Editor’s note: This is the fourth in our series examining the future of the West as both aspiration and destination. For more, see Paul Tullis’ “The End of Golden State Exceptionalism?”, Erin Aubry Kaplan’s “The Black Middle-Class Deferred,” and Jeremy Rosenberg’s “Is The West Still the Best?”

The long-haired cyclist gave me a glance as I approached. But as he saw my shirt, he couldn’t resist. 

“California, huh?”

It was 109 degrees and climbing out here on a sidewalk in Portland. Even as the afternoon’s shadows ran long, the city sweltered under a “heat dome,” a suffocatingly apt way to capture the latest in an ongoing series of unprecedented West Coast weather. I was wearing the most lightweight shirt I owned, a slip of polyester from a brand dedicated to celebrating California and its imagined  “seven-day weekend kinda lifestyle.” The state’s name cascaded down my chest in citrusy, ‘70s type. It reads like a mantra — or maybe a taunt.

Having left Los Angeles over two years ago, I saw the shirt as a small tribute to the place I called home for most of my life. Besides, interstate migration is one of the more benign traditions that built this country. Why not celebrate your roots? 

Well, because for some in Portland, this shirt constitutes an enemy flag. Years ago, when we first considered moving here, a friend advised us to change our car’s plates as soon as we arrived. If not, we would be ostracized — maybe even vandalized — and immediately seen as Part of the Problem with a changing city, as if gentrification’s ills are only transmitted through outsiders.

You could hardly blame Californians (and so many others) for coming. Portland has long stood as the last semi-affordable, semi-interesting outpost of urban life on an overcrowded West Coast. If you aren’t retired or wealthy, and you want to live in a walkable city with community and culture, Portland offers an alternative to the costs and creeping interchangeability of San Diego, Seattle, L.A., and San Francisco. But now, that window is closing. 

Google, Airbnb and Intel are just a few companies that have planted flags in and around the unfortunately named “Silicon Forest,” spurring an ongoing explosion of development. Historic homes are regularly tilled under, giving way to modernist McMansions along with odd-angled four-, six- and multiplex apartments. Like so many cities, Portland’s working class and communities of color have been forced further toward the margins. Homelessness, the greatest sin of every city in America, stands in stark relief here, maybe because Portland’s size affords fewer places to hide. And still, the prices keep rising.

But Portland had other issues that day. Beloved by locals and tourists for its mild summers, the forecast for the weekend rose with the can-you-believe-this daring of an elaborate prank. The temperatures were promised to peak at 106 degrees. Two days later, 109. Finally, our phones accurately predicted a high of 116 — a Death Valley-like heat. Although, only weeks later, even that region would set a new record of its own.

Like when the ice storm shut down the city in February, the weather was all anyone could talk about. Even if this heatwave didn’t spark more fires, which draped a reeling city into a noxious double-lockdown amid the pandemic last summer, the heat seemed capable of spontaneous combustion. What are you going to do? Nobody had an answer.

As the sun fell on Sunday night, most of us responded by staying in and shutting down. After its long, gloomy winters, Portland typically runs deliriously in the summer sun, packing rooftop bars and outdoor patios even before the pandemic made those essential. But that evening, the bars and restaurants on Mississippi Avenue ran mercifully still. Across the street at an otherwise deserted beer garden, two young women in broad hats slouched at a picnic table, determined to make it work. You had to wonder about the conditions inside their homes. 

For the long-haired cyclist, though, the divide between native and interloper still seemed viable. The logo on his bag hinted that he was picking up a food delivery, and I was getting takeout. Apart from a few stragglers, we were the only ones out. California, huh? 

“Feels like it, doesn’t it?” I said. We shared a weary, half-hearted laugh. I kept moving.

***

Why did we move to Portland? In part, because of the weather.

Rainy, dreary, leafy — these were the details I craved. A fair-skinned redhead from Boston, I grew up outside of Cleveland before my family relocated to Lancaster in the Southern California high desert when I was a teenager. Ever since then, I have spent my adult life in wary opposition to the sun. I ran to the milder climate of the Bay Area as soon as I could. It was far enough to be different while still near enough to the California I knew. Eventually, the high prices of the tech boom helped chase me back home.

At night, we laid out water for the wildlife, catching squirrels lying flat and exhausted in the mulch. Every morning the bowls were empty.

Backed into northeast L.A. for its mix of taller trees and lower prices, desert-like heat waves grew more common. Summer monsoons began swirling around the foothills in the 2010s, evoking the suffocating doldrums of my wife’s adolescence in Phoenix. Always a seasonal hazard in L.A., the inland-born Santa Ana winds grew increasingly hostile, erratic. One night in December, the gusts kicked up to 100 mph across the city, knocking out power and fraying trees, palm fronds and nerves. As with every extreme weather event, the wildcat night proved to be the first in a series. And, the heat kept rising. 

In 2018, a few days reached 111 degrees in early July, roasting our fledgling back garden. We treated these spikes like snow days, hiding indoors as our air conditioning struggled to keep the house in the 80s. At night, we laid out water for the wildlife, catching squirrels lying flat and exhausted in the mulch. Every morning the bowls were empty.

Then, there were the fires. 

 The Fountaingrove neighborhood of Santa Rosa in the days after the Tubbs fire swept through in 2017.
Photo by Anne Belden

My first encounter came in 2009 with the Station Fire above Pasadena. As we merged onto the freeway one night, a terrifying red slash glowed across the hillsides, filling the night sky with a doomy glow. The fire was at the city’s northernmost reach, further from our vantage point near Old Town than it appeared. Or, at least I hoped so, as I remember how the traffic and the evening as a whole somehow went on like nothing was happening. We had tickets to the movies, where we hoped the climate-controlled environment would mask the smoke in the distance. Maybe it’s natural to focus on something else when trouble is too close to bear. 

A few years later, my wife finished grad school at Cal State University, Los Angeles, and the state’s housing crisis steadily closed its grip around the city. Tattered two-bedrooms drew crowds with applications in hand as prices reached $2,500, $3,000 per month. “You’d be better off buying,” people who didn’t live in L.A. always told us. Sure. We heard stories of the bidding wars and constant compromise, how all your faint hopes and paperwork can be blown away by an all-cash offer from a flipper. Eventually, we grew to understand the grim calculus: Nothing gets cheaper. If you ever want to walk away, you need to buy your way out. 

We saved for years, finally scraping all we had for a broken-down, 800-square-foot cottage in Altadena, an unincorporated town just north of Pasadena. It was just far enough from more gentrified neighborhoods to fall off the radar for cash buyers. In the ’50s, the Zorthian ranch a few blocks from our door once hosted Charlie Parker. After sunset, vaqueros on horseback reclaimed the streets. “I love it up here,” said one of our neighbors, a man whose family owned a few group homes in the area. “The city can only get me from one direction.” 

The first time you are told to pack your things, you do so mechanically and almost semi-seriously. What constitutes a carry-on bag of essentials? A portable hard drive with all your photos and documents?

Just behind us, closer than I’d ever seen, were the parched mountains the Station Fire had burned just a few years before. I remember counting the blocks between those hillsides and us, imagining the level of disaster that would be required to pose a threat. Something would really have to go wrong, wouldn’t it? Our insurance company thought otherwise and canceled our application during escrow, claiming the risk was just too high. We found another provider and closed on our California home in 2015. The next year, we got to work.

That summer, midway through tearing out the bathroom, the San Gabriel Complex Fire roared above Azusa. Though still miles away, the smoke ran thick, evoking a San Francisco fog bank stained apocalyptic orange. The smell of campfire was inescapable. With our only toilet reduced to a hole in a freshly tiled floor, we planned to skip town as the grout cured. We wiped the ash from our windshield and pretended it was normal. California, huh?

In the following years, the state offered confirmation of the new normal. In Santa Rosa, the Tubbs fire claimed more than 5,000 structures and 22 lives in 2017. Fueled by swirling winds, the fire left residents mere minutes between the moment evacuation orders came down and the moment it was too late. Months later, the Thomas Fire carved a similar path through Ventura and Santa Barbara. Ojai, a bohemian-evoking vacation town where we would sometimes escape the city, was a mere wind shift away from disaster. 

As we grew more familiar with the fires, we quickly learned their language. Under the right conditions, a windblown ember can travel 2 miles and spark, spreading the fire like a virus. Soon, evacuation warnings came for us, too. 

The first time you are told to pack your things, you do so mechanically and almost semi-seriously. What constitutes a carry-on bag of essentials? A portable hard drive with all your photos and documents? Certainly. Then there’s the passports, a checkbook, the dog’s leash and two cat carriers. Everything you need waits by the door, freighted with the wild hope that everything and everyone important is in reach when the call comes. It’s striking how few things really matter.

You go to bed with your phone, wondering where you’ll flee to first. Then you think about the town of Paradise in 2018, and how reaching your car isn’t always enough. Paradise’s some 27,000 people woke up to the Camp Fire bearing down on them as the Sierra Nevada foothills went up in flames, sparking blazes throughout the town. It burned with such ferocity that three of six escape routes were shut off when evacuation orders arrived. Residents fled the firestorm into gridlock. “You’re trying to get out, to escape, and it’s bumper-to-bumper LA traffic,” one survivor told the Guardian. Many abandoned their cars to take their chances on foot. When it was over, 85 people and nearly 19,000 structures were gone, marking itself as the deadliest wildfire in California history, so far. 

That night, the call never came for us. 

A few months later, another threat arrived — the fire above La Tuna Canyon, over 10 miles away. But still, the phone reminds you of imminent danger. Red flag warnings were issued overnight as the fire jumped the 210. Extreme weather expected. Gusts over 80 mph. Single-digit humidity. Be ready to move.

Finally, we were.

***

We knew we couldn’t live in Los Angeles forever. 

It’s too big, too unknowable, too hard. Like California itself, L.A. is a place of abundance. People, cars, traffic, wealth, poverty, concrete, food, diversity, pain and, yes, beauty. Every other city feels small, limited even, in comparison.

I once heard a comedian say L.A. is so big it contains three of the best cities in the world and six of the worst. Definitions for both vary, but everyone picks the part that works and holds on. L.A.’s strength is its capacity for transformation, a boundless appetite to accommodate dreamers from around the world. Whether you come to write, act, cook, code or simply join this country, L.A. — like New York City — is a sprawling resource for reinvention and renewal. If the city seems crowded, so what? The Western frontier has always found room. L.A.’s sprawling geography reflects this ideal, conjuring one world that gives way to another in a few freeway exits or even a few blocks.   

I once heard a comedian say L.A. is so big it contains three of the best cities in the world and six of the worst.

But its supply can no longer keep pace with demand. Amid burgeoning gaps in equality, resources, and availability, the city feels at capacity. For all its storytelling of social malleability, L.A. is inflexible, even to those who were lucky enough to carve out a home. Should you require a move to support a new dream in this once-inexhaustible city, it was likely priced beyond your reach years ago.

***

When my passenger-pigeon rare position writing about arts for the Los Angeles Times no longer felt sustainable in a cratering and increasingly noxious media climate, we started looking. Somewhere cooler, smaller, easier. Maybe even safer.

For most of our lives, we’d been tied to the West. By now, everywhere else in the country feels somehow wrong, off-balance. Yet, options in the West are limited. San Francisco and Seattle are beautiful, but impossible. Denver is booming but hollow with rampant redevelopment; a copy of a copy of an exhausted formula. And then, there is Portland.

We’d visited over the years, and the city always felt inviting. The lush green canopy of trees reminded me of the Midwest, and the heavy old homes recalled the outskirts of Boston. Portland’s idiosyncratic spirit is the stuff of sketch comedy, but it’s also earnest. It is a more ready access to nature, as well as an abundance of food, drink and progressive thought offered further possible benefits. The idea of restarting was terrifying but intoxicating. Almost as a lark, my wife threw in for a job opening and was accepted. We packed up and moved in 2019. 

The overarching plan could be boiled down to “something else.” Friends first asked about the signature gloomy winters, if we worried about the inescapable gray and seasonal depression. At the time, the rising threats of L.A. were just as powerful a mood-altering force. Besides, after years of being a contrarian who loved L.A. the most when it was cloudy, I relished the thought of engaging with the weather in a new way. Being forced to view the environment as a force greater than us on a daily basis sounded refreshing — humbling, even. 

The hubris didn’t stop there. As we sold our house, I remember feeling like we had gotten away with something. After all our hard work, it was hard to leave the little 1920s home we created as I worried for its future. In a year, maybe three, I was sure I would hear about some disaster that would sweep it away. Even if that weren’t the case, I relished not thinking in those actuarial terms. Here we were, out of dumb luck and privilege, parachuting away in the nick of time.

Yes, I am aware of the definition of irony.

***

Events have proven that predictive models remain works in progress. Years ago, a report offered haunting estimates for America’s climate-altered future. As temperatures rose, San Francisco would feel like L.A., and L.A. would resemble Baja, Mexico. For Portland, the forecast mirrored the Bay Area. Hey, I glibly thought, I can live with that.

But there are no easy analogs because we’ve never experienced what’s in progress. Even as you examine forecasts around the country in search of a haven, the effort is futile. Yet, fight or flight remains a powerful instinct. As each year sees more and more climate-driven disasters that can only be considered “unprecedented” and “once-in-a-generation” so many times, flight will grow more popular.

Map of the wildfire potential across the United States in August 2021. Image from the National Interagency Fire Center

As Portland’s temperatures spiked in June, we felt the same impulse to escape. Only 90 minutes away, the Oregon coast’s temperatures would just reach the high 60s. We packed our things and headed West, relishing all the marine layer could offer while we could. The following day, even the beach would succumb, reaching the high 90s.

Still, the dream of a way out persisted. A candy-colored beach cottage up for sale sign caught my eye near the crowded beach parking lot. As I took to one of the many real estate apps that drive so many fantasies of parallel, impossible lives, I noticed a new feature near the listing. In small print, the cottage was scored a 10/10 flood risk. The property stood a 2 percent chance of taking on 2.5 feet of water in the next year. A nearby map offered further proof, charting in blue where the ocean would creep further inland. Maybe it wouldn’t happen for years. Someone will take those odds.

Back in Portland, we were among the lucky ones. L.A. had trained us to consider central air conditioning a necessity. According to estimates, some 80 percent of people in Portland benefit from some cooling system. Of the county’s 54 deaths during the recent heat wave, nearly each one lacked that increasingly essential utility. Our neighbors stayed with us for the hottest nights of the heat wave, which pushed the thermostat in their home to a balmy 96 degrees.

As temperatures rose, social media surveyed the damage. In the North Portland neighborhood of Kenton, the street cracked and buckled under the stress. Though the city’s public transit switched to functioning as free mobile cooling stations to anyone in need, Portland’s streetcar service shut down. They announced the closure with the image of a melted cable.

***

When the heat dome lifted, a more typical summer returned to Portland and with it a full complement of wildfires. Some 300 miles to the southeast, the Bootleg Fire has consumed more than 600 square miles of remote wilderness and old-growth forest. Given the scale of the losses last year, the worst feels yet to come. 

In late July, the heat dome returned, this time descending upon the central United States to drive temperatures above 100 from Louisiana to Montana. Portland expected a high of 99 degrees, which spurred another round of heat alerts and restaurant closures. There’s an established precedent now. 

Portland has a host of issues, but a lot to love, too. The seasonal shifts between winter and spring, summer and fall are dramatic, turning every block into vivid testaments to the endurance of life in motion. The people engage with one other differently, more readily, here. Maybe it’s the population difference that makes personal encounters feel more manageable, allowing for passing conversations to flow more readily. As the pandemic turned everyone inward, we’ve grown to know our neighbors and neighborhood in ways L.A. never seemed to allow. Already, we’ve made lifelong friends. 

The city can be myopic, idealistic and frustrating, but many here reach for a high standard — even as we process all the ways the city, state and country persistently fall short. Like anywhere, we hope for the best, but everyone worries for what’s coming.

However, as each disaster resets expectations for the climate emergency, the national narrative remains at a standstill. Any conversation about reversing the damage remains couched in personal responsibility while meaningful action that would inconvenience industry remains slow in coming. Like mass shootings, the official response to the climate crisis remains couched in the tacit advice to not live in the wrong place when it happens.

Maybe the greatest misconception about the heat and wildfires that plague the West is the implied reassurance of their location. Geographic divides carry a sense of separation — an idea that the bad things are happening to other people somewhere else. The next heat wave struck the Midwest and the recent flooding in Arizona, Michigan and Northern Europe show the fleeting nature of any sense of safety. 

Our upended climate has no regard for any borders between our cities, states, countries or personal beliefs. Wherever you are, the crisis is already there.

A shellshocked friend who’d fled L.A. to southern Oregon checked in with us during the early summer days of the heat dome. Deeper in the Pacific Northwest, the heatwave reached up to Canada and even Alaska, where Anchorage would hit 90 degrees. In another echo of the West’s all-too-familiar pattern, fires spurred by the heat and dry conditions continue to surge across British Columbia. By the time the temperatures settled, nearly 200 people had died in Oregon and Washington and hundreds more in western Canada. 

“Oh my god,” she wrote, “where are we going to go next?”