“Are you OK?”
Text and Facebook notifications began pinging Tuesday afternoon. By Wednesday, my phone felt like it was going off every minute. As news of the infernos surrounding Los Angeles became international headlines, friends from all parts of my life and far-flung relatives were anxious to know if my family was close to the fire – and which one. They saw images of lifeguard towers in flames mere feet from the ocean, movie stars crying over lost estates, billowing black smoke over skylines like battle scenes from some Marvel movie. They had no way to grasp proportion or distance. That this was a catastrophe was all that was clear.
“Are you safe?”
I hesitated before each reply. The truth is there’s no simple way to answer those questions if you call Southern California home.
What is the correct reply when last week Los Angeles County experienced what is adding up to one of the most devastating fire events in the state’s history, and perhaps the costliest in the history of the entire nation? Thirteen people dead and several missing as of this writing. More than 180,000 of us were under direct evacuation orders. Incinerated in the Pacific Palisades were some 5,300 structures that had been our homes, businesses, libraries, churches, schools, synagogues, Will Rogers’ Ranch. That number topped 7,000 for the Eaton fire in Altadena, Pasadena and Sierra Madre. In Sylmar, the Hurst fire burned more than 800 acres. The Sunset fire scorched the Hollywood Hills, threatening homes and iconic landmarks. Topanga was ablaze, again. On Thursday a new blaze dubbed the Kenneth fire began eating through wilderness on the Ventura-L.A. County line.
And…and…and…
Enumerating all the losses feels impossible, and the true depth of them as yet unknowable.
The homes of more than a dozen personal friends are gone, belongings nothing but ashes now. Erika Schikel posts pictures of her Altadena home’s ruins with a charred car in what had been the driveway; weirdly, the only possession that survived was a miniature bust of Beethoven given to her by an ex. Podcaster Meghan Daum posts an episode of “The Unspeakable” recorded on her phone, because all her recording equipment was incinerated when the Eaton fire sped through the neighborhood she called “the enchanted forest” and destroyed it all.
So many more are sheltering in hotels or crashing with friends or family while they figure out their next moves.
And for much of my adult life, I lived in Malibu and the Palisades; I was renting a funky trailer off Greenleaf Canyon Road in Topanga when I started dating my husband.
Which is all to say that, as it is for millions of us now who’ve lived in or just passed through the many places burned, the settings for life memories are totally gone, or forever altered, existing now only in the mind’s eye.
So while technically, yes, here in Orange County’s Orange Park Acres where my family and I now live we were out of the fires’ direct reach – this time – neither we nor anyone we know is “OK.”
And “safe”?
How to explain all the ways we who have lived in the canyons and near the wild parts of Southern California know that not one good thing happens in 100 mph Santa Ana winds? The vigilance that kicks in at the first whiff of smoke in the air. The way that living with what is now this perpetual fire season seems to have rewritten something in our collective DNA.
Even if you’ve lived here all your life and have never once had to leave your home because flames threatened it, these Los Angeles infernos heralded a shift: So many huge fires happening so quickly, penetrating so far down toward the flats of suburban communities, made it feel like those fires that have always erupted in the wildland interface areas might have the power to reach places never imagined.
‘As bad as they have warned’
Over on Facebook, as friend after friend starts marking themselves “safe” from the fires, I start to worry about those I’m not seeing, but who I know live in the danger zones.
“Just checking on you, my friend.”
This I text to Elle Johnson, a writer and producer I’ve known for years who has a house near Malibu’s Corral Beach. While I’m waiting for her reply, I scroll up and read our last conversation from December:
“Want you to know I’m thinking of you Elle,” I texted because another fire was threatening her home then. “Here if I can do anything at all.”
That time she wrote back, “Thank you Sam. I appreciate that. I evacuated at 2:30 a.m. when the smoke wafting through my bedroom woke me up!”
She goes on to say she got out, “But that was scary. I hope the house doesn’t burn down …”
Now we actually talk on the phone. She’s at a place near downtown L.A.
“This is the third time in three months that I’ve had to evacuate Malibu. It’s pretty devastating.” Her voice sounds tired, cracking in a way I’ve never heard from her. “This one feels a lot worse than the other two, even though the other two were actually literally outside my front door on Malibu Road. The first time the bluffs were on fire, and then it was the Franklin fire and Malibu Canyon, but this one is just substantially … more.”
Given her experience with gridlock and evacuation traffic the other two times, this time when she heard the wind so strong it was tossing her balcony furniture around like a toddler in a temper tantrum, she didn’t wait for official evacuation orders.
“I moved the furniture inside and waited until it was light. Then I looked outside at the ocean and saw the waves being flattened by the wind and thought, ‘This is really not good. This is going to be as bad as they have warned us,’” she recalled. “I just basically moved everything inside and thought to myself, ‘OK, well, I guess I won’t be doing my 5:45 a.m. swim with Tower 26 at Pacific Palisades Charter High’ – which is where we swim in the morning – because I thought I should probably get out of there.”
The pain in her voice is so thick I feel compelled to ask why she goes back, and if she will go back after this time. Although, I already know the answer, having had to evacuate from fires three times myself but always choosing to return to the kind of semi-rural communities tucked away inside our megalopolis, part of what makes life in Southern California so incredible, so livable.
And indeed she talks about scenic beauty, being close to nature, the ocean where she swims and surfs. But mostly it’s the small-town character of the place that has enriched her life amid the overwhelming Los Angeles sprawl. While millions of tourists might flow in and out of Malibu, the census says there are only 10,000 full-time residents.
“It’s a really welcoming community – and I’m saying this as an African American woman from Hollis, Queens,” she said. “It’s been so easy to make friends and to talk to people. Once people know that you live there or that you’re working there, it’s like you’re part of it, you know? They know how much you love and enjoy it and want to take care of it as well.”
As contradictory as it may sound given the danger, she said not being there in a crisis tugs at her heart: “That’s part of what’s so hard about actually evacuating. It’s not being there to help people you know and feeling like, God, you should be there hosing down somebody’s house – although I will say with these winds it’s impossible. It’s really not something that you want to try to be doing on your own.”
‘Start of the hellscape’
By Thursday, friends’ updates had gotten more dire.
“Sad to report that this is an aerial view taken this morning of our beloved Upperwoodies community, our homes in the canyon for 18 years. A total loss,” posted Nancy Spiller, who with husband Tom Weitzel had evacuated to Oxnard. Her post showed a screenshot of TV news footage of the burned-out Pacific Palisades. She wrote, “Images of Dresden after the carpet bombings of WWII come to mind.”
When I reach Nancy by phone, I hear a voice on the edge of tears, mourning not only a lifetime of cherished belongings, but an entire way of life.
Daily runs through Santa Ynez Canyon, dinner in the Palisades village, groceries at Gelson’s. She said the topography always made her think of the Chianti region of Italy she had once visited, and sometimes she would imagine they lived there. “If I could just have gotten the locals to speak Italian…,” she said with a small laugh.
“Oh, it’s just – it was – just a miracle of Los Angeles,” she said. “I mean, it’s such – was such – an unusual place.”
Now, all gone.
Even though she and Tom had faced evacuations before, they were not prepared for this level of devastation.
“Everybody was on top of it so quickly with all those previous fires, I just felt OK,” she said. “I felt like, ‘It’s going to be taken care of,’ and not to really worry.”
That feeling changed to dread when it took them three attempts to evacuate on Tuesday because of gridlock on Palisades Drive. Only after bulldozers came in to shove cars out of the roadway, abandoned without keys, could they get out of the area with help from police escorts.
“That was the start of the hellscape,” she told me. Visions of the deadly 2018 fire in Paradise, California, started to play in her head. “It was definitely different than ever before.”
She thinks they’ll rebuild on their property in the Palisades. Well, probably.
“I do think that it’s definitely the end of something and it’s the beginning of something else,” she said. “If we can make it work there, we will do our best to do so.”
But she also worries about what comes next: What happens to all these burn areas when the next torrential rains come, as they eventually will?
“All of us, we don’t know. It’s that uncertainty that is agitating and unnerving for the millions of us who live in the entire region.”
‘Not rich people fires’
As calamitous as the Palisades fire is, by Thursday the Eaton fire looked on track to outpace it, terrible in its enormity, shocking in its suddenness and deadliness.
On her recent podcast, Meghan Daum tried to give listeners a picture of the idyllic and diverse neighborhood Altadena had been, describing the owls, the bears that sometimes made their way down from higher elevations, the squawking flock of wild green parrots. “All that said, I can still walk to Rite Aid from where I live,” she said, noting that a coffee shop, vintage stores and family-owned businesses were a 10-minute walk from her front door. “Even though we’re in the forest, sort of, we’re still in the town. There are major streets and cement buildings and the kinds of things that would generally prevent wildfires from becoming street fires.”
So when news of the fire came, “I wasn’t that worried,” she told listeners.
When she could see flames in the canyon, she sought the advice of a neighbor who’d seen this kind of thing before, who told her not to be too worried, saying, “‘These things look scary from a distance, but they really don’t jump into relatively flat residential neighborhoods like ours.’”
No one imagined how wrong that could be.
By the next morning, her 950-square-foot home and every other house on the street were burned to the ground. “The embers flying around in that wind were effectively fireballs,” she said. “Nothing like this has ever happened before, at least not around here.”
Meghan wants people to try to comprehend what exactly has occurred, and to whom: She is a renter, whose landlady – who also lost her house – is a single mom raising two kids.
“When we think of people losing their homes in California, we think of rich people,” she told listeners. “But many of these fires burning right now, including and especially the Eaton fire, are not rich people fires. The homes are valuable, yeah, because this is Southern California, but most of the homes are modest little houses like mine. There are rickety apartment complexes where people struggle to pay the rent. And yes there is some wealth here … but there are plenty of working-class people in Altadena. It’s always had a large Black population.”
She goes on to add there are a large number of addiction recovery houses and transitional living centers, nursing homes and low-income housing for seniors. These people are “Something close to poor.”
“That’s what I want people to understand: We are going to be seeing reports of celebrities losing their homes and I’m sure we’ll be seeing their social media posts about how ‘hashtag grateful’ they are for making it out alive — and also for having multiple other houses,” Meghan said. “But we’re also going to be looking at images of rubble upon which the homes and businesses of ordinary, hardworking, often struggling people once sat.”
‘State of shock’
By Friday, the Archer fire in Granada Hills was the crisis du jour.
The day before on a group text of friends and colleagues, a series of messages begins: “God forgive me, but this is starting to feel coordinated…Hope you don’t mind me airing these thoughts…Something had to set them off. There is not spontaneous combustion…”
Immediately there’s a rush of science-based information about the power of extreme wind conditions and the anatomy of wildfires meant to quell the paranoia.
“I hate that I’m even thinking this way…In a state of shock…My old neighborhood is going up in flames.”
Others don’t discount the role arsonists could play, but reject the idea of a conspiracy to undo the region. Finally, someone gets to the root of it all: “I think the point isn’t whether or not someone did, but that we are so vulnerable.”
I think again about the well-meaning messages of “Are you OK”? No. Prolonged stress, grief and loss are fraying all of us in some way.
How much easier it is to point to an evil boogeyman inflicting pain and suffering. How much easier than trying to wrap our minds around the confluence of complex issues bearing down on us, all beyond the ability of any one person to control.
Stephen J. Pyne, a professor emeritus at Arizona State University and former wildland firefighter, contends that the world has entered a geologic epoch he has dubbed the “Pyrocene.” As there was an ice age, now there is a fire age. I have no way of knowing if Pyne’s assessment is correct, but if true, I can’t stop it, nor can you. Our only option is to adapt.
‘Changed in an instant’
Tragedy plays out on a human scale. It’s the little things that do you in emotionally.
I worked to help report on the fire devastation, following stories of people displaced and homes lost, with what I thought was steely rationale. Then, during a personal phone call, a friend just happened to mention that the old Malibu Feed Bin at the corner of Topanga Canyon and PCH, a local fixture where I used to buy animal supplies, had burned down.
I burst into tears.
Why that?
“Malibu Feed Bin is where we always got our Christmas trees, to get family photos with the Pacific in the background so incongruous to my childhood snowy Michigan Christmases,” Lori Precious, a former neighbor and longtime Topanga Canyon resident, replied via Facebook. She listed other local touchpoints now gone: “Probably most people in Topanga bought their patio furniture from Oasis. Cholada was the after-beach meet-up place for families (golden bags! ), and the Reel Inn was host to Topanga Elementary fundraisers. I could go on and on … it’s a loss of more than memories for the owners.”
My friend, the author and grief counselor Hope Edelman, tags me in a post, which I read over and over. Perhaps it won’t make it OK, but it does offer perspective:
“I don’t know how communities recover from this, or if they ever can. Life as we knew it … changed in an instant,” wrote Hope, a 27-year resident of Topanga who on Friday was cautiously optimistic her home had survived the fire.
“We’re in the churning process of becoming a new form of us, who will change and grow in ways we could never imagine before. So we simply can’t know what that future is going to look like. And that’s an uncomfortable space to occupy. All we can do in that liminal space is find trust and faith that we will ultimately find a path, to give ourselves grace and compassion for the messiness that may occur in that in-between place, and believe in the possibility that what comes next can be better than tolerable and hopefully even beautiful, in ways we can’t yet imagine.”