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Tag: ["🏕️", "🇺🇸", "🔥"]
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Date: 2025-01-21
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DocType: "WebClipping"
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Hierarchy:
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TimeStamp: 2025-01-21
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Link: https://www.altaonline.com/dispatches/a63434429/los-angeles-fires-pacific-palisades-andrew-dubbins/
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location:
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CollapseMetaTable: true
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---
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Parent:: [[@News|News]]
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Read:: 🟥
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---
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```button
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name Save
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type command
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action Save current file
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id Save
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```
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^button-WillRogersIsonFireNSave
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# Will Rogers Is on Fire
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It was Tuesday of last week and I was on the phone with Mom. A 72-year-old retired social worker, she was telling me about a new TV show she’d been watching called *Landman*. She mentioned Dad was home from the office early, having heard about a brush fire in the Palisades Highlands across the canyon from their house—my childhood home. I offered to drive over from my place in West Adams to help pack things up in case we had to evacuate. No, she said, stay put. I was fighting a cold, and she wanted me to rest. I hung up, then googled “Palisades Fire.” There were already a dozen local news stories, one with a map showing the mandatory evacuation zone in red. And there was my family home, in the red.
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I soon got the emergency text: “LAFD: Palisades Fire evacuation order. Those in Pacific Palisades evacuate now.” This was serious. I grabbed a disposable mask, hopped in my old Acura, and headed west. The 10 westbound was practically empty, but there was gridlock headed east, as thousands fled the Palisades. I saw heavy black smoke billowing above the Santa Monica Mountains. When I rolled down the window, I could feel those hot, dry Santa Ana winds blowing. So hard, the palm trees were bending. We’d been through this as a family before. A few years back, there was a fire one night near the Getty Center in Brentwood. The whole Palisades was under evacuation orders, but my family stayed put because the fire looked far away. We packed all my family’s photo albums in our car just in case. Sure enough, the fire didn’t get close, and we spent the next day putting everything back. I felt today might be a repeat of the same chore. But then again, these Santa Ana winds felt different.
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As I drove west on the 10, I called my sister: “I have a bad feeling about this one.” She asked to come over with her daughters, but they’re just toddlers—more wild than helpful—so I told her to wait. I got off the freeway, drove through Santa Monica to Sunset Boulevard, then up the hill to Will Rogers State Historic Park.
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The windy road has always been my favorite drive in L.A. Green ferns reaching out on one side and a white rail fence on the other. You pass a grove of California oak trees, where my sister and I used to look for deer grazing in the mornings on the way to our elementary school, Corpus Christi. The road snakes up to a beautiful state park with hiking trails; a big, grassy polo field surrounded by tall eucalyptus; and Rogers’s historic ranch house and stables. I pulled into the driveway of my parents’ home of more than 40 years, a two-story wood-shingled Craftsman Dad designed when we were kids.
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Our house, with its mismatched furniture, creaky wood floors, and slow hot water belonged to a previous Palisades era, when middle-class families and retirees filled the town, before the über-rich rolled in and constructed their boxy megamansions. Our house was built on a budget. I remember all those trips to find the cheapest fixtures, appliances, tile, and granite. We splurged on only one thing: beautiful forest-green carpeting that my sister and I found for our bedrooms. My mom wanted us to have it.
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> > “Everyone’s getting out of the Palisades.”
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There were still some other old-timey homes left. One of them was “Boo Radley’s house,” as my sister and I called it. We never saw the owner, not once. His was a ramshackle, dated house, with a weed-choked front yard, unruly avocado tree, and vintage car buried under overgrown bushes. We figured he must be an old man because he had a Cold War–era shortwave radio tower on the roof. Mom once told my sister and me in a whisper, “He’s probably a spy.”
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My parents knew and loved every inch of our house, but my mom was proudest of our trees. In the corner of the front yard was our pine tree and redwood. They were tiny saplings when my sister and I, as preschoolers, helped Mom with planting. The trees had grown to become among the tallest on our block. There was also our flowering pear tree, where we strung white Christmas lights every year, and our two oaks, which shaded my upstairs bedroom like a tree house and reminded me of the old cowboy days of Will Rogers. There was a round pine that our property’s prior owner—a professional golfer—had trimmed in the shape of a golf ball. It was a quirky tree, but its branches were perfect for climbing. Many times I climbed to the top and poked my head through, a tradition that my little nieces were now taking up during their regular visits to Gaga and Popop’s house.
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But my mother’s favorite tree was our liquidambar. She loved mornings spent sitting in her dad’s green leather chair, wearing a cozy white sweatshirt, sipping a steaming-hot coffee, reading the *Los Angeles Times*, and glancing through the window at that tree’s fiery orange and red leaves in the autumn.
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My parents each worked their way through college, put so much into their careers, and scrimped and saved to send my sister and me to private schools. They’d built this home. And now, approaching their golden years, it was their time and turn to finally relax a little. For Mom, that meant reading in her chair or finally looking at all the photo albums she’d created over the years. For Dad, it meant painting on a Saturday morning or listening to Sergio Mielniczenko’s *The Brazilian Hour* on his old Walkman radio as he clipped the bougainvillea in the backyard. He loved the garden and working with his hands.
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For both my parents, this meant inviting over their kids and, now, grandkids. My mom would lure me home with my favorite pasta sauce, or plan holiday backyard barbecues for all of us. She’d decorate for every season, with decorations accumulated over decades. My dad still climbed up on the roof to string the old colored Christmas lights along the rain gutter, even though my sister insisted he finally hire someone this year for godssake. My mom decorated the Christmas tree with ornaments collected from every trip we ever took and homemade ones that my sister and I created as kids. And every Memorial Day, my parents hung the giant American flag from Grandpa’s funeral above our front porch, with Dad climbing the ladder and Mom holding its base.
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Andrew Dubbins
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Smoke billows above homes near Will Rogers State Historic Park.
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As I got out of the car, I turned to the north and saw a big cloud of dark smoke, with the sun glowing red through it. “Anyone home?” I shouted.
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My dad greeted me in the kitchen with his big, roguish smile. “That was fast!”
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“Record time,” I said. “Everyone’s getting out of the Palisades.”
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My mom wrapped me in a hug. She’d been sitting in the living room, on her old, worn-out maroon floral couch, watching news about the fire on TV. She said it was starting to look bad. Those Santa Ana winds were expected to be unprecedented: 50, 70, maybe even 100 miles an hour. “Should we start packing things up?” I asked.
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My dad shrugged. Both of us could remember how long it took to put all that stuff back the last time. But the three of us agreed: Let’s at least load the photo albums, which we lifted in stacks into our cars.
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My mom—limping from a recent hip surgery—grabbed her medications and a few mementos, including my sister’s and my baptismal gowns. I walked up to my room and looked around, standing on the green carpet. My mom had kept the room preserved in the same state as when I was a child. There were my World War II model airplanes—a P-51 with Tuskegee red markings, a green and beige Spitfire, a silver P-38 Lightning—and my grandfather’s plane, the blue-gray PBY Catalina flying boat. I thought about grabbing one—but if you can’t grab them all, why grab any? Instead, I took the little wooden box from my bookshelf. It was my “treasure box” as a kid, filled with my favorite boyhood trinkets: some marbles and a harmonica. I walked out of my room for the last time, passing my sister’s and my gold grade school trophies, which Mom had meticulously dusted over the years.
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After I’d stacked several of my sister’s paintings in the trunk (she was a fine art major in college), as well as a framed photo of our beloved childhood golden retriever, Grace Kelly, I asked my mom if there was anything else we should take. Still expecting we’d be putting everything back, we decided to leave it at that, even though there was still room in our cars. (Those seven words will haunt me for the rest of my life: “There was still room in our cars.”)
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Hoping to spot the fire, we took a last walk down our street, passing Boo Radley’s house and the cul-de-sac where my sister and I played tag as kids. We noticed a gardener dropping off a few potted plants in a front yard and an Amazon driver delivering a package to our neighbor’s empty house.
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A couple doors down, a woman was loading a few last things into her car in a panic and said she could see the fire from her backyard. She let us through her side gate, and we looked across the canyon as her wind chimes played eerily. There it was: the Palisades fire, with its tall, roaring flames licking the other side of the canyon a few miles away. I felt a mist on my face from a water drop and asked Mom “Did you feel that?” She said yes. Overhead, firefighting planes were lining up to drop water and pink retardant on the blaze.
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Andrew Dubbins
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The author's view from his family's porch of the approaching blaze.
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Back at our house, we watched the news as the flames ravaged the Palisades. The fire would later burn down my elementary school, along with the bank and grocery store and almost everything else. From our front porch, we could see the blaze on the mountains above the top of Chautauqua Boulevard, a few miles away. The flames were rocketing up a hundred feet, glowing orange and red in the darkening light. “It’s sort of beautiful,” my dad said. We’d seen the Santa Monica Mountains in every season, and so it was fitting now to see it in one of its rarer but still natural states: consumed by wildfire. In the distance, we saw a ranger on his tractor hurriedly driving down the trail from Inspiration Point and a spooked white horse bucking in a corral. We heard the loud pop-pop-pop of trees being incinerated. We assumed we were the last people left on our block, but then a disheveled middle-aged man on a bicycle rolled by. Speaking through his mask, he said he was an amateur photographer taking photos of the inferno.
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“It’s huge,” he said, “and it’s coming fast.”
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I didn’t feel it would be necessary to evacuate until the fire trucks arrived. And yet, even as we saw the fire getting bigger, there were no fire trucks in sight.
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As daylight thickened into darkness, the flames twisted up higher over the mountains. I went out to the porch and saw the fire pouring over the ridge, into Will Rogers Park. My parents came and looked at the tall wall of flames approaching. My dad made the decision. “It’s time to go,” he said.
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Before we left, Dad and I hosed down the front and back of the house. I did the back, water drizzling down the windows and wooden shingles. The hose wasn’t long enough to spray the balcony of my sister’s room, where she used to play make-believe Rapunzel. I pressed down hard on the nozzle with my thumb, but the powerful gusts of wind blew the water back at me, soaking my clothes and shoes. After we’d finished, my dad and I stood on the porch, watching the sheet of fire avalanche toward us. He looked frightened. There was only one road down the hill. He yelled into our darkened house: “Marg, it’s time to go!”
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Like a captain leaving her sinking ship, Mom was the last one out. It might have been home for all of us, but it had been her full-time job as a homemaker to take care of it. We left the doors unlocked in case the fire department needed to get in. My dad and I backed our cars out of the driveway, then Mom pulled hers out of the garage for the last time, and we drove down the street in a little convoy. I fumbled for my phone to shoot a video of the enormous fire, sweeping into Will Rogers Park. “Jesus,” I whispered.
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We followed each other down into the darkness, passing not a single fire truck, hearing not a single siren. We turned left on Sunset and continued up to Amalfi, passing local TV reporters in yellow firefighter jackets. But saw no firefighters.
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In the car, I called 911 and they patched me through to a fire department operator. I told him, “Will Rogers is on fire, and there are no firefighters, not a single truck!” I tried to explain: “It’s not just the park. It’s not just Will Rogers’s old house. There are streets up there, and homes. There’s a community!” He said he’d been taking calls like mine for hours. There was nothing he could do.
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After driving on side streets through gridlocked eastbound traffic, we arrived at my house in West Adams. I microwaved leftover pasta for my dad and a bag of rice for myself. Mom didn’t want anything. “I can’t swallow,” she told me.
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We spent the next few hours watching the local news. I will never forget the moment, around 11 p.m., sitting next to my dad on the couch, as a KABC reporter stood at the corner of Amalfi and Sunset. He peeked over his shoulder at the fire as it consumed a few homes on a ridge. “I believe that’s Will Rogers Park,” he said.
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Beside me on the couch, my dad said in a low voice, “That’s ours. Over the reporter’s left hand, that’s our house.” But neither of us was sure.
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“Let’s go back,” I said. Mom insisted on coming too. Once again, it was smooth sailing on the 10 West. But when we reached Seventh Street, on the border between Santa Monica and the Palisades, it was blocked by a police car. My mom begged the sergeant to let us through, but he refused.
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“Can you at least give me the number of Station 69, so I can tell them there are homes burning up at Will Rogers?” I said.
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“You have a phone.” He nodded to the device in my hand. “Look it up.” (A couple days later, National Guard troops with machine guns and Humvees would reinforce the police blockade of Pacific Palisades, mainly to protect the evacuated mansions from looters. “We could have used you guys on the fire lines,” I thought.) We tried Ocean Avenue next, but the cops were blocking that way too, so we drove back to my place.
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The next morning, in my small, one-bedroom house, Mom lay on a blow-up mattress, and my dad on the couch. He and I, up early, decided to try and visit our house—or what was left of it. I wrote Mom a note and left it beside her mattress. “Dad and I are driving to Palisades. We’re on our cells. Love Bud.”
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As we got on the 10 heading west, my dad flipped on a local radio station. A reporter was interviewing a Hispanic Angeleno about property damage. “It’s not just the damaged properties,” he said. “It’s the trauma of people, who’ve lost their homes and communities. It’s going to take maybe two or three years not just to rebuild the buildings, but rebuild the people.”
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We got off the freeway, weaved our way to West Channel Road, and set off on foot.
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> > For the first time since the fires broke out, I wept.
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My dad is OG Pacific Palisades. He grew up there, went to Pali High, played tennis at UCLA, and shucked oysters at Moonshadows on Pacific Coast Highway before starting up in real estate. He led me to the “secret stairs,” which descend to Rustic Canyon. With the heavy smoke, we gasped for breath through our protective masks. Neither of us had brought water.
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Another father and son passed us hauling a big bag of stuff that they’d presumably retrieved from their house (or its ashes). We exchanged a nod.
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Deep in the mandatory evacuation zone, there were branches and garbage cans, overturned by the wind, littering the streets. On the corner, three fire trucks were busy spraying water on a mansion on fire. There were no other civilians, just a couple *Washington Post* reporters. When we told them we were trying to find out if our house burned down, the reporters asked if they could walk with us. My dad said sure.
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“What do you think of the response?” one asked.
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What I said was, “Last night was a historic windstorm. They knew it was coming and they could have been prepared.”
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What I wish I had said was, “What response?” There were no fire trucks on my street when we evacuated, and far too few in the Palisades. Mayor Karen Bass was in Ghana. Gavin Newsom was coiffing his hair for press conferences. President-elect Trump had spent his entire previous time in office cheering for California to burn (and will most likely do nothing in his next term to help the victims, other than his rich benefactors). I wish I’d said that this never-ending fire season is plainly the result of climate change, an issue politicians are all too comfortable ignoring to appeal to fossil fuel giants. I wish I’d said that my nieces—who were now sheltering at home—will be growing up in a world much worse off than when I found it.
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With my dad in the lead, we popped out on upper Amalfi, right beside the fire trucks. The firefighters were too busy to notice us. We passed a home with a backyard balcony, from where we thought maybe we could see our house. As I jogged to the balcony and looked across the smoky canyon, I heard my dad’s voice behind me: “It’s gone,” he said. “There’s your mom’s pine tree.”
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I looked through the smoke and saw the tall, charred tree. Beside it was a pile of rubble, only our two brick chimneys still standing. The whole row of houses was gone. The park was shrouded in smoke, so I couldn’t tell if Will Rogers’s historic ranch house had survived (it didn’t).
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With our faces hot from a mansion fire a couple hundred yards below, my dad stood beside me, looking across the canyon at what used to be the house that he and Mom built, now gone in an instant. I put my arm around him, and for the first time since the fires broke out, I wept.
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Andrew Dubbins
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The author’s father climbing stairs as he returns to the Palisades to learn the fate of his home.
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There would be plenty more tears. There’d be tears from the guilt. My sister weeping, because she didn’t come home to help us evacuate that night. Tears of empathy. Like when Jesús, our gardener for 20 years and a close friend, called my mom after she evacuated. They used to talk for hours about our trees, and Jesús’s childhood in Sonora, Mexico, where he chased away mountain lions to protect his family’s flock of sheep. “Margaret, he said. “I was so afraid that you’d stay behind.” Jesús said that 40 of his clients had lost their homes. It meant that the landscaping business he’d labored and sweated so hard to build—which had put his four children through college—was now over. Now he had no work and might move back to Mexico. He felt too old and too tired to start over, as did my mom. She broke down in tears at the Macy’s in Westfield Culver City, where she walked in alone to buy a fresh pair of underwear and replace her only outfit—the one she wore on her back. “My drawer at home was filled with underwear,” she told the salesperson, who wrapped my weeping mother in a hug and gave her a discount.
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Tears from the loss. Like my dad, who paints as a hobby, dropping his head when he said, “To think of all those paintings I spent hours working on. Every little detail. Gone.” When you lose your home, you have to answer so many calls, texts, and voicemails from concerned friends and relatives. They don’t know what to say, but often resort to that same cliché: “At least you made it out safe,” it goes. “Everything else is just *stuff*.”
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But it’s *not* just stuff. It’s the handmade quilt and Christmas pajamas that mom sewed for us every year and the albums of irreplaceable photos that we forgot to grab. It’s my dad’s paintings and his collection of baseball hats from a lifetime of travels. It’s my sister’s favorite teddy bear—Bush, with his missing nose—and case of dolls. It’s my mom’s book of Shakespeare from college, Christmas ornaments, her dad’s blue canvas tent and favorite green leather reading chair that she had planned to pass down to me someday. It’s not just “stuff.” It’s heirlooms, memories. It’s a long-established routine and well-deserved rest. It’s a legacy. It’s a life.
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I know that my family is not alone in our pain. Many lives have been lost in these horrific fires, along with thousands of businesses and homes. On our street, only two homes were left standing, one of which—I’d learn later—was old Boo Radley’s. My parents and I had assumed that *we* were the last ones to leave our block: the ones with the deepest attachment to our home. But as it turned out, we were wrong. I’d assumed the old man’s house was empty when we walked by that night of the fire. But in fact, Boo Radley was somewhere behind those dusty, darkened windows. After that hellish fire had consumed our home and the rest of our block, it had roared toward his house. With our fire department nowhere to be found, the 95-year-old old man fought that enormous inferno with his garden hose, dousing the embers and flames, until he passed out in his yard from smoke inhalation. He’d nearly died.
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My mom showed me his photo, which had been posted on a neighborhood thread. In the image, a police officer stands beside him as he sits on the curb, with a shock of white hair in a mess and soot covering his exhausted, wrinkled face. It was the first time I’d seen Boo Radley, who so loved his home that he risked his life for it. And he saved it.•
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---
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`$= dv.el('center', 'Source: ' + dv.current().Link + ', ' + dv.current().Date.toLocaleString("fr-FR"))` |
