The Etiquette of Disaster : Fires in the suburbs, as in the city, demonstrate the possibilities--and the limits--of community life.

In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king; in the kingdom of the newly homeless, it is the man or woman with a working kitchen and a set of pots and pans who reigns supreme. I’ve been loading up my car with the classic “Joy of Cooking,” making housewarming visits to the “temporary” homes of friends displaced by the recent fires. The smoke and soot are gone now along canyon and shore, and daily life has regained a normal veneer. They eat off rented tables with donated knives and forks, a fragile sense of recovery taking over after grief. The wedding china and baby photos may be gone, but here’s that recipe for lemon meringue with a flaky piecrust. We do what we can do.

During the fires, even while the mountains and canyons raged, acquaintances would ask me if now, finally, I understood. Do I see what the people of South-Central must have endured two Aprils ago?

Do I get the point more directly because it was my home, and not some distant apartment, that was threatened? This craving to form equations, to compel the lion of the well-to-do to lie down with the lamb of the down-and-out is natural, I suppose. It is nevertheless unnerving, a tearing away at one’s uniqueness even in tragedy, and it is part of the unexpected etiquette of disaster that Southern Californians are creating.

As it happens, the urban and suburban fires do share much in heart and in mind. A cemetery of trees or a graveyard of bricks--not much difference here on the daily rounds of life. Weeks after the fire, we still feel disoriented, shorn of our markers; the safety of the known is gone, the flow of life disrupted. Just like at Florence and Normandie.

And just like at Florence and Normandie, fire has exposed the yin and yang, the dark and light of communities in crisis. On the light side are the food and toy banks, the clothing drop-offs, the enormous wave of human sympathy as churches and synagogues leap into social action, acting as both spiritual sanctuary and home base. And like South-Central when Rebuild L.A. was born, my neighbors, too, have received grandiose promises perhaps destined never to be fulfilled. In South-Central, the promise of jobs and industry and shopping malls and the reclaiming of personal dignity have been slow coming. And in the suburbs, the promise to cut through the red tape of the permit process for reconstruction was the first to come, and the first to go.

Disillusionment is the name for it, or fear of being ignored. It is something they now share with the Asian storekeeper who had no insurance and the African American mother of five who still has no major market in which to shop. My weary neighbors are learning the limits to their fire insurance policies and the limits to human concern. We can take only just so much vicarious agony. Enough quickly gets to be enough.

So what we are watching is the process by which individuals and communities make distinctions. Between the lucky and the unlucky, the blessed and the damned; between those with the bad fortune to live Over There, where disaster has struck, and those who live Over Here, lucky and spared. The goal, of course, is to distinguish the Us of our legitimate responsibility from the Them who can safely be ignored. We can only do what we can do.

And this explains why so soon after disaster, the cruel need to assess a hierarchy of blame, to seek out what lawyers call the “contributory negligence” leading up to disaster. After the riots, it was the residents of South-Central who were implicated, as if they had allowed a rebellion to brew without taking charge and making change. And now it is being suggested that the fire victims themselves contributed to their losses by arrogantly building their houses up too high, in areas too wild, too far away from the city, and were too rich to care about the results. It’s nonsense; many of the homes destroyed were as much as 50 years old, representing a full life’s savings. Just as are the homes in South-Central Los Angeles.

I don’t want to make a big thing of it. In due time, the insurance companies will probably pay up, though some will not do so without a fight. And the wildfire victims are savvy people, most of them; getting their act together may take effort but it will be done. It is just that in this interim period, while waiting to begin again, the distance from the one fire to the next is suddenly easy to perceive.