By Jarret Liotta
A pop-up camp organized by a small group of parents is allowing their children to maintain some semblance of normalcy after enduring the trauma of the Palisades fire.
“I lost my house,” explained eight-year-old Olly Felker, who lived in Pacific Palisades. “Every day it’s really sad because all my neighborhood is black ash and it’ll never be the same.”
But for a few hours each day this week Olly got together with friends at the Barrington Recreation Center, playing basketball and football under the supervision of Victor Costa, his coach at the currently closed Curtis School, a private school on Mulholland Drive near the Skirball Cultural Center.
“Around eight or nine families were directly affected by the fires,” Costa said, and the students were stunned by the dramatic evacuation of their school.
When parent Nicki Hemmat of Brentwood reached out to Costa about organizing an impromptu sports camp for their sons while Curtis School is closed, the coach agreed. “They just wanted their kids to be together and play together, and give them a sense of normalcy,” the coach said.
“We decided we would set this up for the boys to get out, play basketball, see their friends, get off their devices, move their bodies,” Hemmat said, and each parent volunteered to provide lunch on one day.
And part of that time the boys talked about the wildfire week as only young children can do.
“Where do you sleep now?” one asked another. “At my cousin’s house,” he said.” Another said, “Our house didn’t burn down.”
The Felker family is still reeling from the loss of their home.
“I first noticed the fire on Tuesday morning,” parent Ely Felker said. “I didn’t think too much of it because we lived in the Huntington (neighborhood), which is right by the Village. It’s supposed to be like a really low fire-risk area.”
“And then it started moving closer,” he said. “We got a little more concerned. We evacuated and it was really hard to get out.”
That night the family went to a hotel, hoping that their house would be spared. “Then we woke up in the morning to find out that (our house) and basically all the other houses in the neighborhood, were completely gone,” Felker said
“It’s just been hard, dealing with the loss. … Dealing with all the kids’ emotions, our emotions, finding a place to live,” he said. “The rents are like astronomical for anything in this neighborhood.”
Tearful, Felker said, ” So it’s really great that they did this, getting the kids out here, taking their mind off all the stuff.”
Another eight-year-old boy in the group from the Palisades who attended Calvary Christian School — a school destroyed in the fire — shared how his school was evacuated. His parents asked that his name not be used.
“There was a fire alarm in my classroom, and my teacher said, ‘This is not a drill.’ We grabbed our bags and walked to the parking lot. There was ashes everywhere and it was hard for me to see because some ashes got in my eyes,” the boy said.
His older brother shouted at him to get into a car driven by his best friend’s mom, and 12 other children piled in. His family stayed that night with an uncle near the airport, and in the morning, he said, “My parents told us that my house burned down.”
“It’s like a rollercoaster,” the boy said of the wildfire week, “going down mostly, but sometimes going a little bit up, like just to know everybody’s safe.”
Despite the shock and sadness, Felker focused on the good.
“We’ve had a lot of support from our friends, our family, the school, and it’s been really great,” Felker said, noting that Meera Ratnesar, head of school at Curtis School, is letting the Felker’s family stay in an empty condo of hers in Westwood.
“Sometimes you see the worst of people in things like this, with the looting and the price-gouging with the rents,” Felker said, “but you really see the best of people too.”
For his son, Olly, it’s hard to see the bright side because the reality is still sinking in.
“If we stayed there it wouldn’t be a good place to live because all the houses are just black ash,” Olly said. “There’s no grocery stores, no car wash, no basketball. So we can’t live there.”
Jarret Liotta is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer and photographer.