Queens Building Fire Escape, Geography Department, Royal Holloway University of London, United Kingdom
A last minute tutee cancellation gave me a fifteen minute gap in my back to back student meetings, and I snuck out the back of the department to the fire escape overlooking Egham. It was bitingly cold, but fresh. Though the pass was relatively high, the signal struggled to emerge from the static, and I decided the fire escape might not be the best location given interference from heavy machinery, air venting and lab equipment directly adjacent.
The news has been filled with the Trump inauguration. For those of us, like my family, who have been directly affected by the LA fires, the slew of executive orders since Monday has felt like another set of fires that were foreshadowed by the burning of Los Angeles over the last two weeks. I am still checking the Calfire map many times daily, and stunned that 'containment' of the Palisades fire is still only 63%. A county infrastructure damage map has recently been released. It looks like a pointilist painting of red, black, green and yellow, but the coloured dots are houses, schools, cafes, libraries, offices and other structures in various states of damage. The map is mostly red, which means 100% structural damage. I found a photo of the house I lived in during high school and couldn't stop looking at it. It is marked as 100% damaged, but unlike other homes that are just piles of rubble, our former house is a hollow cinderblock rectangle with the remainder of the two-story facade pointing to the sky. The single window in the facade looks like a wide eye. Everything inside has burned, but because of the existence of the facade and cinderblock walls, it feels like a hollowing-out rather than a burn-to-the-ground. One can see directly into the corner of the garage where we used to have our family desktop computer- this was where I downloaded music on Limewire for the first time and made CDs for myself and family road trips. It is also the corner of the garage where I sat and chose my first semester's courses at Stanford University. The remainder of the house is a poetics of space- of corners, bubbles, staircases and windows where so much of my life unfolded. The second story - where my bedroom was - is completely gone, and the ring of tall bamboo that used to surround the house is absent. This means the hollow house is open to the sky- in the photograph, this is a pale gray sky that suggests ash still swirling in the air.