasons due to the smoke.
“I have asthma and I was concerned about the air quality and when we were near the evacuation line, we looked at the air quality it was triple the amount that it should have been. My asthma is not usually an emergency until there is some sort of air quality issue. During COVID I had to use my inhaler regularly, so I was just really nervous that all of that would happen again and I felt it instantly. It was 10:00 at night and we thought, ‘do we evacuate, do we stay overnight?’ Luckily, we had an air purifier and we put it in the bedroom and then in the morning we were just like ‘yeah we need to get out of here somehow.’ It was either get on a plane—physically go somewhere else—instead, we decided to just come drive out here to where there’s better air quality.”
Heather’s partner Justin, a long time visitor to Joshua Tree, is aware of the stress this mass exodus of Angelenos is having on the hi-desert but asked for local understanding.
“If you’re local to Joshua tree I know that during the pandemic probably folks here in the valley felt overrun by people from L.A coming out and kind of taking advantage and you’re feeling like your special place is being overrun. As an Angeleno I’d would ask for a little bit of empathy. A lot of the folks not only have had their houses burned down, and others simply can’t go back because their houses are unlivable because of all the chemicals in the air, all of these disgusting substances that aren’t meant to be lit on fire are just lingering. These houses and apartment buildings and condos that haven’t burned down are now health hazards, so maybe the desert is an option for some of these folks because you have about 100,000 refugees two hours away, so some of them are bound to come here so I guess I would ask the locals for some empathy and some understanding.”
