The New Yorker:

Three dear friends had Thanksgiving babies, and I was thinking of them all last night. One was born a month early, five pounds and elfin, in San Francisco; she went home with her parents and two older siblings, to Ojai, a week or so ago. The second, a long-awaited second child, lives just north of Sunset, in Brentwood. And the third, a first child, is in Tujunga, in the San Fernando Valley. A few days ago, my friends in Ojai fled sixty miles north, as the ninety-thousand-acre Thomas Fire threatened their home and the quaint downtown was being evacuated by means of vintage trolleys. Yesterday morning, as soot and ash from the newly broken-out Skirball Fire swirled through Brentwood and settled in my friends’ house, they left, too. The friends with the newborn in Tujunga, improbably, stayed, in spite of a mandatory-evacuation order owing to the encroachment of the Creek Fire. Their bags were packed, but they reported that the sky was blue.

The Skirball Fire started early on Wednesday morning in the brush on the hillside next to the 405, at the exit for Mulholland Drive, opposite the Getty Center and its treasures. Marysol Velamoor, a friend who lives near there, in Bel Air, was awakened by a panicked text from her cousin. She spent the next twenty minutes pacing, while her two boys slept. Her husband, Sri, was on a business trip, to Minneapolis. Was she overreacting? If so, they could have a laugh about it later. She shoved some clothing in a suitcase, packed the framed impressions of her children’s handprints, their passports, birth certificates, computers, a hard drive, and four yogurts from her fridge. She put on sneakers and her best earrings. Then came the mandatory-evacuation notice. She woke the kids up and told them they were going to have an adventure—no school! They drove south, avoiding news on the radio, part of a forty-six-thousand-person exodus from Bel Air.

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