We may believe the places we love will outlive us. But nothing lasts forever

Pico Iyer is the author of, most recently, The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise.

One hot summer evening, 33 years ago, I walked upstairs in our family home in California to see flames five-storeys high surrounding me on every side.

I grabbed my mother’s cat to try to run to safety, but when I got outside, I saw there was nowhere for us to go. Fires were rising on every side of me, made crazy by wild winds swirling at more than 100 kilometres an hour. There was no way to drive up our narrow mountain road, no way to drive down.

For three hours, I was stranded at the bottom of our driveway, at moments watching the blaze systematically make its way through the house, reducing every last childhood souvenir in my bedroom to ash and then wiping out my next eight years of writing, all outlined in handwritten notes.

Through what felt like a miracle, I was rescued on that occasion by a Good Samaritan. Blessed with a water truck, he saw a fire up in the hills and drove up to be of help, only to find himself stranded right outside our driveway. The hose he pointed at every onrushing surge of orange saved my life, as well as his own.

But when I walked up the silent road next morning to see what was left, I found bronze statues reduced to ash. My parents’ cars were hollow skeletons. All 60 years of their photos, mementoes, lecture notes – gone, as if they’d never existed. A once-in-a-generation conflagration had overturned my family’s lives in an evening.

Our insurance company gave us just enough to rebuild on the same property, and we moved into a much sturdier house, though an empty one. Yet more than 10 times since, we’ve received reverse-911 calls that have sent us fleeing from the new structure, pursued by flames. Every time I drive down to the grocery store, I can’t be sure I’ll have a home to return to.

In the case of houses in the hills of California, we residents know that uncertainty is the price we pay for living where we do. Humans were probably never meant to dwell on dry slopes that are growing more combustible by the season. But it can be heartbreaking to witness what seems to be the mounting fragility of almost everything around us, even those places we fancifully imagined to be safe. As I took in the images from Lahaina, Hawaii, earlier this month – waterfront streets turned into blackened wastelands, cars parked at crazy angles, suggesting people in flight or gone forever – I wondered whether anything we love can last for long.

As travellers, we often count on places to remain fixed, the way they are in our memory or our photographs; they speak to stability in a world on the move. We return to classic sites in the hope of witnessing permanence, or at least to pay homage to what has stood for centuries, and promises to outlast us. We know in our hearts that this is an illusion – even the Great Pyramid won’t be there forever – but still it was shocking to see Lahaina’s famous banyan tree, which had protected the historic town for 150 years, charred and ashen. It was harrowing to think of the little boat that took my wife and me out from Lahaina Harbour so we could hear whale song as the mighty creatures breached a few feet from the prow. As summer draws to an end, many of us are surely wondering what places will still be around next year.

We’ve all grown accustomed, in this age of extreme weather, to reminders of fragility. In Antarctica three years ago, I saw huge, millennia-old slabs of white calving off the ice-shelf, one month before the continent recorded a terrifying temperature of 18.3 C. In Venice, I heard how the whole city is sinking by up to two millimetres a year; it may have disappeared entirely by the time my granddaughter saves up enough money to visit. Last week, my daughter flew from Japan to visit California for the first time in 25 years; a typhoon cancelled all flights out of Japan hours after she left, and a hurricane wiped out her return flight from Los Angeles six days later. As she awaited her rescheduled flight, an earthquake about 50 kilometres away, measuring 5.1 on the Richter scale, rocked the ground beneath her.

The entire world is being remade as we move around it – and, more and more, because we move around it. Most of us know that it’s our own destructive habits and longings that are helping to precipitate the disasters that shake us. As someone who has come to love sites on every continent, I have to ask myself how I can ever justify travel these days as I watch it ravage the places I’m visiting, and everywhere else. For most of the year, in suburban Japan, I’m glad to live far from cars and planes and to travel no farther than my feet can carry me. When I do take a trip, I have to make sure that something constructive, and reaching farther than myself, will offset the damage I am causing.

Yet for those who still wish to take vacations – or have to travel on business, as I do – scenes like the ones from Maui remain impossible to forget. One of the traveller’s first duties has always been to think of the people left behind: the mother or spouse waving goodbye on the platform as you take off on your grand adventure; the new friend in Havana or Addis Ababa who watches you rise into the heavens on a plane that she can never dream of entering. These days, those complex feelings need to be extended to the places we’re leaving, too. The usual ache of departure – will I see this building again? And who will I be if I do come back? – are deepened by new questions: Will the view of the Taj Mahal that transported my wife and me on our honeymoon even be visible should we return, amidst acid rain and smog and even flooding? Will that street we’ve been longing to revisit look like the Lahaina waterfront today – an old friend who’s suddenly grown sick beyond recognition?

It’s not always natural disasters that rewrite our lives, of course. In Paris last month, my wife and I walked across town to revisit the Notre Dame cathedral, which has long uplifted us with its high ceilings, the light streaming through its stained-glass windows, the young woman sometimes standing at its altar, raising the roof with her prayerful voice; all that faced us now were shuttered doors, and photographs recalling the structural fire in 2019 that took down the spire and much of the roof of a treasure-house that humans began working on more than 850 years ago.

Not long before I planned to visit the Buddhas in Bamiyan, in Afghanistan, they were shot and then dynamited into the ground by the Taliban. And I recognize that some transformations can be for the better: Shanghai and London are among the many places that have grown infinitely livelier and more prosperous in the years I’ve known them, though sometimes at the cost of irreplaceable historical treasures.

Besides, I’ve long believed that cultures – and people – are more resilient than we imagine, and that places don’t change every time their features do. Lhasa, in central Tibet, may be packed with karaoke parlours and high-rises now, but the Jokhang Temple at its heart may move the visitor more than ever, in part because of everything that threatens to destroy it. And environmental consciousness has developed powerfully over my lifetime, though many would say too late: In the Maldives this May, I was invited to a resort where every visitor was asked to hand over his or her shoes before arriving, to protect the sand. The owners are now working to create a nursery that could propagate 50,000 coral fragments a year to help protect the precious reefs.

Yet impermanence makes house calls wherever we happen to be sitting, and insofar as it’s often as much a result of human choices as of “acts of God,” it asks us, searchingly, whether we shouldn’t just stay at home. At the very least, it urges us to take nothing for granted, and savour what we can, while we can.

During a paradisal month at the Banff Centre, six years ago, writing in a studio looking out over snowcaps and long, pristine lawns, I saw the peaks disappearing behind an angry brown haze, set off by fires hundreds of kilometres away in British Columbia. I came to cherish every hour in the smoky air because it reminded me that it’s the places of greatest natural beauty that are often the places most in peril. That province is on fire again right now.

In such a climate, I find myself turning to those who have reflected deeply on suffering. In the wake of the terrible tsunami of 2011 that swept at least 18,500 people to their deaths in my adopted home of Japan, I travelled with the Dalai Lama up to a fishing village that had nearly been erased from the Earth. The Tibetan leader held and blessed dozens of the souls who came out into the rubble to greet him. He offered words of strong counsel, about looking to the future and honouring the ones who were lost. He warmly shook the hands of tiny schoolchildren who were the only members of their families left. But all he could really do, with tears in his eyes, was remind them that none of us is exempt from loss. He recalled for them how one day, at the age of 23, he woke up to be told that if he didn’t flee that evening – leaving behind his friends, his small dog and his home as fighting between Tibetan protesters and Chinese Communist soldiers escalated dangerously – he and his country might be gone forever.

The Dalai Lama remains as confident and clear-sighted a soul as I have met, rightly famous for his warm smile and constant laugh; he reminds us that the only way to live in a world of constant change is not to pretend that it might be otherwise. We may have little control over external circumstances, but we have a lot of control over how we respond to them, and how much we choose to take loss to be fresh opportunity.

This week, I head back to a Benedictine monastery, high above the Pacific Ocean in Central California, where I’ve made more than 100 retreats over the past 32 years. Six years ago, my monastic friends were cut off from the world for several months when winter storms sent parts of the slope above the narrow road below sliding into the sea to both the north and the south. The monks’ worship and their sense of community grew ever stronger in the undistracted quiet, but their revenue, which largely depends on visitors and a retreat ministry, shrunk to almost zero.

Heroic road workers managed to clear the debris, which in one place dumped six million cubic yards of rock and hillside on the road, only for the coronavirus to shut everything down a few seasons later. Just as the COVID-19 pandemic was beginning to ease, a panicky neighbour set off a blaze that forced the monks to evacuate for another five weeks. Firefighters worked around the clock to protect the tiny cluster of buildings in the wilderness, but more than 120,000 acres all around were burned. This past winter, 12 unseasonal atmospheric storms again blocked the highway off on both sides. Some locals wonder if it can ever really be restored.

The brothers’ faith remains undented, because they’ve always known they can’t depend on material things to support or protect them. They’ve even found a way for a few of us visitors to get around the roadblocks at certain hours so we can visit them. But the ever-more-visible precariousness of our homes – and the places we love – is telling us, every hour, not to waste a moment or assume that everything will remain the same. That banyan tree in Lahaina that enjoyed a 150th birthday party this April may not be around next year, even if you do go back to see it.