Living Through the Fires, and Covering Them

Living Through the Fires, and Covering Them

New York Times reporters have been writing personal portraits about the fires in the California Today newsletter. Here is a collection of their dispatches on what the disaster means to them, and to Los Angeles.

The Memories That Burn, Too

There was a period of my life when I went to Will Rogers State Historic Park all the time. My husband and I would drive to Pacific Palisades and park near the polo field, where they held real polo matches. We would hike past creeks and live oaks, and smell the eucalyptus. Sometimes we would peek into the preserved ranch house where Will Rogers, “the cowboy philosopher,” once lived. That house is gone now, burned to the ground.

Later we settled far to the east, in the San Gabriel Valley. It was a time when everyone was scraping and saving for starter homes. Children in tow, we would while away weekends at open houses, lookie-looing at bungalows and ranch homes. One memorable house had a backyard with an ivy nook that felt like a secret garden, and I still sometimes think of its cool greenness. It was in Altadena, near Eaton Canyon. I suspect it is ashes now.

When wildfires strike, people often talk about lost possessions. The heirloom in the rubble. The family album, up in smoke.

But fires like the ones this week also take landscapes that, when they go, can take a piece of you with them. As flames spanned Southern California, I thought of lost backdrops. The destroyed cafes where people wrote screenplays. The burned bleachers where teenagers shared first kisses. The park where my husband and I once held hands and smelled the eucalyptus, and, in a place that is now just a memory, were young.

When to Report, and When to Help Out

I had been in Pacific Palisades for only a few hours when I started receiving messages from evacuees asking about their homes.

Many residents have not been able to return since the fire swept through, but reporters can enter evacuated zones under California law. I was posting videos of the devastation on social media, and I started receiving a flurry of direct messages on X from people asking me to check on specific properties.

One woman asked about her sister-in-law’s home, saying it would bring her some closure if she knew for sure it was gone. One man asked about his apartment building. Another worried the fire had crept out of the Palisades toward Santa Monica Canyon, endangering his house.

It’s not a typical assignment for a reporter. But I decided to help out. It felt, in some way, like I was doing what reporters should be doing in a crisis: keeping people informed.

So far, I’ve been able to check on about six places. At one point, I drove up a winding street into the hills to check on a property. A few blocks in, a power line blocked the road. It felt like a waste to turn back. So I got out of my car, and walked the rest of the way.

A few homes on the street were still standing, so I thought there was a chance of good news for the person who had reached out to me on social media. But as I rounded a corner, I saw the remains of a home actively on fire, burning quietly. I couldn’t see a street address, so I wasn’t positive it was the right one. I sent a video to the woman who had asked me to check on it — her grandmother had lived there for 60 years.

“Unfortunately, I think it’s gone,” I wrote. “It might be this one burning.”

She confirmed that it was. She was surprised I actually showed up in person — she thought I’d send a drone. She was grateful, and she asked me to be careful.

The Wait, the Worry and the Fear

It was 2007, and my very first week away from home. I had barely tacked a Playbill over my bed in a dorm room at the University of California, Los Angeles, when I heard from my parents. A wildfire was racing through the hills near my San Diego suburb. Just a few days before, I had said a teary goodbye to my parents to start life on my own. Now, they were evacuating — and I was terrified.

Don’t worry about us, they seemed to be saying. Others have it worse.

Nearly two decades later, my first week back in Los Angeles after spending seven years in New York has been consumed by fire, too.

I packed a go bag when the Sunset fire in Hollywood got a little too close. And while I’m a little less terrified now, I’m not sure I should be. There are few things in life more anxiety-producing than refreshing an online fire map, over and over, as you helplessly wait and worry.

It is incredible how every person I’ve spoken to here has so casually dismissed packing up and leaving their homes as something routine. They’re eager instead to discuss how they can help, even as their children — often crammed inside a friend’s spare room — scream in the background.

Don’t worry about me, they seemed to be saying. Others have it worse.

Few people who are not physically here in Los Angeles can feel this fully. When fires rage, we are stressed — and we are scared.

I was reminded of that stress and that fear when I called my parents to tell them I was fine. They didn’t say it. But they didn’t have to. I could hear it in their voices.

After the Fires, It’s a New City, and a New World

From the day I moved to Los Angeles nearly 15 years ago, friends and family back in New York would take note of some crisis afflicting the region and send notes of concern, envisioning me fighting off flames or mudslides from my front stoop.

Their reaction reflected a misunderstanding some people (myself included, before I got here) had about Los Angeles. It’s so immense that the calamities capturing national attention might as well have been taking place in another state. It was just another sunny, blue-sky day where I was.

And for the first hours after the fires broke out in Pacific Palisades and Eaton, I responded to similar emails of concern the same way: We live in Hollywood, and those fires are miles away. Another world. I was intensely concerned about what was taking place there, but, like many people I know out of state, I was mainly following events on the news.

Until one night last week, when I looked up the street and saw the hillside of Runyon Canyon, a few blocks from my home, swept by a wall of fire. We evacuated (no need to wait for the inevitable “get out now” order). In our case, since the winds had died down, the Fire Department was able to deploy helicopters to contain the blaze overnight. We were back the next day.

We were lucky. But I realized that night — as I sent my friends and family the “ignore previous email” message — that, at least until it rained, few parts of Los Angeles would be immune from the threat of fires. This is a very different world — and different city — we are living in.

Signs of Fire, Signs of Hope

In the wake of these fires, I’ve been thinking about my children and the world they’re inheriting. The disastrous effects of climate change have made these college-age children question what kind of future will be afforded to them. Can they raise families of their own? Will they afford a home? Where is it safe to build? It’s easy to feel helpless.

And then, as natives of Los Angeles watching these catastrophic fires, where scores of friends are losing their homes, the future remains incredibly uncertain and the stress level high. One day we’re packing up to leave, the next day we’re returning to await grandparents, who are evacuating from yet another blaze, in yet another part of Los Angeles. Fire is everywhere. As I write this, my daughter informs me that a new one erupted in Granada Hills. It’s hard to maintain any sense of optimism.

Yet if you look a little closer, signs of hope are visible. The helicopter pilot with the incredible aim who took control of the Sunset fire. The synagogue in the Palisades, which has miraculously remained standing despite the homes around it reduced to rubble. The fire relief pop-up center in West Hollywood, where my children volunteered to organize hundreds of clothing donations and supplies for families who have lost everything.

The road ahead for Angelenos is sure to be rough and the future is not guaranteed. If we can remember our humanity, perhaps there is room for hope.

In L.A., the Heartache of Being Home

All week, I’ve been reassuring friends and family across the world checking in over texts, DMs and WhatsApp messages with this: We’re safe . But right now in Los Angeles, safety is a provisional state.

At home in Highland Park, my husband and I planned where we might shelter and packed our go bag — several go bags. We stashed passports, some jewelry, stacks of family photos from the late 1990s still in their red Kmart sleeves, diapers and wipes for the baby, and supplements for our elderly dog. We checked our locations against Watch Duty, glanced at group texts and shook off all the false alarms.

On Friday, I came home to find my husband putting away some tools. He’d been busy installing a little coat rack near the front door, right at my daughter’s height. We’d talked about doing this weeks ago, so she could reach her jacket and the bag she takes to day care with her lunch and snacks inside. Her day care in Pasadena is closed. We’re not sure yet when it will reopen. But all week my husband tinkered around the house, taking care of it, the baby and me. He did laundry and cooked dinner and repaired a cabinet and dropped off supplies for a mutual-aid group in the neighborhood.

I wrote We’re safe because that was all that mattered and because it was hard to explain the heartache of loving Los Angeles this week and calling it home. If you were lucky to still be at home, to still have a home, then it was the heartache of packing a go bag, but also putting up new coat hooks. It was the heartache of getting ready to go, and at the same time, getting ready to stay.

A Sense of Belonging, Shaped by Fire

The built-in bookshelves in my Studio City house have two rows dedicated to works about California, three if you count a California fiction section that’s mostly L.A. noir. As a native Californian and Golden State history buff now raising two children in Los Angeles, I’ve read probably two million words about the goings-on of this city.

But until last week, I never considered L.A. home. That’s because I grew up in the Bay Area and identify so strongly as a Northern Californian that I’ve carried that identity with me no matter where I live.

I voted absentee while attending college in San Diego. During my decade in New York, I read far more about San Francisco politics (which were especially bonkers back then) than anything happening in “the city.” The story I told myself was that those other places were waypoints on the way back to where I’m from.

Something about collective trauma has a way of focusing the mind on where you are. Last Wednesday, my wife and I hosted a pizza dinner for friends and neighbors whose power was out. The party broke up when the Watch Duty app, which tracks wildfires, informed us that the Sunset fire put our neighborhood in the evacuation zone. Everyone left with their children in tears to prepare go bags, and an hour later, we were driving to a hotel.

Thankfully, everything was fine. We have spent the days since explaining to our children the importance of being ready to go, and delivering toys and clothes to people who’ve lost everything. I cover housing for The Times, and I recently told my editor that I’m now on the “rebuilding L.A. beat.” The story is urgent as well as personal.

I’ve moved enough times to know that there’s no point in declaring any place my forever home. And while I’m not quite ready to call myself an Angeleno, and while I’ll always root for the Giants, this part of the state is a part of me now in a way that it wasn’t a week ago. It’s one thing to read about history, but it’s something else to live it.

Discovering L.A., as L.A. Reels

I moved to Los Angeles from New York less than a month ago to help report on Southern California. It’s been taking some time to settle in and adapt to my new home. I still miss my old neighborhood in Queens — the fruit stand around the corner, the cast of characters on my subway ride to work, the bodegas down the street.

My new neighborhood doesn’t have a fruit stand, and I drive to work now. But the Los Angeles I’ve started to discover, and appreciate, is a city reeling from disaster. It’s hard to get to know a place when that place is in crisis. But a city can reveal its true self in such times.

On Sunday morning, I visited Friendship Pasadena Church. Before I could tell several churchgoers I was there as a reporter, I was quickly and warmly welcomed, and offered water, coffee and doughnuts.

The people at Friendship Pasadena have been hit hard by the Eaton fire. At least 15 families who go to the church lost their homes. Others had to evacuate or know someone whose home was destroyed. And yet they still had so much to offer me, a total stranger.

It may take more time to get used to living here, but this past week taught me the meaning of home. It’s more than a physical space. It’s people.

Losing Homes, and the Dream of One

At the very moment a fiery blaze tore over a ridge in Pacific Palisades, threatening houses, my husband and I were six miles southeast, wide-eyed in the entryway of a home we hoped would become our first.

It was a Tuesday morning — a wholly inconvenient time to attend an open house — but my husband saw it enter the market and had a good feeling about this one. We had each been saving aggressively for over a decade for our starter condo and had become the kind of couple who bickered over whether to splurge on an heirloom tomato. The down payment for a fixer-upper was coming together, and this one was ours, we could feel it.

I spent that evening and much of the next 10 days on assignment in the fire zone, whipped with ash by the Santa Ana winds as I spoke with families whose homes had burned. My husband packed a go bag for us as the evacuation order came within blocks of our apartment — all while quietly waiting to hear back on our offer. The guilt of pursuing a home weighed on us.

That modest little condo is — for us, at least — gone, not because of the flames but because of 14 competing offers that had landed by the weekend in the wake of the disaster, an unprecedented new market, even for L.A. We have not yet given ourselves permission to feel disappointed; it seems absurd to desire a home when so many families have lost much more than just dreams of one.

These fires will bring new consequences for our unaffordable city, for those whose homes were destroyed and for those, like us, trying to find a square foot to call our own. Still, I was struck by the words of a mother I met in the fire zone as she sifted through memories of her Palisades house. “After this experience,” she told me, home was redefined. “You can build that little nest anywhere.”

The Push and Pull of Los Angeles: Beauty and Danger

Often when you’re visiting Los Angeles, you walk up the 282 steps to the Baldwin Hills scenic overlook. You pass the sagebrush and the primrose. The high rises of downtown come into view. Then, as you stand under a live oak and take a swig of water, you notice the oil wells, those nodding donkeys pumping grease out of the ground, symbols of the oil-hungry economy that birthed this sprawling city and now makes it more flammable.

You don’t dwell on the oil wells. You know they’re there. They’ve always been there. You focus your gaze elsewhere. The Santa Monica mountains reveal their crowns as the marine layer lifts. You see a flash of the Pacific. You are distracted by a monarch butterfly.

This seeing and not seeing — this knowing and not knowing — for me, is the essence of inhabiting Los Angeles. You believe in its golden story, or else how could you possibly live here? Perhaps this is also key to rebounding from this latest calamity.

I am a child of Los Angeles. I’ve run away from it. I’ve come running back to it. My family refuses to leave Los Angeles, which makes it forever a part of me.

It’s not like we don’t know the hazards. The road rage, the heat rising from the pavement, the insane housing prices, the strung-out kids on the Metro, the tents of misery that you drive past when you drop your kid at school. It’s not like we don’t understand that if a hillside is on fire, there’s only one skinny, winding road that leads to safety.

My friend bought a house on one of these hillsides, in Hollywood, in 2022. Last week, she evacuated. She is well aware of how climate change is supersizing fires. She didn’t think it would be so fierce, so fast. “This is happening a lot sooner than I ever thought,” she texted. “tho I know you had an inkling.”

I didn’t really. I had been afraid for her.

Los Angeles is no stranger to ash and wind. The fires of 1961 destroyed Bel Air; Zsa Zsa Gabor surveyed the ruins of her home in a fur coat. Watts burned in 1965. More of Los Angeles burned in 1992, after the televised beating of Rodney King. The Santa Ana winds fanned the Woolsey fire in 2018, which torched a swath of Ventura. In its wake, the “Ventura strong” yard signs went up, as though any of us have dominion over fire, particularly those living in a dry woodland.

You’ll hear a lot of bromides about resilience in the coming days.

Every great city prides its ability to rebound after ruin. Mumbai after the 2006 terror attacks. New York after Sandy. Paris after the fire at Notre Dame.

And every great city dips into its own story in order to rebound. In the case of Los Angeles that includes a considerable amount of scenic overlooking.

The fire this time, though, is likely to force a reckoning over what lessons we should learn from the past about living in a hotter, drier, more incendiary city. Even if the homeowners of Pacific Palisades want to rebuild, should they, so close to the fire-prone wildlands? Should you build homes with only a single solitary road to access them? What should we do about trees that shade homes in hot summers but become tinder in fire season?

Scientists who study resilience in nature say the memory of one trauma helps build fortitude against the next trauma. Certain species of corals are able to withstand bleaching after they’ve experienced one or two bleaching events in their lifetime, a recent study found. Maize that suffered drought in early life is better equipped to handle it later.

Living creatures carry memory. What matters is what we do with it.

Psychologists say humans who rebound after catastrophes share certain habits of mind. One of them is optimism. Not a delusional optimism, but an ability to focus on problems that can be solved.

Los Angeles will have to focus on the problems it can solve in order to save itself. The scenic overlook has its limits.

We who carry Los Angeles inside us know that our survival on a hotter planet requires overlooking the hazards sometimes and staring hard at the delights. This is how Los Angeles beguiles us and sustains us. The delights. The cherimoyas in December. The tube-light taco stands along Centinela. The yucca blossoms that will shoot up on the Santa Monica mountains in April, as though to say, “Look at me, look at me.” And you will turn your gaze away from the burn scars on the hills.

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