New word: Pyrocumulus

As the now-infamous Station Fire continues to burn outside Los Angeles, a new word has entered the local vocabulary: pyrocumulus. This word defines the awesome cloud formations resulting from the intense heat and smoke of large fires. The mushroom cloud from the Station Fire has been looming over Los Angeles for more than two weeks now, and often it is the only cloud in the sky. It is awesome and beautiful, a fact that many Los Angelenos are torn about. It is hard to admit that something resulting from intense destruction could be beautiful, but we all took pictures in awe of the eerie pyrocumulus clouds, that rise from the ground instead of from above.

The fires and the resulting pyrocumulus clouds triggers thoughts about the common paradise/apocalypse dichotomy associated with Los Angeles. As a new resident, I find this dichotomy fascinating. Gregory Rodriguez wrote a compelling piece exploring this idea in the LA Times recently. An excerpt from the article:

“Here's what the pyrocumulus cloud tells me: We should stop thinking of Los Angeles in such hopelessly schizophrenic, contradictory, "pitched back and forth" terms. That's because the theological notions of paradise and apocalypse are not so much opposed as deeply intertwined....

Far from being the victory of hell in L.A. over heaven in L.A., they reminded me that in a very real way, we can't have one without the other. The cloud is just what it looked like: two sides of the same coin; the one defines the other. Heaven, hell. Ugly, beautiful. Apocalypse, paradise. Los Angeles.”

Susan Orlean also recently wrote about the Los Angeles heaven/hell dichotomy for The New Yorker. In her article, she writes, “this week, hell won out.” She wrote her article at a time when multiple fires were burning out of control. At the time of this writing, the only active fire is the Station Fire, and its 160,000 burning acres are 62% contained.

I have only been in Los Angeles a short time, and already, my thoughts about my personal environment are changing. The foreign is becoming domestic; the strange is becoming normal; the unnatural is becoming natural; the ugly is becoming beautiful. Los Angeles.