I wanted to tell you about the two fallen senior ladies I rescued off the sidewalk.

How each of them had spilled onto different sides of the same block of Lincoln Boulevard separated in events by the year I’d gone without my car.

But then a wildfire messed it up.

My one year anniversary without a car in L.A. was ruined by the Palisades wildfire.

Before dusty chaparral melted homes, I was going to humblebrag about riding public transit while most of my fellow Angelenos enslaved themselves to smaller motorized cages.

But now I’m in a FEMA hotel driving my wife’s cage around like it’s also mine.

Did you see it on the news? Evacuating drivers in that traffic jam ditching their luxury cars to escape the oncoming flames of the Palisades Fire? You probably saw it on your Instagram. How a bulldozer was brought up to clear the road of the abandoned Teslas and Audis and Mercedes so fire trucks could pass through to their fight.

A doom spiral wherein the cars that spew the toxic emissions, haul hard won rare earth minerals and all the inequities that brought us to this edge, are our best escape methods until they’re not.

Personal automobiles are enshrined in our U.S. Constitution while our own inner ones sit inside at angles the human body was never meant to sustain.

My sister Britt drove her Jeep Compass out to the Arizona desert to meet us with our dogs while our apartment was under mandatory evacuation. We crammed inside of it while the air turned bluer. Our bodies unnatural, our minds racing faster than the highway. Planning next steps in panic trying to hang onto life’s steering wheel even though life is not a car it’s a train.

“Electric cars will not save humanity they will only save the car industry” the meme says. The new old president says drill baby drill anyway. I order an acai bowl at the smoothie bar of a gas station at the California/Arizona border back en route to the smoke.

Upon return to our city, a 2006 Toyota Rav 4 holds our stuff, rescues us, steers our conversation into anxiety every time we’re looking for a parking spot. “There’s one. Oh no wait, there’s already a car backed up into it.”

Before this, when I was artfully learning how when one bus is missed another two can be found to get closer to the destination than if I’d waited, I could feel a smug thinkpiece brewing in my fingers supported by bicycle toned leg muscles about the freedoms I’d found going carless in a city intertwined with private motor vehicle use.

I was going to say how the stigma of riding the bus in L.A. gives it a subversive charm. I could hide on the bus from the expectations of individualism and feel a righteous theft. A Robin Hood of stealing street transportation from the rich and giving it back to my poor soul.

I had a joke about using my passive time on the bus to safely nurture my phone addiction. Texting and driving and pretending you’re not is a popular form of self dishonesty.

Riding the bus in L.A. is only scary if you refuse to recognize other people’s suffering as part of your own.

The Palisades Fire struck within a mile of my apartment and the biggest urban fire in U.S. history made

cars important to me again.

Fires made worse by cars forced me back into needing one.

It takes fire to start a car. Spark, electricity is a hidden fire under the hood, behind walls, downed power lines in dried buckwheat and white sage. The ignition of dead cells to awaken motion, time travel. A car perverts time, getting us to a place we weren’t supposed to have access to so fast. A bus does the same. A bicycle is sensual time travel, we earn it but are rewarded with pleasure for our sweat. Walking is God, you must be humble to hear God, walking is how I pray. Crawling is even more reverent, it’s where we begin and end.

Driving in cars we move against each other, competing, on the bus we move in communion, see each other’s eyes, hear one another’s YouTube videos. Shut the fuck up I’ve wanted to say on the bus too. It’s not a utopia. I refuse to remember the bus as an ideal. How it took 3 buses and 1 train to get from apartment in Santa Monica to my brother’s in Atwater Village.

I haven’t ridden the bus in L.A. in almost three weeks. We wait for the right day to clean our ash stale apartment and salvage what we can to leave.

I miss the motion of my life when the bus helped actualize it. The exhaustion of exposure to the streets helped peel layers off of me.

It will be a car that takes me away from my lifelong city. Packed with what’s preserved of belongings and knowledge I’ll never understand what life means without technological disease. All the hidden flames made into bits of evil that take us away from each other.

The first elderly lady I helped up had fallen from her walker onto a patch of dirt and bushes. She was Eastern European and so was her elderly companion. They spoke little English but I gathered they wanted me to help her up. Another man walking by took one arm and I cradled her other side. She seemed fine and I walked to catch the 18 Blue Bus, ready to tell the world how that wouldn’t have happened had I been in a car.

One year later an even older woman was on the sidewalk like an upside down turtle next to a walking stick. I was riding my bike the last mile home after taking the 18 bus most of the way back from a hard day of manual and emotional labor. I was on the verge of tears after I helped her up because I needed it so bad. She felt secure in my arms as I braced her. She said “Thank you young man, thank you.” I asked if she needed more help walking home, she said “No thank you,” then called out after me “thank you young man, thank you,”and I needed it. That day I needed it so bad.