ON THE SURFACE OF THE FIRE BURNT HILLS

..just above Brentwood

Photographs by Paul Ryan

I remember, many years ago, wandering the lava fields of Hawaii after the volcanic explosions. The eruptions had been not that long ago. Months, maybe a year. There were black swirls of rock turned stone hard. Undulations of waves frozen in place. But green life was already being born.

I thought of that last week when I went up to my favorite hiking and bicycling path here in Los Angeles, the West Ridge Trail

It had been right in the path of the fires that consumed Pacific Palisades a month ago. There were none of the green trees left, none of the scrub brush. Paths that wound into hiding in the foliage were now exposed in bare nakedness.

It was strange to see, but there was a sere beauty in the newly uncovered forms of the hills. Sunlight, that had been absorbed by foliage, now created shadow shapes that hid and revealed private places of the land.

There was, at first, nothing green. Nothing that spoke of life.

Trails and pathways stood out as three dimensional maps.

Wide winged Red-Tailed Hawks and Turkey Vultures flew in circles…

…occasionally diving in search of some small creature to feast on. It was a fruitless pursuit. There were none.

The Hawks must have gone hungry

Gradually I became intrigued more by the shapes of the remains of the trees, many of which revealed rich color under fractured limbs or peeled bark.

The water of the recent rains was only a transient visitor, carving out new gullies on its way downhill toward the sea.

It’s a long trail - it rises and falls. I wondered how far the incineration of destruction continues. But I felt was descending into an increasing labyrinth of ash…

… departing further from any familiar landmarks on a trail I always knew so well. Further from reality through a progression of Dante’s seven circles,

or maybe David Byrne’s Once in a Lifetime:

”And you may find yourself in another part of the world…
And you may ask yourself, "Well, how did I get here?"

My comfort of familiarity was thinning.

Then someone came around a bend toward me, headed downhill.

Did you go to the top?
No…

I asked him to take my picture with my iPhone , so in later times I would remember the reality of being here

And then I found a spring of regrowth.
Like the ferns on Hawaii

I had to look closely, down by the base of the wood or between the jumble of rocks . But there were the insistent of greenery.

I wish I knew that they were called, I admired them. And I thought of the times I had planted a flower or bush in an ideal environment only to have it fail. These guys are tough.

So I turned around with a reminder that things change, and we move on.
A lesson of intelligent co-existence with the inevitable changing forces, some contradicting our own plans, of the natural world.

“Letting the days go by .. same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Once in a lifetime, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground “