I have a ritual I do most every time I'm in Los Angeles. I make my way to the end of the Santa Monica Pier at sunset. The Pier is loud and filled with tourists; there's a ferris wheel and a roller coaster. It's not the type of place I'd normally seek out. But I go because the Pier is the end of Route 66, the fabled highway that originates at Adams and Michigan in Chicago and extends across the US until it reaches the ocean. Until it reaches the Pier.

I go because when I stand there—past the crowds and the carnival and the food stalls and the buskers—right at the very end of the Pier where the fishermen and young lovers jostle for a quiet corner, I'm connected by a line that goes from LA to Chicago. To home.

It's no longer a physical line—Route 66 was replaced by the interstate highway system a half-century or more ago. It's a brittle line now, one that exists only in small fragments and in memory. Like life.

And I go and I stand there, on that line that connects me to where I come from, as day turns into night. And as it does, I take a moment to reflect. On distance and time. On past and future. On a life that has lead me to this point from that point and on the mystery of what points will unfold from here.

The sun sets over the ocean at the end of the Pier. It's just you and water to the horizon. It is big and red and then it gets thinner and thinner until suddenly it blinks out and the sky turns from reds to blues. Every time I've stood there, as the sun disappears, people applaud.

Today, just blocks from the Pier, is an evacuation zone and, just beyond that, devastation at a scale that should be impossible to fathom but instead we are forced to face its horror as Los Angeles burns.

The first time I went to LA I thought I'd hate it. Midwestern bred, I was prepared to dismiss it as fake and obsessed with its own self-mythology. Instead I fell in love with it, because it felt so much like home.

Like Chicago, Los Angeles is a city that works. Every person I've ever met in LA is like me: someone who's ready to roll up their sleeves and put in the hours to get the job done. Far more than its glamorous mythology, it is a city of immigrants, of laborers, of people working hard every single day to get by. I've always found it gritty in the best way, riding its busses and the metro and walking for miles (admittedly walking places often gets me strange looks from folks that live there). I have eaten some of the best food of my life from temporary stalls on a random sidewalk in LA. I have hiked its hills and canyons and seen wildlife I never would have expected. I have watched so many sunsets over the water.

Every time I leave, I want to go back.

Even now, watching Los Angeles burn from 2000 miles away, feeling stressed and worried for those that are there—friends and family and so so many strangers—I want to go back.

Because LA is a city like Chicago, which rebuilt itself from the devastation of flames. And so I know it will happen there too. LA is a city that works. LA is a city that dreams. The people there—friends and family and so so many strangers—are ready to work, are ready to look out for each other, are ready to dream in a way that only LA can dream and build something better from the ashes.

Every sunset ends in darkness. But it sets up the sunrise of a new day.

End note: If you, like me, are looking for ways to help, the LA Public Press has compiled a very good list of lots of local resources.