Hands in the earth

Hands in the earth.

Feeling for healing, what my homeland must be reeling from. Giving some TLC to some stressed outside and inside plants. I drove home from the desert into an ominous brown cloud of smoke from the wildfires hanging over my hometown here in SoCal. The sky looks clear. The Air Quality Index says it’s safe, but there’s no telling what else might be in the air.

All of this was so bad. I don’t think I can add more than what has already been said, seen, shown…lost. I personally know of three families who lost everything in a single night. I knew, as the Palisades fire broke out while the wind forecast looked incredibly dire, that it was going to be a long and horrible night.

That will forever be known as the day LA burned. Like so many, my heart broke as I could only watch from afar. I could only check the Watch Duty app over and over again, post and send resources on social media. Since I live in a fire-prone area, I’ve been through this so many times myself. So I did everything I could to tell friends what I know from experience. To anticipate the evacuation orders. To be ready. To help those who need the most help as much as you can. I got maybe three hours of sleep that night.

What was no help at all was the barrage of misinformation coming not just from strangers online, but from people I know. One so-called friend who insisted this was the best time to rain down f-bombs and critiques of politicians at me, along with some bizarre rants and misinformation. This was echoing much of the lack of empathy people were seeing online, as if Angelenos somehow deserved this. No one deserved this.

Being from here and having lived through many fires, I can sense some of what is coming. The winds will persist, hopefully not causing any more catastrophe. The containment lines will hopefully hold. The fires will still burn, though much of LA will move on towards business as usual. It will take years for people to rebuild. We will hopefully get one good rain, but then comes the danger of landslides.

So many here need healing. But I have been seeing just how much this giant, sprawling city that’s more than one city has come together. People have opened their homes at a moment’s notice. People have opened their pantries, their hearts, their wallets to help. Donation centers are overrun with supplies. And still people want to help.

This is the real LA. The rest of the country labels us as a town of fakes and phonies, but this is who we really are. It is no shock to me just how much people have come together. There is still so much to do.

Hands in the earth. Feet on the ground.

Wildfire damage in natural forest land.

Photographing Damage From The El Dorado Fire

A few weeks ago I made my way up to a special place, a place I’ve thought of as home since I was 14. A place where I still return to every summer to work with a small arts non-profit (www.campbravo.org). A place that was nearly burned down by a massive wildfire.

Camp de Benneville Pines is a small UU camp located near Angelus Oaks, CA. The El Dorado Fire started in far away Yucaipa and was allegedly started by careless people setting off an explosion as part of a so-called gender reveal stunt–in a dry grassy field, during a record heat wave.

The wildfire raged into the hillside directly above camp, but the camp itself was spared. Thanks to many hardworking firefighters who skillfully fought the blaze even as it entered camp in some spots. The very thought of this special place burning down due to such carelessness was enough to have me spiraling.

Reading that they were seeking local volunteers, I drove up there to donate some photography hopefully to help illustrate just how bad the damage is, and how badly this tiny camp needs extra support in order to stay afloat during such impossible times. The camp executive director took me up the hillside to the fire damage is. Where once was a beautiful, lush forest hillside now stands an ashen waste land.

Thankfully, there are some trees still standing. But the destruction this fire wreaked spans tens of thousands of acres.

Growing up in SoCal, I knew about earthquakes of course. I knew about fire season. It’s only been in the last 10 or 15 years that fire season has become something else entirely. Months on end of endlessly destructive wildfires, apocalyptic skies, and terrible air quality.

My hope is that a few of the snapshots show just how badly we need to address our current climate crisis and its effects. In the meantime, if you would consider visiting the website for Camp de Benneville Pines and supporting them with a small donation. On top of being a small business having to navigate being shut down all year, they are now having to manage soil erosion and mudslide risk.

A happy cabin and tall trees spared from any fire damage.

All images are Copyrighted by Matt Lara (Matt Lara Photography) and may not be reproduced without permission.

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