As I write this, it is exactly one month since the Eaton and Palisades fires started in Los Angeles. I have connections to both places, friends who lost everything in both places, and I mourn the loss of life in both, 29 lives lost.
For me, the Eaton Fire hits closest to home. I lived just west of Altadena for 20 years until just two years ago. My daughter’s elementary school is gone, her library, and the hall in Farnsworth Park where she played recitals with her miraculous little school jazz band–first on her tooty recorder, then her dad’s flute, then a used silver trumpet she requested when she wanted to “play more of the melody.”
The school founders lost their house, escaping just as the flames caught their garage, the smoke in the street so dense, the wind so fast, they had to abandon one of their cars, packed full of treasured belongings. Our kindergarten teacher left with just an overnight bag, decades of her hand-shaped pottery left to be refired by nature, either lost or forever changed, along with everything else. So that’s it then. Lost or forever changed.
It can be easy for some at a distance to be unkind, to imagine California as a place that deserves a fire like this, or at least could have prevented it. But this was a new kind of fire, nothing like the ones I’ve evacuated from since childhood. My friends described a cross between a fire and a hurricane, trees blowing down, embers traveling for miles almost like bullets on 100 mph winds. This firestorm savaged the flatlands, ordinary neighborhoods, the dry cleaners, the pie shop, grocery stores, gas stations, the shoe repair, a McDonald’s, churches, schools, and thousands and thousands of simple bungalow homes that took their value from distant views of the San Gabriels and the friendliness of a diverse community and local small businesses. All gone.
Altadena was what people hope their neighborhood will be, not because everyone was prosperous or healthy or fortunate, but as a place where JPL engineers could afford their first house and so could third-generation locals whose home went back decades to their grandparents’ fight for a modest American dream. You could manage there in the harder times, you could thrive as an artist or blend in as a celebrity. You could ride your bike to your cousin’s house after school, you could build a beautiful wild garden around your 50-year-old olive tree or shape a small house into a sanctuary for friends and family. People said that word sanctuary a lot—they missed what they had lost for themselves and what they had to share and give. People appreciated Altadena.
This catastrophe seemed more akin to what other communities endure, when leveled by hurricanes. It was a new scale of destruction for southern California, to se everything razed for blocks and blocks and blocks and blocks, an area the size of Manhattan, over 9000 structures gone. Not just gone but made toxic. We know we’re not alone out here in dealing with nature’s power. We know others are still rebuilding from their losses, we are not the first neighborhoods to lose everything, we won’t be the last. Tens of thousands of people will start again, once again. Thanks for listening.
