The house was a sweet little Tudor Revival at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains where Pasadena gives way to Altadena.
The $130,000 asking price was a steal, our real estate agent told us, and we’d be fools not to grab it. This was the mid-1980s, and there was no greater incarnation of the Los Angeles dream, as she put it, than living in suburbia amid the wonders of nature.
I looked out the picture window and saw rock, ravine, oak, canyon, stream. We were steps away from disaster, I reckoned, from earthquake and fire. I might have questioned her more — I was a young journalist with The Los Angeles Times — but I already understood one thing about the metropolis: From the houses on stilts in the Hollywood Hills to the aqueducts that shipped in water from faraway places, Los Angeles was a preposterous proposition.
Besides, my wife was eight months pregnant with our first child and in the throes of nesting. I did not dare a counteroffer. We moved into the house on Beverly Drive, two bedrooms, one bathroom, as the floats for the Rose Bowl Parade rehearsed their lineup. The next day, New Year’s Eve, our baby girl was born.
When nothing would stop her colicky fussing, I took her on a walk one day to see the folds in Eaton Canyon. Suddenly, she grew quiet. The San Gabriel Mountains, possessing some strange gravitational pull, it seemed, became a mesmerizing force in our lives.
Across the Los Angeles basin, feeling the same draw, new dreamers were joining old ones in a migration to the wildland. The higher up the hill, the more quixotic they became. Among the truest believers, a sort of madness took hold. They saw the houses and gardens they had planted above and below the canyons and the cars they parked on the sloped driveways, and they believed they had settled a place.
And yet it was a place that could not be settled. Chunks of charcoal in the earth spoke not only of cataclysms past but also of what surely was to come again. Their awareness of this doom, and yet their need to push disaster away from the mind, turned into a kind of collective psychosis.
From the San Gabriel Mountains to the Santa Monica Mountains, the response was to push further into feral spaces and grow suburbia evermore. The developers ran the show. The politicians and bankers and insurance underwriters were abettors. This is how simple ranch houses became two-story multimillion-dollar mansions. This is how commercial strips — restaurants and bars, grocery stores, medical offices and boutiques — put down stakes on windblown hills.
In a city that deified its invention of sprawl, a more rational way of existing was a discussion best left for another day, until disaster struck again and all reason was lost in the finger-pointing, not the least the lesson of human folly.
One of my neighbors, Timothy Dundon, known by his alter ego, Zeke the Sheik, had put the tragedy to rhyme. A tall man with a long gray beard, he lived in a farmhouse next to the cemetery in the Altadena neighborhood. He had taken to wearing a blue headdress and a floor-length brown caftan and reciting verse about the virtues of his homegrown fertilizer.
Past his rampaging turkeys, he led me to a compost pile that rose up like the mountain itself. Two hundred feet wide, it was exhaling puffs of smoke. So hot was its combustion of horse, duck, goose, turkey and chicken droppings, mixed with kitchen garbage and cemetery leaves, that it would spontaneously explode, shooting flames into the sky.
“I’m the clown in the brown-bound gown,” he said. “The most profound clown who’s ever been found. Who’s here to expound on the brown mound on the ground.”
He was practicing regenerative horticulture before its time, sequestering loads of carbon into the soil to fight climate change. The health department deemed his pile a public hazard. The sheriff’s department busted him for growing a few cannabis plants among his rare cactuses. At his courthouse trial, he sang 20 minutes of verse. “I’m just the sage who was too much of an outrage for the stage because he had the message that through the proper usage of the sewage, garbage and foliage, we can really turn the page on a new and more abundant golden age.”
He finished his 160 hours of community service and showed up at my house with a truckload of compost. I spread the dark matter and planted tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, squash, melons, okra, corn. The profusion of summer vegetables went from June all the way through winter and then to March. His black gold had changed the seasons.
The earthquake hit on the morning of Oct. 1, 1987, shuddering the folds in the canyon. We sold the house on Beverly Drive for $231,000 and moved back home to Fresno for reasons that had nothing to do with averting disaster. From my perch in the state’s middle, I wrote books about California. Too often, this meant making pilgrimages to places erased by wildfire, places where the weather had behaved in a manner truly strange, not merely the volatile patterns that struck the state every so often but phenomena entirely novel.
If only the climate change deniers peddling their pap on Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News considered the last escapees from Coffey Park, a mundane suburban tract tucked behind a freeway in a corner of Sonoma County in Northern California. At 1:30 a.m. on Oct. 9, 2017, flames raced down the gully of an adjacent hillside, and a gust of fire roared toward them. If nothing else, they calculated, the wide, paved lanes of U.S. 101 would act as a barrier.
But they had no way of determining the rarity of such a beast. The fire leaped over the freeway as if it were a game of kindergarten hopscotch. As the gale-driven flames slammed into 1,300 houses, heat rose up and pulled with it the wind, creating a vortex of superheated air that swirled at tornadic speeds. The whirling fire uprooted trees, peeled off rooftops and flipped over cars, and then set about obliterating everything. They ran for their lives. Five did not make it out.
In a state nearly 1,000 miles long, nature’s chaos was breaking out everywhere: katabatic winds in forests that torched trees already dead from drought and parasitic beetles; blazes in the cool, wet climes along the coast where such blazes just didn’t happen; Diablo winds that moved in a newly diabolical fashion; a smoke-choked sky lit by a blood orange sun that made the Golden Gate Bridge look like the last thing left on earth.
Now it is the winter of 2025 and wildfire has come again to Pacific Palisades, an affluent community of 23,000 residents nestled in the lower hills of the Santa Monica range, where the ocean breeze almost always feels liquid.
A good rain hadn’t fallen in eight months. And like the Diablos, the Santa Ana winds were displaying traits never witnessed before. “I know the fierceness of a Santa Ana wind. I felt my first one when I was 10 years old,” said Robert Rosenstone, an author and emeritus professor of history at Caltech. “This wind was something crazier.”
He and his wife, Nahid Massoud, could not figure how their house and most of the houses on their block were unscathed while all the houses on the adjacent blocks were ravaged. Ms. Massoud was scrolling through a long list of cellphone messages from other survivors, texts and social media posts filled with rumors and conspiracies and castigations about who and what was to blame. “What can we believe anymore?” she asked.
President-elect Donald Trump, for one, was blaming the delta smelt, a two-inch, cucumber-smelling fish in the faraway flows of Northern California, for emptying the water tanks and fire hydrants. Mr. Rosenstone and Ms. Massoud wondered if Mr. Trump even understood that Los Angeles had only a single real river in its backyard, and as far back as 1905 it had to go poaching for distant rivers. Had Mr. Trump not seen the movie “Chinatown?”
“Climate change is only too real,” Ms. Massoud said. And so were the acts of man that had doubled the density of Pacific Palisades and neighboring Brentwood since the 1950s and “mansionized” so many of the modest houses that once made up their community. Greed had become kindling. And yet here was California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, promising that everything destroyed was going to be built back, this time without the constraints of the California Environmental Quality Act or the California State Coastal Act.
I drove in the direction of Eaton Canyon beneath a sun masked by smoke but somehow still brilliant. In Altadena, block after block had been cordoned off by yellow tape. The cop who finally let me into the fire zone said the community was being treated as a crime scene.
I was looking for the neighborhood where Zeke the Sheik had tended his compost pile, but everywhere I went only chimneys were standing. I picked a Meyer lemon off a burned tree. Still yellow, it tasted of sweet, sour and smoke. Zeke had died in 2019 at the age of 77, bent like a horseshoe from arthritis but still lugging his dirt.
Up the hill, I reached the smolders of Zorthian Ranch. Jirayr Zorthian, a 5-foot-3 wrestler who had survived the Armenian genocide, landed here in 1945 as if off a spaceship. Yale-educated, U.S. Army Intelligence-trained, an artist with great range, he discarded the conventional to pursue an off-the-grid life. Until his death at the age of 92, he hosted a festival he called “Primavera.” Dressed in long red underwear, he took on the persona of “Zor-Bacchus” as his young models danced naked around him. If you timed your visit right, you might find him in the company of the musician Charlie Parker or the artist Andy Warhol or Richard Feynman, the Nobel-winning physicist who was his best friend.
I found his son, Alan, caretaker of the ranch, roaming the 40-acre spread in a state of daze. The water hose he had wielded day and night and then, in futility, tossed aside in the dirt, looked to be the world’s biggest lifeless snake. “I knew this was coming. I should have done more to prepare,” he said, grim-faced. “How could I have left my dad’s artwork hanging in the gift shop? How could I have been so careless? There’s nothing there.”
Down the hill in Pasadena, I made a right turn on Beverly Drive and came upon our old house, built in 1926, still standing. I knocked on the door but no one answered. I could see the footprints departing in the fallen ash. The neighborhood was now an evacuation zone. The woman cleaning her porch across the street thought I might be a looter. When I told her the house once belonged to me and my then-wife, she softened.
“It’s listed on Realtor.com,” she said.
“How much?” I asked.
“One and a half million dollars,” she replied.
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