Trials By Fire
Guest post by Los Angeles resident Jamie Richards
Jamie is a dear friend from graduate school, an award-winning literary translator and mom. We kept each other sane through the early days of parenthood, navigating how to be an intellectual, writer and thinker through the haze of sleeplessness and hormones, even when she was far away in Milan. I was so happy when she moved back to the U.S., and am heartbroken to read her story here of parenting through natural disasters. You can read more about her work here.
When you grow up anywhere around Los Angeles, you’re never far from a canyon. But I don’t come from particularly outdoorsy stock and I’ve lived elsewhere for most of my adult life, so many of the beloved hiking trails edging the towns are unfamiliar to me. One afternoon, on the occasion of our daughter’s name day, December 6, we decided to try a walk through nearby Eaton Canyon, which we passed by every week on the way to dance class. It had a nature center, where we could learn about the local wildlife and indulge our daughter’s newfound interest in geology, and the trail was beginner friendly, a virtually flat dirt path alongside a wash and ending at a waterfall. We picked up a map and proceeded, picking up rocks, observing the parched brush, big sycamores, animal droppings and ground burrows, noticing the dry creek bed and the houses on the surrounding hills. But children dawdle, and we tired and turned back about a third of the way in, assuring one another we would come back soon and walk the whole way to the waterfall at the top.
The day the fire started, we were already looking out the window, because of the wind. A day or two earlier, I’d seen the notice from the Los Angeles Weather Office that threatened like a ransom note.
I was prepared for a windstorm. I’d seen the Santa Anas tear through and halve the pines and palms around here before. I had checked the Facebook page “Altadena Weather and Climate” run by the 24-year old climate specialist and amateur meteorologist Edgar McGregor, now celebrated as a life-saving hero. His expert forecasts, conveying specialist information in layperson’s terms, had foreseen the risk of fire, and armed with data, had warned people over a week in advance to be prepared for the worst.
That afternoon, as the wind intensified, a large tree fell across the wide street next to my daughter’s school, blocking passage in both directions. Fortunately, it was about an hour after release, so pick-up traffic had largely dispersed. I passed the image onto my family, as it would block the main street heading to or away from their house.
The wind was strong, but not dramatic, and we kept looking outside to monitor the situation. After dinner, a sharp glow appeared over the building lining the commercial street in front of us. I scrambled downstairs to get my husband: “there’s a fire, I think in the park.” I was referring to the big county park just two blocks away, which covers 185 acres, abuts a golf course, and has lots of tall trees. I checked a community Facebook page for Arcadia, the city where I live, whose northern tip borders the mountain areas of Chantry Flats and Wilderness Park, which I used to explore in my youth but have mostly been closed due to fire damage for as long as I can remember. A post at 6:47 asked, “Does anyone know where or what’s on fire?” Someone replied “Eaton Canyon.” Unsure, I remarked that the fire seemed closer than that; another resident agreed. It was 6:52 p.m. And then we watched the flames climb the mountain as the wind gusted. Sirens blared past. Electrical wires crackled and sparked. We began to follow the fires on TV. I don’t think I’d been aware of the Palisades Fire until then.
My sister, from the house she and her family live in at the top of the city, which is also my childhood home, had been relaying mounting anxiety all afternoon. She took in a friend and her dogs from Altadena, who hadn’t known about the fire until she checked in. She texted, “The Jewish school where our kids went burned down” (10:13 p.m.), and then, at 10:50, “We are ordered to evacuate.” We downloaded Watch Duty, following the fires’ spread. By the time we went to bed, the blinding blazes in the hills had left us with a skyline of smoke.
Earlier, we had texted our closest friends in Altadena, who were on the train returning from their holiday visit to family in Texas. They replied, “We know Altadena is not evacuating, yet”: 8:28 p.m. They would arrive at dawn to their house in flames, pausing to document the destruction before heading away to safety.
No one wants to appear in the news because of a disaster. I’ve been following local accounts so closely I’ve been shielded from the national reporting ranging from politicized misinformation to overinflated coverage of the rich and famous. Fire doesn’t discriminate: it doesn’t know who inherited their hippie grandfather’s ranch house on the bluffs, who poured all their savings into a down payment on a 2-bedroom mission-style bungalow for their family of four, who is an immigrant with a popular restaurant living in a modest condo, or who is a multimillionaire with another home to go to.
Los Angeles is lucky to have all of these people in proximity to one another, and the generosity we have witnessed in recent days has transcended class lines. No one deserves to lose their home, and more than homes have burned: community spaces, places of worship, historic structures, cafes and restaurants, parks, daycares, and schools. And all the things inside, which although not life itself constitute our documenting of it: baby pictures, wedding albums, artworks, record collections, personal libraries, heirlooms and mementos. Our livelihoods. Our treasures. Each home represents not a life but a history of one. Each structure the home of a community. The burnt buildings are the corpses of countless memories. And that is the sum greater than its parts that all Los Angeles is grieving.
I think of the local outpost of the Angeles National Forest office I drive past almost daily and its wooden sign on the corner indicating “FIRE DANGER TODAY.” Its pointer usually hovers toward the right, between high and extreme, at least I think so—these signs tend to blend into the landscape, like the safety protocols outlined by flight attendants before frequent air travelers. On the bottom, next to Smokey the Bear, the slogan “ONLY YOU CAN PREVENT WILDFIRES” mockingly beggars belief.
Both the Palisades and Eaton fires began in the hills but descended far into the urban space, decimating massive parts of Los Angeles. Pacific Palisades is iconic California, where the old hippie-surfer community rubs elbows with entertainment legends. Altadena is a special place, bureaucratically speaking an unincorporated area of Los Angeles, rightly called “feral” by the L.A. Times, Pasadena’s northerly outpost with its own distinctive character. But not just quirky – a place where solidarity puts social justice into practice. Most importantly, it became a refuge where Black families were able to make homes and build generational wealth when surrounding communities were sundown towns and Pasadena redlined people of color beyond city limits. Octavia Butler, whose cautionary fictions presciently imagined apocalyptic futures that mirror our own, is the city’s most prominent native daughter. Her namesake store, Octavia’s Bookshop (still standing!), a Black-owned business which emerged out of the pandemic in 2023, has become one of the many pop-up resource hubs where people can freely pick up donated essentials.
It was Altadena that welcomed me most when I moved back to the area two years ago, its beautiful library (still standing) event series hosting me for a reading, and its yearly LitFest in the Dena including me as a speaker. It was where I went to buy used furniture when I needed to put together an apartment from scratch, from a Mexican-American reseller whose home at the end of a driveway was lined with succulents for sale and chain-link-fenced yard covered in small furniture she advertised online. I wonder about her and her house. I wonder about the elderly Black lady whose citrus trees we picked volunteering through Food Forward, with whom I traded complaints about rising prices. There’s a map, but it’s not updated yet.
Everyone is mourning the loss of treasured spaces like Oh Happy Day, a sui generis apothecary/vegan café, Pizza of Venice, a Black-owned pizzeria which hosted the monthly Trans Pizza Party; Rancho Bar, where you could eat barbecue and listen to local bands, Café de Leche with its gorgeous back patio or the homey Little Red Hen which had been serving soul food for decades; the delightfully kitsch collection that was the Bunny Museum; Public Displays of Altadena, a performance space for out-there comedy and theater; the Altadena Seed Library, a resource for local gardeners and sustainable planting; Village Playgarden, a Black-owned forest preschool keeping kids muddy and rooted; the Pasadena Jewish Center, a historic synagogue, cultural space, and preschool – the list, unfortunately, could go on.
(Photo credit: Jaclyn Elkins)
But yesterday, January 13, the Altadena Star of Hope was erected, a beacon of light (illuminated, with the help of firefighters, by solar power) in the hills. The community has begun to take stock of their losses, eulogize, grieve, and organize. People have set up GoFundMes, and others are filling them. A lawsuit was put together, our inadequately belated modern means of reparations for the irreparable. We can hope that the 2022 California legislation affirming the use of the indigenous land-management technique of cultural burning becomes more routinely adopted. And us… Maybe one day we will make it to the top of Eaton Canyon to see that waterfall.
