Opinion | What 9/11, Cancer and the Palisades Fire Taught Me

I was standing in the alley behind our home in Santa Monica, Calif., taking out the trash, when I looked up and saw that the mountains were on fire. It was as though I’d never noticed mountains there before; I didn’t think of the Santa Monica Mountains as such — more like steep hills rising above the village of Pacific Palisades. I stood there stunned, staring straight up my alley at the flames, black smoke unfurling into the blue sky. It was about four in the afternoon on Jan. 7, 2025.

I instinctively drifted to the corner where my neighbors were taking photos and videos with their phones. Drivers were passing slowly, many stopping to watch. Everybody seemed concerned yet relaxed, dazed or guiltily excited. I recognized the feeling. I found myself quoting myself inwardly, a poem I wrote after my wife’s breast cancer diagnosis in 2015 — or maybe I wrote it after my colon cancer diagnosis six months later: “The holiday / of catastrophe / with friends.”

My 11-year-old daughter joined me outside. She took my hand.

“What’s happening?” she asked. “A wildfire,” I said. “We’ll be OK.”

I watched the North Tower of the World Trade Center burn from the corner of Maiden Lane and Water Street at 9:03 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001. As the South Tower exploded in a fireball of biblical proportions, black smoke unfurled into the blue sky. An old woman pushing a handcart of groceries crumpled on the sidewalk, wailing.

I ducked back into my girlfriend’s building in the Financial District, where I’d spent the night. She was dressing for work and I told her to grab her things. Back out on the street, I instinctively turned and walked toward the towers. Why? To see the destruction firsthand? To help in some way? My girlfriend pulled me back into the exodus of people heading uptown through the East Side. Our phones weren’t working reliably. My girlfriend was sobbing sporadically. When we reached my sublet in the East Village, we switched on the TV and saw the North Tower disintegrate in a mushroom cloud of smoke and dust and ash. A friend, a former Army medic, somehow reached me on my landline: “Close your windows,” he said. “You don’t want to breathe this air.”

We’ll never know with certainty that carcinogens in the smoke, dust and ash from the World Trade Center caused my wife’s cancer and my own. Our oncologists think it’s possible, even probable. A significant “environmental insult” can easily lead to cancer in 10 to 15 years, they told us. The Sept. 11 Victim Compensation Fund agrees with our doctors; my wife and I are both registered recipients of compensation.

But cancer is the result of a complex interaction of any number of factors, including environmental insults, genetics and pure chance. A mutation flares like a spark from a downed power line in a Santa Ana windstorm and the body ignites in a conflagration of uncontrolled cellular growth.

We didn’t leave Santa Monica right away because my wife was sick with the flu, so I stayed up monitoring the news and social media, ready to pull my wife and daughter from their beds. My phone chimed: We were now two blocks away from an evacuation warning zone.

An editor I knew called from the airport in Phoenix to ask if I’d be willing to wear an N95 and drive toward the Palisades to write about what was happening. I wanted to go — I felt I should and must go — but as a survivor of Stage 4 colon cancer, my lungs are among the places where a recurrence is most likely. Breathing the smoke and ash of trees and brush and thousands of burning structures would be unwise, to say the least. So I lay down in the dark, listening for the chime of an evacuation alert that never came.

That morning, as I walked the dog, the wind buffeted the tall, slender palm trees. The sky was churning, a filthy beige color, the glow from the flames reflecting in the clouds. There was an acrid smell of airborne silt. My throat was irritated, my chest was tight, my arms and legs felt weak. Gusts of wind cleared the smoke, briefly allowing me to see the fire spreading wider and lower along the mountainside.

Pacific Palisades was gone, according to the news. For all we knew, our town could be next.

After Sept. 11, my girlfriend and I stayed in the East Village until we were allowed back into her apartment in the Financial District. We had left her windows open, so when we returned we found everything inside coated with dust and ash. A young guy from FEMA visited and recommended that we purchase a HEPA vacuum. Within days, we were living there part-time again. Politicians on the news promised that the air was safe. Everybody was encouraged to eat in restaurants, go shopping. Otherwise, the terrorists would win.

The sky above Manhattan was a greasy yellow smear that made me think of bones, bone marrow, bone meal. I couldn’t stop thinking about the thousands of dead whose bodies we were breathing. Ground zero smoldered for months. Soon, though, I was running again, over to First Avenue and north past the makeshift morgue outside Bellevue, to the United Nations and back home. I was young. I trusted the politicians on the news. What choice did we have? This was where we lived.

As the L.A. fires burned, we chose to evacuate. On the way out, I closed every window. We found a rental cottage in Laguna Beach, about 60 miles south, where people were surfing, licking ice cream. I went running; the sky was blue. My wife was still struggling with the flu, and now our daughter was feeling sick. That night, as I lay in bed with her, trying to soothe her, she asked if our house would burn.

“Our house is safe,” I said, though I knew it was entirely possible that the Palisades fire could sweep two miles south and tear through Santa Monica.

That night she tossed in her sleep with a fever, and I imagined our home gone. A home that has held happiness, the arrival of our daughter and the days and nights with her since. A home that held the stunned anguish — and the joyful, stunned survival — of our cancers. The books that I’ve read and loved and kept, and the books I’ve written and published. Boxes containing 30 years of journals full of love poems and notions for stories and plays. Boxes containing handwritten letters, birthday and holiday cards, printed, predigital photographs. I thought of a poet I knew who, facing a terminal diagnosis, decided to burn everything she’d ever written in a backyard bonfire. Maybe I was in shock, but I suspected that I wouldn’t grieve for any object or possession that burned. As long as we survived.

A laminated booklet hung from metal rings on the cage, providing names and biographical information about Don Draper, Betty and Romeo, the red-rumped parrots; Pippi, Panchito and Pac-Man, the rainbow finches; Chadwick, Belinda and Lupita, the button quails. My daughter giggled when Buster the cockatiel, known as The Mayor because of his gregariousness, nibbled her fingers through the wire mesh.

I was in the kitchen when a woman stepped out of the house on the other side of the aviary. She was just a voice to me, a blur of long gray hair. She owned our cottage and these were her birds. She loved that our daughter loved them.

“Has your family been displaced by the fires?”

Our daughter said yes. “Our house is OK,” she added. “So far.”

We were lucky. Our home is still here. Many of our friends lost their homes in the Palisades and Altadena. Some have their homes, but their schools are gone. One friend returned to where he lived and found a single coffee mug in the ashes. Another found two plates of her wedding china. Another found one photo: a singed school portrait of her son.

Once we were back in Santa Monica and for a long time after the fires, I tried to stay inside. When I walked the dog, I wore an N95 and felt like it was March 2020. The A.Q.I. apps described our air quality as “good,” but the smell was Sept. 11. I worried about dioxins, asbestos, PCBs — carcinogens in the ash and air. Ash eddied in gutters. Sidewalks were gritty and crunched under heel. A film of ash covered everything outside: the remains of burned vegetation, 16,000 structures and dozens of human beings.

I didn’t know when I’d feel safe running again, with the breeze, a leaf blower, a passing car stirring up molecules of potential cancer. When I saw other people running, I tried not to envision them in the chemo chair in 10 to 15 years. I rented a cheap stationary bike. I left my shoes at the door and carried the dog to the sink to wash her paws. Our new HEPA air purifiers were blowing nonstop and our windows remained closed.

Over the last eight months, I have slowly acclimatized. Long ago I stopped wearing a mask outside. I don’t wash the dog’s paws after every walk. The cleanup of toxic debris in the Palisades and Altadena, we are told, is almost complete, and people are buying and selling lots. Friends have moved out of Los Angeles, or out of California. Other friends are rebuilding. The beaches have been open for months. I returned my rented stationary bike and I’m running outside again. But on blustery days, when the ash swirls, I stay inside. I don’t open our windows wide. I am wary, but I believe in survival.

Ten years ago, when my wife and I were diagnosed with cancer, friends and friends of our friends, acquaintances and strangers, sent flowers, letters, food. Sent money. Called and visited us. Saved us. So my wife and I have been doing what we can. Helping friends find houses and apartments to rent. Donating to GoFundMe after GoFundMe. We are determined to help in small and personal ways, now and in the months and years ahead, when the mass sympathy is gone, when the cataclysm is half-forgotten — which is often when the worst of a trauma is felt.

I write this during a heat wave in the heart of fire season. Hardly any rain has fallen in Los Angeles since January. Last month, the massive Gifford Fire burned through Los Padres National Forest, north of Santa Barbara. Wildfire smoke from Canada is again polluting the air in the Upper Midwest and the Northeast.

East Village, New York City

Sept. 2001

Learning to live in a near-constant emergency feels too much like the experience of living in remission from cancer: a state of ceaseless uncertainty that my wife and I have learned to accept in our remissions. This is not a life that we should accept en masse, that we should accept for our children. But this is how we live now. This is where we live.

I often find myself daydreaming of rain. Of an afternoon darkening not with smoke but with storm clouds. Of rain that rinses the air. Of the alley behind our home streaming with rain that washes the ash away. No; that’s a trite and disingenuous metaphor. Rain offers only a partial cleansing, transferring the pollutants to lower ground, to the ocean and the beaches.

And another fire is always coming. So my mind turns to fantasies of escape, of moving to the west of Ireland, where I lived for a year in my 20s. Where the rain, it seemed, was never-ending.