On Cycles

Stephanie Pushaw

I grew up at the edges of fire country. The kind of edges you don’t realize are edges until they’re illuminated, a bright orange line cutting through the night sky. In Southern California, the mountains look dry even when the air feels wet. The chaparral holds its breath all summer, a desert pretending not to be a desert. As a kid, I thought the golden hills were permanently sunlit, that the brittle grasses and twisted oaks were just the way the world worked. Until they weren’t. Until smoke turned the sky the color of bruises and everything smelled like burnt metal and pine resin.

When the Woolsey Fire came in 2018, I was there. I remember the light turning sickly yellow in the middle of the day, the sun reduced to a bloodshot eye behind layers of smoke. I remember the sound of helicopters, the faint crackle of embers on the wind. We packed in a daze—photo albums, passports, a few clothes shoved into trash bags. I remember standing in the driveway as the ash drifted down like snow, trying to decide what else to take, and realizing there was nothing else that mattered.

The evacuation felt both frantic and strangely calm, as though the body instinctively knows what to do when confronted with something so much larger than itself. But there was a moment—when we were stuck in traffic on the Pacific Coast Highway, the hills on either side of us glowing with veins of flame—when I felt something crack open in me. A sense of finality, maybe. Or inevitability. The fire kept coming, faster than the alerts, faster than we could drive away.

Afterwards, when we were allowed back, everything felt hollow. The edges of the world had been scraped away, leaving behind a brittle, scorched version of itself.Writers talk about the blank page like it's terrifying, but the truth is, it's not nearly as terrifying as a blank world. A world where the familiar markers have been burned away, and you are left standing in the middle of it, trying to figure out how to begin again.

The fire left me feeling paralyzed. I didn't write for months. Every attempt felt futile, like trying to build something delicate in a place where everything could be reduced to ash in an instant. But slowly, painfully, I started again. Little fragments at first, a sentence here, a paragraph there. I thought about the stubborn shoots of green that started appearing in the burn scar, about the way the earth knows how to heal itself even when the damage seems irreversible. Writing felt like that—small, hesitant growth pushing up through something charred and broken.

In 2024, the hills burned again. I wasn’t there this time. I watched updates on my phone, the same red splotches spreading across the fire maps, the same frantic text threads with my family. The fire came close—so close that it reached the edge of our property line. My sister texted me a screenshot of the fire map, a glowing red perimeter hugging our street, the digital edge of disaster. Ten feet. That’s how close it came. I stared at that image for a long time, unable to decide if I felt relief or something closer to guilt.

There’s a strange powerlessness in watching something like that unfold from far away. You think about the weight of what could have happened, about how fragile it all is. But this time, when the flames receded, I could feel something else: a quiet gratitude. Reinvention doesn’t always start with ashes; sometimes it starts with a narrow escape.

There’s a house I remember from the Woolsey aftermath. It stood alone on a hillside, everything around it reduced to cinders. The walls were stained with smoke, and the glass was warped from heat, but the structure still stood. Someone had spray-painted across the garage door: Still here.

There’s something about fire survival that feels feral, almost prehistoric. It reduces life to essentials: air, water, shelter, an escape route. And when the danger passes, what’s left is a hollowed-out version of the world you knew. A quiet landscape of loss, and yet—always—the first signs of something stubbornly alive, creeping back into the edges of view.

Writers block feels like that, too. A hollowing out, a stillness after destruction. But eventually, something grows back. A fragment, a sentence, a thread of meaning. And you realize that the fire didn’t destroy everything. It just cleared the way for something new.

The fires will come again. They always do. And every time, there will be that same stunned silence afterward, that same question hanging in the smoke-drenched air: How much longer can we keep living like this? But the answers are slow and contradictory. Some will leave, retreating to places where the earth doesn’t crack open and smolder. Others will rebuild, plant new gardens, sweep the ash from their patios, and tell themselves it won’t happen again. Until it does.

There’s a kind of beauty in fire country, if you let yourself see it. The way the hills glow in twilight, the way the air tastes sharp with sage and salt, the way the chaparral refuses to die even after the worst of it. But beauty isn’t enough to keep the flames away. And the edges—those thin, liminal places where homes meet wildness—will always be the first to go. But reinvention starts there, too, in the thin spaces where everything seems lost and yet, somehow, something still begins to grow.