ALTADENA, Calif. (AP) — The warnings began on Saturday, Jan. 4.
Our neighbor, a volunteer at the local sheriff’s station, texted that we should “batten down the hatches” for a “big windstorm.” From there, things moved fast.
On Sunday, I put on a bowtie and tux to cover the red carpet at the Golden Globes. Tuesday morning, I drove from my home in Altadena toward the massive Pacific Palisades wildfire to shoot video for our coverage. I asked my wife, Meg, to ready the two cat carriers and shoot video of our home for insurance purposes.
Just in case.
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EDITOR’S NOTE — Ryan Pearson, a Los Angeles-based entertainment video editor for The Associated Press, lost his home to the California wildfires last week.
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On my way home, I saw orange glowing smoke. A colleague texted that there was another fire in Altadena. To get a closer look, I parked at a gas station across the street from a place called the Bunny Museum. Our favorite new pizza place, Side Pie, was on the other side of the intersection. A cafe called Fox’s, open since 1955, was just down the street.
Less than an hour after the fire had started, flames were ripping strong along the mountain above Eaton Canyon. I wore a KN95 mask and ski goggles. The fire was probably still three miles from our home. But the Santa Anas were blowing at a level I’d never felt before.
I went home and gave Meg the news: We needed to pack and get out.
Our daughter, Reese, was away on a school trip. We took maybe an hour, which felt like both five minutes and an entire day. I picked out an Ozomatli sweatshirt I’d just gotten for Christmas from my closet, some jeans, vitamins, a portable speaker. Meg packed up her stuff and Reese’s essential items — school backpack, a few stuffed animals. I started packing wine bottles, thought, “What am I doing?” and put them back. We got passports and birth certificates. A litter box and some wet food for the cats. We loaded both cars.
Did anybody else on the street need our help? I asked our neighbor. Her next-door neighbor did, so we went over and I helped Donna get her husband, Phil, from his wheelchair into their Subaru.
I snapped one last picture from our driveway — our house with a reddish-orange haze behind it. With that, we headed off into the night — into a future of flames and smoke and loss that would change us forever.
It was a backdrop to our family’s growing history
This was our home:
We first encountered Altadena when Reese attended the Summerkids camp there. I felt the city’s hustle-bustle melt away each morning that I drove her past the towering pines, deodar cedars and maple trees that lined the calm streets. When Reese was 5, we found a three-bedroom, two-bath home that had a backyard view of the San Gabriel Mountains and a tree out front with thick branches perfect for hanging a swing.
Built in 1958, it had been owned for years by our new next-door neighbor. Megan and I both loved the clerestory windows, hardwood floors and wood beams that crossed the ceiling; they’d been painted brown, but we stripped the paint to expose the natural wood.
We loved the mixture of people around us, nods and greetings from neighbors when we walked down our sidewalk-less street. Along with a deep-rooted Black community, the hush and space and trees and birds and relatively affordable homes have long drawn musicians, artists and artisans from the LA area’s more-blue-collar-than-you-think creative community.
When the weather was right, I walked down the driveway and hiked uphill to the trail leading up to Echo Mountain and eventually to Inspiration Point. It was so accessible, I called it “my mountain.” On Echo Mountain you could find the remains of a resort and hotel that burned in fires in the early 1900s. Once, when I hiked up with Reese, she and a friend dug in the dirt and uncovered pieces of a pot that we carried down, cleaned up and tried to piece back together.
Two years ago, a family moved in next door to us with two daughters. They all became like sisters, and the girls would climb atop our garage to watch fireworks on the Fourth of July, play ping-pong in the back yard or sit in Reese’s room and play Roblox. We adopted Luke and Archie, our two orange tabby cats. The cats, with us before the pandemic, helped get us through that hard time (including a few weeks of lockdown with nearby fires on the mountain keeping us indoors for days on end). Meg envisioned eventually building a “catio” for them outside.
After Meg’s father died, we used her inheritance to remodel. Meg modernized and styled every corner while retaining the house’s midcentury character. She curated the artwork, paintings, photographs, wood sculptures and trinkets from places we’d visited in the before times.
One Christmas, Meg surprised me by converting the garage into a man cave/study with a TV, elliptical and spin bike and her dad’s old roll-top desk. We put sheds in the back for storage: photo albums from the time before digital photos, holiday ornaments, scrapbooks with my earliest newspaper clippings and Meg’s elementary school class photos and report cards. All now gone.
I ended up working from home a lot and walked a three-mile loop through the neighborhood that gave me a regular view of the community’s variety: yards filled with cars in various states of disrepair. People in cowboy hats riding horses down the pavement. Ultra-modern new homes with glass walls. Coyotes — and dog walkers who carried thick sticks to fend them off. Rainbow flags and “In this house …” signs and Black Lives Matter signs and Harris signs and a couple Trump signs. A cul-de-sac on a hillside with a house where a motion-activated robot voice told me I was being recorded every time I walked past.
Works of humans and works of nature. The predictable and the unexpected. The entire tapestry. All of these things, and more, made it our home.
Surveying what was left (not much)
The night we left last week, we went to stay the night with friends in northeast LA’s San Rafael Hills. I woke up at about 6 a.m. and headed back to Altadena.
From the freeway, it resembled the scene in “Fury Road” where there’s a swirling wall of orange as the vehicles enter the sandstorm. But I drove into an all-black cloud of smoke instead.
Homes were on fire just down from the always busy McDonald’s. I stopped to send in live video from my iPhone because I knew I couldn’t get a cell signal up by my house.
My house. Our house. What had become of it?
I tried to drive up to check. I turned back when the smoke got too thick to see the street and I was encircled by flames.
After a while, I headed over to the evacuation site at Pasadena Convention Center. It was fascinating to watch the center evolve: at first just people wandering in and sitting against the wall, then Red Cross volunteers arriving, paramedics pushing folks from nursing homes on hospital beds, people giving out free food from World Central Kitchen and Chick-fil-A.
We interviewed evacuees for a bit. When enough time had passed, I drove back up Marengo to check on our house.
I swerved to avoid burning trees in the road. Debris and destruction surrounded me. Our street was blocked by a burning downed electrical pole.
I didn’t even get out of my car. I just looked long enough to absorb it: Like nearly the entire community, our whole block had burned. Reese’s tree swing and the backyard ping-pong table were still there, plus our chimney and fireplace, with brick painted white. Everything else — everything in this place where we had chosen to live our lives and raise our child — was simply gone, as if it had never been there in the first place. But I knew better. I had lived it.
Driving back down the hill, I cried.
