Tuesday, Januay 7th.
My son Charlie called. He was breathless. He had barely escaped the Palisades. The sky had been clear, he said when he took the actor John Goodman’s retriever, Miss Daisy, to the vet. But when he returned a couple of hours later, black clouds of smoke and flames blotted out the sun. A hurricane strength wind had ignited the brush in Temescal Canyon north of Sunset Boulevard. The fire now engulfed the Palisades, a neighborhood on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Coast Highway. Sirens wailed, police and fire engines raced up Sunset. Charlie found himself stuck, not moving, in a traffic gridlock. Residents panicked, trying to evacuate.
He was waiting for the cars to move and realized there was no one in the car in front of him. It had been abandoned in the middle of the road. People were jumping out of their cars without pulling over. KTLA news shouting, if you leave your car, leave the keys in your car!
I was so thankful he had delivered Miss Daisy safely and made it out. He called me when he was back at his apartment on the west side of the city, a fairly safe distance from the Palisades. There I was, driving Miss Daisy, he managed a sad laugh.
My daughter, Tempe, who lives in Altadena (forty miles from the Palisades, on the other side of town) was cooking soup around 6 p.m. that same evening.
Charlie called his sister, “Have you heard there’s a fire in Altadena?”
What fire? she asked, then looked out her window and saw a rim of flames cresting the mountains behind the house. She saw one ridge on fire, then the fire leaped to the next, one after the other all across the mountains. Her neighbor texted, “Are you worried?”
By the time we left, she said, the street next to us was totally engulfed in flames.
In 1993 I had to evacuate during the Malibu Topanga fire. What do you save when there are only minutes? I saved my computer, my journals, a few framed photographs. The dogs, our cat. My friend said when she was evacuating, she was so crazed, she grabbed a jar with her children’s baby teeth as she fled.
This January, during one of the worst fires in California history, I watched the news day and night. I listened to the reporters speak the names of the small communities in the canyons and mountains and valleys, and along the coast. The geography resonated. The names of places, more than a name, a dot on the map, images on the TV screen.
Place is a relationship, an emotional space. Place names hold identity and time.
While the fires raged uncontained, an old friend, now living in Maine, called me. We had not talked in years. During the Topanga Malibu fire our family had taken shelter with hers in Woodland Hills on the valley side of the Santa Monica Mountains.
I’ll never forget the fire burning towards me, down a hill in Topanga. Primal and terrifying. Owls flew up out of the creek, rabbits, deer, coyotes, all the wild animals fleeing. People turned their horses loose. We packed up our two cars and became caught in the gridlock of everyone fleeing out of the canyon. Charlie and Tempe were in different parts of the city in different schools. The telephones jammed. No one had cell phones then. Many hours later we were reunited and brought them to my friend’s house in the valley. We watched the news and saw our road, Old Canyon, on TV marked with icons of fire, all up and down the road. Topanga was burning. Afterwards, no one was allowed to return to the charred canyon. We did not know if our house had survived. My husband and my friend’s husband snuck up the canyon creek to find out. When my husband saw our house, still standing, he said he grabbed the fireman and kissed him.
Our house survived only because the firemen had set up a command station in our home and the Santa Ana winds had died down enough for them to light backfires in the mountain meadows behind our house. We were lucky.
Over the phone, my friend, in Maine, told me she was surprised at her feelings when hearing the L.A. names—the unexpected emotions stirred hearing the names of mountains, streets, neighborhoods.
“I never liked living there,” she admitted, “so I was very surprised to feel what I am feeling hearing the names of those places.

I watched every minute as the planes air-dropped water and fire retardant over steep hillsides. Fires sprang up miles apart from each other. Suddenly, in Mandeville Canyon. I remembered the writing teacher up in Mandeville Canyon, her house and her odd glass chairs. The road winding up to her house.
Another fire sprang up in Hollywood, not far from Franklin Avenue. The Hollywood Hills. The news had named it the Franklin Fire. For years I drove down from Whitley Terrace every day to Franklin Ave, hauling kids to school or to the Hollywood YMCA, yoga classes, shopping.
During the Palisades fire the firemen held the line on the S curves of Topanga Canyon. So many years of going up and down that steep winding road to the ocean and there at the foot of the canyon the historic Malibu Feed Bin, built when there were ranchers in the canyon, where I bought live Christmas trees and chicken feed. Burnt down. The Thai restaurant Choloda, on the Pacific Coast Highway, a converted shack with a backyard garden. The restaurant Moon Shadows on the ocean, reduced to ash.
It was surreal to see Anderson Cooper standing up on a ridge in Topanga Canyon talking about my canyon, what a beautiful canyon, he said, and such a tight-knit community.
My friend who lives on Henry Ridge in Topanga volunteers for arson watch but had to evacuate. Her son stayed behind to combat embers. Fortunately, the fire did not burn deep into Topanga. Not this time.
Three thousand miles and two decades removed I am remembering an old love, the city, the canyons, the curve of ocean, the names of streets, the Palisades village on the bluffs, and Altadena, a working-class neighborhood with ancient hemlocks at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains, musicians, artists, Hispanics, generations of Black families; the houses and churches burned to the ground.
New York Times op-ed speaks of communities destroyed in catastrophes: “Though often a physical space, it’s also more vibes-based and amorphous—the networks of feeling among its members and their environment, built and natural . . . it’s loss is personal and collective, a civic identity, uninsurable, nonreimbursable.”
Personal and collective.
I listened to every interview of the ones who lost their homes. One man had just finished three years of renovation, then added, it’s not the house, but all the ‘stuff’ the memories, the ‘evidence of lives lived.’
My friend who lost her home in the Palisades loved an apricot tree in her garden. All her husband’s paintings were destroyed. Even the ones that hung in a Palisades restaurant. It burned too, she said. I didn’t take anything. Not really. I thought we’d be coming back.
Pico Iyer’s essay in the NY Times helps me gain a perspective. Iyer lost his home years ago in the Painted Cave fires of Santa Barbara.
“In the months after the fire, I’d noticed that some of my neighbors remained captive to what they had lost, while others were thinking more about how they could begin anew. It’s a matter of circumstances and temperament, perhaps, but the world’s increasing threats mean that we have to learn to ground ourselves amid the constant reminders of impermanence.”
A week later, the national guard and police allowed my daughter and her fiancé to visit the ashes of their home in Altadena. She said there was nothing left. An incinerated dishwasher that they had loaded right before evacuating. One of the last things we did was load the dishwasher, Tempe told me. I said, it was because you thought you’d be coming back. Yes, she said, we did think that, but it was something else. It was to show respect. Give the house a little dignity before we left her.



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