Just as soldiers counted time after D-Day, Mom measures days not by the calendar but from the fire: day 35. Day 107. Day 203. Today is day 366.
On day 39, I walked through Will Rogers State Historic Park. Like my family, the rangers had been left by the fire department to fend for themselves, forced to grab what they could and flee. Will Rogers’s old ranch house and stables were piles of debris. The oily-leaved eucalyptus trees, a non-native species beloved by Rogers though highly flammable, stood charred and skeletal. The hills I’d hiked and mountain biked as a boy looked lunar, stripped bare.
Our gardener, Jesús, estimates at least three years for the mountain foliage to fully regrow. Despite losing over 40 clients in one night and facing the threat of Trump’s ICE raids, he has chosen to stay in Los Angeles. His children are here.
Boo Radley is staying, too, our elderly neighbor who fought the fire with a garden hose, as I recounted a year ago in my story for Alta Journal, saving his home and the one across the street. My sister and I, as kids, didn’t know him—hence the nickname—but now we do. We asked the former engineer about the night of the fire, needing to hear how our childhood home burned. He recalled wood fences (like ours) igniting first, the heat blasting out windows, allowing embers to swirl inside. “Houses don’t burn from the top down,” Boo told us. “They burn from the inside up.” He described explosions ripping through homes, one after another.
Boo explained how he spent much of the night hosing down his windows from the inside, keeping them cool as the firestorm raged outside. Still, he deflected all praise, instead crediting a volunteer firefighter who’d run up the hill to help. “My guardian angel,” Boo called him.
And there have been many such angels. A printer re-created one of our lost family photo albums free of charge. An artist replaced a cherished watercolor print. A historian tracked down my grandfather’s destroyed World War II records. Army Corps engineers lifted a porcelain Virgin Mary statue from our rubble and placed it in Mom’s hands on Easter. There were also the many Angelenos who volunteered with FEMA, giving us water and supplies, or showed up for CERT training, determined to help. Los Angeles can be unfriendly and transactional, but some days, it lives up to its name: the Angel City.
I don’t remember which stage of grief anger is, but I’m still in that one.
Anger in a meeting with two State Farm representatives who smiled as they explained that my parents would need to inventory everything they had lost to receive full reimbursement.
“How do you put a value on birthday cards my children wrote me over decades?” Mom asked them. “Or my husband’s paintings?”
Anger walking through an open house with dozens of other displaced Palisades families in the frantic search for a rental days after the fire, wandering empty rooms like ghosts, trading brief condolences before racing back to their brokers to outbid one another.
Anger reading the Los Angeles Times reporting that crews were ordered to leave a smoldering New Year’s Day blaze, only for it to roar back to life as the wind swelled on January 7.
Anger driving through the Palisades, past my charred former grocery store, where the smiling checkout lady Karen worked; past the charred bank where I deposited my lawn-mowing money; the charred church where I altar served; the charred elementary school where I grew up. My hometown resembled Dresden after the war, bombed and hollowed. My sister pointed out the sign on the wall outside a decimated Village School: “This is childhood.”
People grieve differently. My sister scoured eBay for replacements of what we’d lost: clothes, books, decorations. She gifted replicas to my parents at various holidays this past year. Dad was confused, opening a box of his favorite shirts, including the red flannel short-sleeved shirt he wore at every special occasion and his cherished 1998 U.S. Open tennis T-shirt. “These didn’t burn?” he asked, bewildered.
Mom used to love bookstores, reading the new-release jackets, trading recommendations with staff. But on day 158, walking into a Mid-City bookstore, she stopped at the entrance, looked across the shelves, and retreated outside. “Too painful,” she told me later. Each shelf was a reminder of the lifetime of books lost: her Grisham, Hannah, and Connelly hardbacks; her signed school yearbooks and UCLA Shakespeare anthology. A fresh copy could never replace those yellowed pages with folded-down corners to return to someday. “I have to lock that part of my mind and heart away,” she said.
But how? It’s impossible to lock away. Reminders are everywhere. Whenever I call my parents, I still instinctively tap “Home,” forgetting that our home landline melted into the soil.
One of the cruelest parts of losing a house to fire is there’s no pause. Trauma is funneled into an endless to-do list: finding a temporary rental, setting up utilities and internet, filling out insurance claims, replacing birth certificates, marriage certificates, and passports; finding a soil engineer, architect and contractor; signing up for a FEMA loan, Army Corps debris clearance, UCLA soil testing. The list goes on.
Many longtime residents have left the Palisades for good, and there are obvious reasons why: rebuilding means returning to a fire zone, scrounging for sky-high (if even available) fire-insurance rates, and enduring the noise from the inevitable endless construction projections. Added to that is the daunting burden of building a new house or rehabilitating a spared home containing toxic walls and arsenic dust.
My parents will try to stay and hopefully rebuild a home suited to old age, with plenty of space along the sides to serve as a buffer from flames of a future fire. But they know the Palisades will never be the same. Where there were once many boxy McMansions, there will now be only boxy McMansions. The obscene money circling the neighborhood makes the point: One of our neighbors quickly and quietly bought the parcel next door to his own with plans to install a rotating steel platform—a kind of lazy Susan—for his sports cars.
My family left town for Christmas. Mom couldn’t summon the strength to host after losing all of our ornaments and treasured decorations, collected over her 73 years of holidays, travels, and milestones.
Driving up to Mammoth, Mom spotted a Nativity scene in front of a Methodist church. She used to arrange her own small wooden set every December on her dad’s antique table, carefully placing Mary, Joseph, the shepherds, and the wise men in the A-frame barn before letting us kids set the baby Jesus in the manger on Christmas Eve. “I wanted to give it to my granddaughters someday,” she said. What we are actually passing down to my nieces, I realized, is a plastic bin of blackened artifacts in my sister’s garage that nobody can bear to look at.
As we headed deeper into the mountains, the scenery transformed. Fresh snow weighed down the pines, and my two nieces fogged the windows with their breath as they searched for a sledding hill. Then we passed a hillside of charred trees, burned by some recent blaze whose name I didn’t even know.
There’s no escape from fire anymore, not in the world or the mind. Though we kept on driving.•
Andrew Dubbins is an award-winning journalist and the author of the forthcoming book Into Enemy Waters: A World War II Story of the Demolition Divers Who Became the Navy SEALs. His story “When the Mafia Came to Lodi” for altaonline.com won a 2021 SoCal Journalism Award from the L.A. Press Club.
