The arsonist we need

A screenshot of the air quality map at 8:20am on January 8th.

In the “pandemic speedrun” model of the last week — a week so uniquely horrible for LA that there isn’t actually a useful comparison to draw from in its history — this morning felt like we’d hit already somewhere around the summer of 2021.

A lot of group chat discussions about whether we need to be masking or not. The disaster still burning, mostly in the same places but somehow feeling farther away. People stepping back outside to find a city that looks weirdly normal but also not normal at all, completely unequipped to reckon with the damage, still picking up unclear signals that another wave might be around the corner.

But one thing was pretty new about this particular city-defining event, and doesn’t fit well in the pandemic timeline: the manhunts. Maybe that freshness and variation from Covid is part of why so many people signed up for them. And just like when Tom Hanks got it, the celebrities were among the first to make it feel real:

Someone. Eyes emoji. The momentum was building. Eventually it was Henry Winkler who finally blew the horn and unleashed hell:

An arsonist. What a relief to have someone to hunt down and bring to justice — and maybe even just one person! Imagine if one guy had been going around pouring COVID in the water supply, and we knew it would all end if we could just find him and beat the shit out of him together. We would all get in on it and then after the final beating was done we would reminisce about the moment for the rest of our lives. Could we have that moment now?

There were clues everywhere. People found burnt pages from the same book in neighborhoods miles from the fires. Alissa Walker found a burnt shred of a Pennzoil ad with the cryptic message “long love.” Suspicion grew quickly. Were these pages an “arsonist calling card?” Was this not caused by climate change, but “some kind of psycho-climate change activist”?

Some of the celebrities took up arms. Whitney Cummings shared a video of herself driving to “trailheads, which is where arsonists seem to be targeting” to confront them with a sword.

And then the texts started going around. If you live here you almost certainly got one. Most of them were about “a guy” or “guys” who were running around intent on incinerating the entire city.

Whitney Cummings once again surfaced as the person who maybe received the most “a guy” texts of all, including this one from a friend about a particularly demented guy:

The Topanga friend was circling reality here: there was a guy caught in Woodland Hills.

This particular guy was carrying a blowtorch around the neighborhood, and some residents saw him trying to light old Christmas trees on fire. A couple of neighbors leg-swept him to the ground and citizen’s arrested him. LAPD officially announced that they suspected the guy of starting the Kenneth Fire, which then burned through a thousand acres around West Hills.

“Arson!!!!! May you be fully prosecuted!!! What scum!!!” Khloe Kardashian reacted in an Instagram story. Note the “may you.” Henry Winkler had already seized control of our very words.

But after LAPD reviewed the evidence, “the allegation was determined to be unfounded” and the guy was not charged. To my knowledge, gasoline poured in the sewer has also not been reported elsewhere, nor do I feel I have a complete understanding of how it would influence wildfire behavior.

But it didn’t matter if this was the guy who started the fires. There were plenty more guys out there. And a lot of people who were texting about them were people I hadn’t heard talk like this before. The Topanga friend was right about one thing: it really was happening all over.

Among the many texts I received about guys:

• Notes from an “LAPD meeting” in Laurel Canyon that confirmed two “scooter guys” were caught on video riding a scooter into Runyon Canyon Park right before the Sunset Fire went off. The “scooter guys” were then seen taking a blowtorch to the brush fifteen minutes later, then again lurking in the neighborhood the following night. “They’re now saying this was all Cartel related,” the text concluded. (And I’m now seeing that Justine Bateman got mostly the same text I did, minus the cartels).

• A screenshot of an email from the President of the Baldwin Hills Homeowners Association, containing word “from a well-sourced person in LAPD” that “LAPD is pretty sure that the fires are being caused by an arsonist.” Specifically “a very savvy arsonist who knows about wind patterns and fire science.”

• A rumor that the LAPD searched the phone of the “the arsonist guy they let go” in Woodland Hills “and found photos of him at the Altadena fire scene.”

There were threads connecting all of these theories. LAPD was referenced in each one, so this information was coming from a place of authority. And all of them implied one or two people were causing multiple fires — maybe even all of the fires. So many of the texts, just like the tweets, talked about AN arsonist. THE guy. The idea just kept coming up: could all of this really have been one person’s fault?

I followed up on it. And while I can’t confirm whether any of the fires were caused by arson, I did learn that even after all of these rumors had already spread widely, neither LAPD or LAFD had found any evidence to support any of them. And despite having been claimed as the origin point for all the rumors, LAPD weren’t even aware of most of them. There was no indication at the time that arson was the cause of any of the major fires.

But look at how much we wanted to believe that this was all just the handiwork of one or two people. Over and over, we kept shrinking the responsible parties down to a number that could reasonably fit in an average-sized cage — a little like that one New York Times op-ed that rejected collective responsibility and prayed for one single leader to step forward and save the other ten million of us.

And isn’t it kind of weird that so many of the arsonists manifest in these rumors as cold, calculating criminals? The cartel agents, the fire scientist, the guy who took a phone camera picture of his arson, the guy who developed some kind of sewer plan. Wouldn’t you have expected more rumors about homeless maniacs? But that would be too many people to deal with, right? Too many behaviors to control, just too chaotic to reel in. A couple of supervillains we can handle, though.

But wait: do the manhunts even matter? There is so much other incredible stuff going on. Thousands of firefighters, now from all over the world, busting ass through the night in hell to stop one more house from going up. Water drop fancams. Evacuation centers with more volunteers than evacuees. The lists of places to give are everywhere, with so many GoFundMe goals absolutely detonated and people inventing new formats to boost the ones that haven’t. Yesterday I almost ran over a box of jeans from one of the clothing drives that seem to be busting out into the street, distracted by joining a group honk at somebody holding an “I Love LA” sign. It was such a nice honk.

And the reporting!! The TV field reporters holding on to paintings for evacuees and getting their windbreakers blown off by a hail of embers. The local anchors pulling six all-nighters and somehow looking more solid and trustworthy as they go. Oh my god, the print journalists — you read the coverage and you can feel them screaming around the city to get you what you need. Brianna Sacks at the Washington Post watched her father’s house burn on Wednesday, then went out to the burn scars and tore off some of the best fucking stories of a week that was absolutely covered in them.

There hasn’t been an outpouring of civic devotion in LA like this for so long. Isn’t all this high-energy humanity more representative of what’s happening here than some Instagram stories about burnt tables of contents? Maybe we’re better off just ignoring the manhunts, 95% of which only really exist in our phones.

But after a week of all this — during which I admittedly haven’t been sleeping that much — something weird has happened to me. I’ve actually come to think of the manhunts as another piece of the civic devotion. A sadder and often freakier piece, but in some cases just as much of an expression of love for LA as a honk.

We all just want to be here so, so much. If we didn’t, why would we work so hard to convince ourselves of the ludicrous idea that just a handful of people are preventing us from achieving a long, stable life in this city? We’d only invent these stories about people if we were desperate to avoid having to reckon with anything about the place. And look at the celebrities — these people could live anywhere! They’ve been to so many places and could just move to whichever one they like best! But instead they’re pretzeling their brains like everyone else, coming up with a story to justify sticking around while ignoring obvious red flags. I’m sorry, but that’s what you do when you’re in love.

Of course it’s not true for everyone. Many of the leading manhunters have not been driven to join by anything remotely love-derived: some are trying to win political power or build brands or promote global race hatred. But most of those people don’t live here, and most of the ones that do who are looking for someone to blame are just terrified. For their health and their homes, but also that their particular dream of LA might have already been lost.

I’d love to keep maintaining a detached, superior air here and pretend I’m just observing behavioral phenomena from afar, but unfortunately I have also been immersing myself in a particularly stupid self-soothing manhunt all week. Not in search of a guy who started the fires. My quest has been about holding a handful of people responsible for our collective fear, which I’m very worried will add years to the devastation we endure here. So I have been out in the field looking for suspects among local politicians and online commentators — people who have annoyed me for years and are now assuming prominent roles in the post-disaster discourse. I root around for posts, articles, and group chat rumors to build some vague case that these people have been spreading panic and misinformation for personal gain. It’s never totally clear what I intend to do with the evidence, but it feels very important while I’m doing it. They’re poisoning the city with lies! They must be exposed!

As if people need to be somehow tricked into being afraid right now. Like a viral post or a TV hit even moves the needle. The only thing more pointless than blaming a handful of people for the convergence of two years of heavy vegetation growth, eight months without rain, and hundred-mile-an-hour winds is trying to find someone to blame for our collective fear response. It was going to happen with or without anyone’s help.

I have no idea what’s on the other side of this, or when the fear dies down, or what happens when it does. I don’t know how we’re going to help people who lost their homes, loved ones, and neighborhoods — any physical proof that their lives happened — feel like they have fully rebuilt. I don’t know how we redirect ourselves from all looking for the guy who did this to the policies that actually did. I don’t know how we’re going to keep thousands of families from leaving town, an exodus that was already in progress and could reach terminal velocity if we don’t open up our planning code to allow more people to live in the safest parts of the city.

A lot of people are saying LA will never be the same. They’re probably right. Alissa wrote about one way it could be different:

The Palisades Fire, which has destroyed the most valuable real estate in the country in an insurance market held together with toothpicks, is likely to become the costliest fire in U.S. history. And, in less than two weeks, the federal government will turn its back on our recovery. Thousands of families be displaced for months or years. But what usually happens after extraordinarily destructive urban fires is that many of the people who lose their homes don't return. Our communities, still fragile from the pandemic, are on the edge of collapse.

But that’s only one way. We could very plausibly come out of this disaster with a safer and more habitable home, with better lives for new neighbors and even the neighbors who are hurting the most right now. I just don’t know right now if panic is more likely to push us toward or away from that work.

But whatever we try to predict today for the LA of a month or a year from now is probably wrong and definitely premature. The fires are still burning. We can check the forecast again after they’re finally out. Not much else to do until then but listen for the phone to make a new noise and look around for what people need.