LOS ANGELES — Pedestrians shuffled by the famed Chateau Marmont hotel, customers queued up at Starbucks on Sunset Boulevard and car horns bleated at gridlocked intersections. But overhead, shadowing the usual bustling Los Angeles scene, a blackish dome of wildfire smoke turned daybreak into an eerie twilight.
Even beyond the reach of the flames from five wildfires, Los Angeles residents accustomed to radiant sunshine and balmy weather are living with disquiet and even fear. Across the city are reminders of nearby danger: Thumping helicopters overhead. Wildfire ash tumbling like snowflakes. A lingering whiff of smoke just about everywhere. The familiar crystalline sky turned ashen gray.
''It is otherworldly,'' said Lydia Thelwell, a bartender visiting a hair salon where wildfire smoke could be seen from the front window. ''You know it's happening, but we just go on with our day."
The sprawling, congested city of nearly 4 million has always been disjointed, what's been called dozens of separate cities in search of a unified whole. It's not uncommon for temperatures in different neighborhoods to vary by as much as 30 degrees, with cooler days at the beach and desert-like communities in the San Fernando Valley.
But nearly everywhere now is the sense of nearby danger from the fires, with smoke coiling for miles across the sky. L.A. hasn't seen fires like these, especially in winter months, any time in recent memory.
For coffee shop manager Pascal Loza, it was business as usual, with long lines of customers waiting for lattes and paninis in the Studio City business.
''It's hard to feel scared when it's so far'' in a distant neighborhood, he said. ''It's something you learn to live with.''
Indeed, wildfires have long been part of living in L.A., where residents enjoy arguably the nation's finest climate but accept the tradeoff of wildfires, earthquakes, and drought — and the uncertainty that comes with them.
