Published in the Anthology "Burned:Stories About Fire" (2025) Edited by Nicholas Davidge and Alana White

Where do stories begin, and where do they end? Fresh chapters and revelations always arrive by their own timetables. Some stories return again and again to our world, and sometimes, we only have to look for the clues, and listen to recognize their voices. This story begins with an ending. It’s a travelog of sorts, that traverses a personal and temporal landscape, tracing an arc of fire through time, with Dante as a guide.

We begin in July of 2020, during the worldwide Covid Pandemic. We were all living a bizarre bubble-life of a quarantine lockdown, and one of the places I would often escape to was the Hahahmonga Watershed Park, at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains, in Altadena, California. An odd place, not quite park, not quite wilderness, it’s a space where the natural world and human-made infrastructure coexist in peculiar proximity. The area consists of roads and trails circling a large dam and seasonal wetlands. A river flows right down the middle from the mountains above. These waters split off, and are partially diverted through a series of channels, locks, and ponds. All of these waters culminate at a massive concrete reservoir, known by the local name, “Devil’s Gate Dam.” The park is traversed by local hikers, horseback riders, birdwatchers, and mountain bikers, along with municipal water district employees that maintain this series of channels and ponds. The entire park sits alongside the massive campus of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, its own mountain of buildings rising up against the chaparral slopes of the Angeles National Forest.

During the pandemic, many of us found ourselves in a strange space of isolation, needing to reach for, and re-forge our connection with others in new ways. The acute awareness of our short history as humans on this planet, the plagues and pandemics that have inevitably shaped our lives and losses, strengthened a fresh kinship for me personally, with those artists, astronomers, and writers of the past, who strove to form a better world out of the ashes, the plagues, and upheavals of their times.

I remembered the drawings by Sandro Botticelli I had seen years earlier, of Dante and Beatrice rising up through the stars, traversing the spheres of heaven. Narrated by the lines of Dante’s Divine Comedy, Botticelli’s stars appeared like immaculately patterned and animated fires, forming and reforming at each successive level of Paradise. To Dante, as well as Botticelli, these blazing stars were each a representation of the divine, and are simultaneously, “the living power within our own hearts… what holds the earth together.” (Canto 1 - Paradiso) These words struck a deep chord for Dante and his readers. Dante drew from the suffering and agony of his own personal life, living years in exile from his home, while witnessing the horrors of wars and plagues. From the tormenting flames of the Inferno, to the emotional suffering and regret of Purgatorio; at the end of his poetic journey, it was the distillation of all this loss and pain in his heart, that reveals the love that still remains and lights the way to Paradise.

As I spent my days of quarantine walking through this park alone, I wondered how odd it was, that right in front of me, astrophysicists were reaching for and receiving signals from distant stars. I wondered, to what end will all of this signaling lead? And how are we, standing here today, a bridge between the past and the future humans who have always, and will always, be signaling stars?

While tormenting fires existed in Dante’s Inferno, they were small and individual, and Hell was a cold, hard place. In Purgatorio, we are confronted with fire again; it is horrifying and all-consuming, yet it offers purification and redemption on a deeper level. When Dante reaches this wall of fire upon his final ascent through Purgatory, he feels a greater terror than ever before, knowing that he has to pass through this intense flame, becoming all but ash, in order to be renewed. When he emerges on the other side, he has left his fears behind.

In Paradiso he is greeted again by flames, but now they are pure light, living spirits, dancing, animated by love itself. Looking back, all earthly existence seems as “strange as a flame that never moves.” (Canto 1 - Paradiso)

The year before the Covid pandemic, I had painted a page of these heavenly fires, after Botticelli. I was staying in a small town in Italy, not far from where Dante and Botticelli had envisioned their own flaming stars. As I walked down the local streets, past the cafes and bars with their ads for ice creams and mobile phones, I imagined my page of Botticelli’s fires printed onto large sheets of wallpaper, covering the walls and billboard signs that filled the countryside with their commercial signals. One day, I printed twenty-five sheets of my flame drawings and pasted them onto a small, vacant billboard that stood along a narrow road by an olive grove. It felt like a message, a signal fire sent out into the world.

On my walks through Hahahmonga park in the summer of 2020, I began to notice a number of old trail signs and markers, many of which were empty or so weathered that their markings had disappeared under the sun of passing years. I gathered my pages of Botticelli’s flames, and posted them onto these guideposts around the park. There, in the shadow of NASA, stood these guideposts to the stars, like small beacons against the darkness, hope in a pandemic.

My connection with Botticelli’s fires didn’t begin with my stay in Italy. It was actually a few years earlier, when a friend had traveled to London, and visited the Courtauld Gallery to see Botticelli’s illustrations for the Divine Comedy. Upon return, she had given me a gift, a small print of Dante and Beatrice rising through the Second Planetary Sphere of Paradise. Here, the two beloved reach towards each other, encircled by concentric rings of flaming stars. This print has hung on my wall since 2016, always quietly in the background of life.

Just a few months ago, this same friend rushed back to Los Angeles on a flight from Miami. Her family’s home in Altadena was in the path of the Eaton Wildfire. Countless homes and businesses in the community had already been lost. On January 8, I walked over to my friend’s house to check on her parents, who had remained home throughout the wildfires. Fortunately, their home was spared much damage, but their yard was littered with ash and debris that was still blowing in with the high winds and surrounding fires. As I was leaving, a burned page from a book drifted down from the wind above me, and landed at my feet in the driveway. A small illustration graced this page from a fairy tale, showing a young woman– who looked strikingly like my friend, or was it Beatrice? The edges of the page were neatly burned, almost too perfectly, by this monstrosity of a fire that delivered so many endings in such a short amount of time. This strange arrival seemed to remark that the mythic is always close at hand in times of crisis.

After these devastating wildfires, many of us have found ourselves in darkness, like Dante, exiled from our homes. We can return, but never in the same way. How can one be haunted by fire? These are not the cold ghosts that shimmer in the darkness– here we are haunted by raging, incendiary specters, burning with the heat of exploding stars. This story begins with an ending, when seemingly all has been lost. Or perhaps, caught between beginnings and endings, learning that the only path ahead is through fire and grief. As I write this on Good Friday, I’m aware that this is also the day that Dante’s story begins. And so we shall begin, in the darkness, at the doorway to the Inferno, Devil’s Gate Dam.