Downtown Los Angeles has been orange for the last week. I look out from my seventh floor window past the library, past the library tower to Disney Hall and the Dorothy Chandler beyond and everything is a hazy, dusky color, at once beautiful and unsettling. The atmosphere itself seems to close in on us, the sky a little too low, the clouds a little too dark. It feels like a blizzard is coming. But blizzards don’t come to Southern California.

We are not in danger of losing our home to the massive wildfires sweeping the state, but there’s a sense of dread here nonetheless. The guy in the next cubicle spent all of Friday on the phone checking the progress of the fire that threatened to engulf his house. Luckily, the winds shifted and the firefighters were able to contain that blaze. Others, obviously, were not so lucky.

All through my childhood, we spent every summer vacation at the Inn of the Seventh Mountain in Bend, Oregon. We weren’t a particularly adventurous family and my Mother’s idea of a good time was two weeks in a lounge chair and the occasional Haagen Das bar. We would drive the eight hours in two days, check in and commence with doing absolutely nothing. When I was fourteen, we took the same trip we always did. As the resort sits in the middle of a large national forest, we had seen signs of forest fires nearby in years past. This year, we saw one in full blaze. Off in the distance, we could see the smoke and the choppers flying back and forth. We talked about it amongst ourselves, worrying for the scattering of homes in the area and the loss of wildlife. But we didn’t really think it would affect us.

After our yearly trip to the grocery store to buy the aforementioned Haagen Das and the half watermelon my mother would buy every year and then not eat, we checked in and found our room. The smoke was still looming in the distance. I thought it looked like it was getting closer. My Mother thought I was being ridiculous and should shut up about the fire. My Father, well, my father doesn’t say much.

After we had unpacked and eaten dinner, I decided to go take an evening swim, mainly so I could do what ever fourteen year old wants to do on vacation - get the hell away from my family. The minute I got up the stairs to the parking lot I knew something had changed. People were everywhere, throwing things into their trunks, gathering small children in herds toward station wagons. Cars peeled out. I looked and saw the dark smoke even closer than it had been before. I must admit, it gave my fourteen-year-old mind a bit of a thrill. I had never been in a crisis before and, as Scott will tell you, I am a drama queen.

I ran down the steps to the room and burst in.

“Mom, Dad, I think we need to evacuate!” They looked at each other they way they always looked at each other when I ended a sentence with an exclamation point. It was a look that said: “How will our son ever find a wife if he continues to be such a ridiculous drama queen?”

After I persisted and my Mother pooh-poohed me, my father, I think just to shut me up, went outside. He was gone about thirty seconds. Now, I should note that my father never does anything quickly. His every action is deliberate, contemplative. He comparison-shops everything. He discusses, he thinks things over. I have never in my life seen him panicked or hurried. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen my father run. When he returned to the room, he said nothing. He just made a beeline straight for the suitcase and hurriedly began throwing things into it. Considering the fact that my Mother and I had never seen him make a beeline for anything, we were a little startled. For my dad not to discuss something before he did it meant only one thing. He was in a panic.

Now, if my Dad’s great gift is his nature to be reasoned and thoughtful, my Mother’s is her ability to completely lose her shit. And seeing my father in a panic? Well, that shit was nowhere to be found. She started questioning him, wanting to know what was going on, where we were going, every question imaginable. I don’t think my Dad knew the answers yet, but he wasn’t going to think about it there.

I started following suit, grabbing things and throwing them in boxes and running everything to the car. Once my Mother got outside and saw the smoke and the chaos in the parking lot, even though she was no longer in possession of her shit, managed to lose some more of it. A few paper Dixie cups had fallen out of one of my boxes and hit the concrete. She immediately began screaming, “Mark! The cups! Don’t forget the cups! You dropped the cups!” As they were disposable, biodegradable and, you know, on the dirty ground I decided they were not important in the large scheme of things. My Mother fixated, continuing to scream about them as I dropped the box off and ran for another. It’s the one time I may actually have been justified in slapping my Mother. Do not think I haven’t rued the missed opportunity.

After everything was packed up, we followed the line of cars out to the entrance. It was getting dark, both because of sunset and the choking smoke that was beginning to descend. I looked up at the moon and saw that is was blood red. It was a chilling image.

At the entrance of the hotel, which was about a half a mile from the actual resort, we saw the main road. A man with a bullhorn was shouting, “Turn left only”. This seemed like a stupid job for him to be doing since the only thing on the right side of the driveway was a ten-foot-tall wall of flames. We continued following cars out and away from the flames, turning around and watching them get smaller and fainter as we drove away through the winding timber road that wrapped for 20 miles or so around the hills and woods before reaching the next civilization, another major resort.

We were, to some extent, refugees. But we were refugees from a vacation so, really, not exactly pitiable. Most of the guest of our resort ended up at Sunriver, which was prepared for the onslaught. We were offered reduced rates and my father booked us what he could: A three-bedroom ski lodge, which was cheap because we would have to put the sheets on the bed ourselves. We showed up and found ourselves in a vacation home that was bigger than our own house.

We settled in, glad to be somewhere safe, a little exhausted from the crisis. We realized that our lives had never been in danger and recognized very quickly that we were lucky ones in this thing. We weren’t losing our home, we still had one waiting for us in Washington and we still had a car to take us there.

My parents went to bed in a bedroom downstairs and I went to sleep upstairs, in a large room with two beds. But the ceilings were so tall and I was still so on edge that I couldn’t sleep. I tried sleeping on a fold out couch closer to my parents, but I was still terrified. Not of the fire, really, because it was miles away. And I was old enough not to be afraid of ghosts or monsters under the bed or anything. But I just wasn’t ready to sleep that far away from my parents. I ended up sleeping on the couch outside their door. I had, in some minor way faced my own mortality. And theirs. I’m not sure which terrified me more.

Obviously, the only things my experience had in common with what the families here are going through is that there is a fire motif. And probably a few panicked Mothers. We didn’t lose anything, except for that half a watermelon, which perished when the power was shut off to the hotel. We were able to return to the resort after a few days and no structures at the place had been damaged. We saw a few charred remains of houses along the road. The image of a lone, blackened chimney always fills me with a very specific sadness. But we were together. We kept talking about my mother’s cup obsession or how fast my father had moved or, in the ultimate lesson, how nobody believed Mark when he said we should evacuate. And we ended up having a lot of fun on that trip.

And ultimately that’s the one good thing that can come out of what’s happening in LA and San Diego right now. Something like this allows us all, like my parents and I, to come together as a larger family. And make fun of my Mother.