Hell Angeles - Chapter 7

January 9th

The baseball fields burn at 10:22 am. As a matter of science, the destruction might have happened earlier. The fire might have torn down the home of Pacific Palisades Baseball Association sometime earlier this week; after midnight on January 7 or on the morning of January 8. So many of those streets near the park were by then abandoned to flames. North Swarthmore, De Pauw, Via de la Paz, Alma Real and Frontera. But the psychic ball drops for all of us at exactly this moment. 10:22 am on Thursday January 9. In a town with ten places of worship (seven churches, three synagogues, a Church of Jesus Christ Latter-Day Saints, countless parochial schools) baseball is the true religion. Baseball is the single faith. Baseball is where the physical meets the spiritual, the higher, the bigger, the numinous enters our lives. This is the moment. A town on the verge of breaking will finally break. Bob Benton, the man who has presided over Pacific Palisades Baseball Association for 36 years sends this e-mail.

January 9th, 2025

PPBA Families -

It's with a heavy heart that we reach out to our fellow Palisadians. Instead of preparing for our 2025 season, we are all trying to comprehend the damage and devastation that has hit our community.  First and foremost, we hope that all of you and your loved ones are safe. Obviously we will not be having evaluations this weekend and for the time being, we are unable to provide any further guidance.  What we can say is that we will do everything in our power to try and provide these kids, and your families, with some sense of normalcy and community through baseball at some point this spring.  

The reason that PPBA has been so strong for so many decades is 100% due to the incredible community we share.  We have no doubt that the people of the Palisades are going to rise up from this tragedy, rebuild what has been lost and reestablish a community that will thrive for future generations. If baseball can play a small role in bringing people together and allowing the kids to see each other and forget other things -- we will be thrilled to be able to make that happen.

For now, we send our love and prayers and hope that we get to see you all soon.

#PaliStrong

PPBA Board

There are moments this week (amidst the miasma of digital life) when we think we are alone. Isolated. Now we remember we are together in our suffering. Every eye on this e-mail, every heart comprehending the loss of our baseball fields—the loss of Pacific Palisades Baseball known as “PPBA”—those four grassy cathedrals framed by tall palms and dark mountain and blue sky, outfields touching at the center, metal bleachers on the corners, banners flapping on the chain link fence, pitching machine firing in the cage, guy rolling fresh lines and sweeping the base bags talking to umpire who arrived at dawn and will spend his whole day here—this place where we spend our whole lives from January to July— as Roger Angell[1] put it “no place I’d rather be”— this place is gone.

Going, gone…

The suffering is fresh and new. It’s not your home that’s burning it’s the baseball fields. The place you like better than home.

Take my home. Give me back the baseball fields.

How can that feeling be true? How can it be so strong? This gets to a point I made earlier. The thing that’s burning isn’t your material possessions. It isn’t Pacific Palisades in physical form. It’s what lives on top of it. Little ecosystems of soul. I’d call it community but that’s too prosaic a word. Soul is the idea. When you find a group of people who want to spend 20 hours a week sitting on a hard metal bleacher watching kids learn to play baseball, people who leap up from their seats and cheer, holler, shake the fence when an awkward lumpy kid who doesn’t have friends at school and has a difficult relationship with his parents and has never been an athlete and can’t catch and throw and always steps out suddenly cracks one to the outfield, the ball is flying, flying over the outfielder’s head—the kid is jogging the bases with a bewildered look on his face while the dugout chants his name, while parents are in the air, hugging, hearts bleeding for this kid who against all odds just became his highest self at the moment the team needed it most—the glory, glory—of this moment. This moment, these people are your soul.

The lumpy kid jogging the bases is your soul.

Watch him closely.

In her recent bestseller The Night We Lost Him which spent months on the New York Times Bestseller List, Laura Dave writes a long inscription. It’s her acknowledgement section and there are a lot of people to acknowledge. She is after all the #1 bestselling author of The Last Thing He Told Me, Eight Hundred Grapes and other novels. Her books have been published in 38 languages and have been chosen by Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club, Best of Amazon, Best of Apple Books. The Last Thing He Told Me is a series on Apple TV+. She is the co-creator. Jennifer Garner stars. Her husband, Josh Singer, is a screenwriter best known for The Post and Spotlight and Maestro. He won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Spotlight. Laura and her husband are a power couple. They attend awards parties. They have projects flying in the door and window. They get paid millions to lift the pen. There are a lot of things Laura could be grateful for. Lots of things could satiate her soul. What does she write in her acknowledgements section of her bestseller? I underlined it when I saw it:

Jacob, my favorite boy…

…nothing in this world makes me happier than watching you play baseball.

Laura is a Santa Monica resident and her son Jacob, 8, is an excellent shortstop. He plays for Pacific Palisades Baseball Association. His team the Chicago Cubs faced my sons’ team the St. Louis Cardinals in a second-round playoff game last spring. It was an epic battle. Late in the game we found ourselves down by four runs. Cardinals sat hunched on the bench. Ready to give up. Out of nowhere we rallied. Went on a streak. We tied up the game, 10-10, to go into extra innings. You can imagine our cheering section. I’ll insert now, selfishly, that of the ten PPBA teams we’ve been a part of we’ve never made it to the World Series. This was our chance and how glorious it would be to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Top of the 7th inning, Cubs score two runs. We’re down 12-10 but our best batters are going to get their chance. Our nine hitter grounds out to shortstop. One out. Our leadoff hitter Jack steps up. Singles. My son, Grey, hits a ball to left field. E Jackson singles on a fly ball to right field. “BASES LOA—DED!” kids in the dugout are stomping, shaking the fence. My son Sam is up. Hits a big ball to left field, sending one across the plate. Another coming. Score is 12-11. Grey is rounding third base and on his way home—this is it; this is the tying run—to open the door to the greatest moment of our collective lives—when the umpire stops the play. Sends Grey back to third base. Said he wasn’t halfway when the ball was controlled in the infield.

Silence.

Yelling. Coaches flying from the dugout, spit flying from their lips. How can you see the halfway line? You were turned the other direction? What is the halfway line? Point it out. Put your shoe in the dirt and show me where you think the halfway line is. The argument gets big and ugly and loud. A hush falls over the stands. The commissioner of the league is nearby. He wanders over to give the word of God. We’re afraid to breathe. Our entire life, our destiny was wrapped up in the outcome. The call stands. 12-11. Cardinals are down by a run, but it’s okay. We have bases loaded. Only one out. Kid named Ryan steps to the plate. He hits a pop fly to shortstop. Our runner on 2nd doesn’t tag up. Quick double play.

Silence again. Death that soon?

The outcome of course is that we watched Jacob’s team advance to the World Series. Laura Dave turned into a pile of nerves and Josh paced near the dugout and then wandered further, maybe the parking lot, too anxious to watch his son. We rooted for Jacob and the Chicago Cubs because we’d almost beaten them. The 2024 Pinto Cardinals were almost a World Series team last year.

Almost…

Glory….

That’s the promise baseball makes. The cycles of hope and depression are regular. They are communal. We are guaranteed the right to shout at the top of our lungs, sing and weep, stomp the metal bleachers when our epic journey almost plays out. We are met by death. Death again. One more out. Birth! One moment we’ve never felt better. The next we’re sure we’ve never felt worse.

Entire lives lived inside a season.

Like when my daughter Eloise’s team, the Bronco Tigers, went 13-5 in the regular season under the direction of the two greatest PPBA coaches there are. Ollie Dunn and Eric Foster. This is 12-year-old baseball; by this age in Southern California the players are good. The top players have played travel baseball for years, in addition to rec league and summer league. It’s year-round. Top players are two years away from being scouted by college coaches. In 8th grade it happens here. A 13-5 regular season record isn’t easy to achieve. There are many, many schools in Pacific Palisades. Their spring breaks do not coincide. There’s a period from mid- March to early April when at any given time, you have no idea what your roster is going to look like. Your entire bullpen could be at Disneyland. Yet, the show must go on. Two games a week. You put people on the mound who have never pitched before. Your infield looks shaky. You pull players up from Mustang to play outfield. No one knows their names or if they can catch. The 2024 Bronco Detroit Tigers managed this period beautifully. We didn’t drop a single game. We had two girls on that team (anomaly) and my daughter Eloise who bats 8th or 9th went through a long dry spell. Her teammates never stopped cheering. They stood in the dugout, yelling her nickname “Tweezer” every time she stepped into the batting box. They almost toppled her one day when she caught a big hit to left field. Their winning record, a thing of beauty, doesn’t begin to describe the chemistry of this team. How much fun they had. Their coaches. The coaching style. Dignity. Excellence. Humility. Sheer athleticism on full display.

Playoffs approach.

The phoenix will rise on the wings of this team…

Coach sends out the e-mail on Sunday May 5th.

Hi team,

Great effort yesterday. Full team win and…. we secured the number 1 seed in the playoffs!!! Kids deserve a big pat on the back. Historically the number 1 seed has struggled, mostly because of lofty expectations. let’s all do our part in reminding the kids that we lost to some teams that are waaaaaaaaay behind us in the standings. Seeding doesn’t matter!!!!

Upcoming we have practice today 6-7:30ish on field 1. Please try to be there!

Final game is on Tuesday at 4:30 on field 2 vs the orioles. Bp on Wednesday at 6:30………we don’t know who are playing in the playoffs but we know that our first game will Saturday may 11 at 2 pm. Put it in the calendar

ROAR

-donuts

Tuesday at 4:30 pm on May 7th we make quick work of the Baltimore Orioles. We win 7-3 and barely watch the game. We’re on Amazon buying Detroit Tigers balloons and banners and picnic ware and cup holders and cloth flags and cowbells and glitter decals for the face and arm. Flea bitten Detroit Tigers sweatshirt from a thrift store in Venice. Everything we need for a playoff run.

Next e-mail from coach on Sunday May 8th:

Hey tigers,

Great win last night! Awesome way to wrap up the reg season. We play the same team (orioles) on Saturday in the playoffs. Was a hard fought game yesterday and I anticipate the same for Saturday.

The only thing that changes in the playoffs is there are no substitution rules other than a player cannot sit two innings in a row. The defensive rotations will be tighter.

We have bp tonite at 6:30.

ROAR!!!!  

-donuts

Another e-mail on Mother’s Day.

Hi team,

Quick update. We play tomorrow on field 2 at 2 pm, we are the home team so we are responsible for scoreboard and GameChanger. Please have them there by 1 pm near the cages.

If we win will play on Tuesday if we lose we will play on Thursday. In either case we will have practice on Sunday like normal, 6-7:30 even tho its mothers day. None of you guys are my mom;) Given where we are in the season I think it’s important to get some work in but also I completely understand if people can’t make it. No need to let me know but I’ll be there at 6 like normal and we will go from there.

The playoffs can sometimes have a more intense feel, depending on the game and who shows up in the stands etc…. its our job to try to keep everything normal. Let’s all do our best to keep the pressure off—parents have been really good at this all season let’s keep it up. I have been only so so at it, I’ll be better I promise!!!

Let’s enjoy this playoff run!

ROAR!

-donuts

Saturday approaches. We’re on our lucky field. Field 2. It’s the furthest walk from the parking lot but it gives us time to control our excitement. Breathe. There’s nothing better than being a powerhouse team headed into the part of the season where life takes on new meaning. Set up the folding chair. Regular spot. Don’t do anything differently today; don’t pierce the magic bubble. Detroit Tigers are looking good, relaxed, ready to play. Why shouldn’t they be? Detroit Tigers crushed the Orioles just four days earlier. Our players are the best, most athletic in the league. They have that je ne sais quoi; you can see it in the way they dig into the batter’s box, get the wistful look in the eye.

Game begins. We score a run in the first inning. They score a run in the second inning. We work our lead up to 5-1 at exactly the right time, with only one inning left to play. Victory in the bag. Right? Top of the 6th inning. Feeling good. One of our ace pitchers is on the mound. Orioles batter grounds out to pitcher. Easy out at first. Next batter up. Walk. Hit by pitch. Walk. Somewhere in there we pick off a guy at 2nd. As Roger Angell, the great baseball writer wrote, “This is how I describe baseball. Nothing happens. Nothing happens. Nothing happens. Then all hell breaks loose….”[2]

Well. A little bit of hell is breaking loose. Not a lot of hell. Just a little. Pitcher is sweating through his neck gator. Coaches are up and out, discussing. They decide on a pitching change. New pitcher. The new pitcher’s mom circles the dugout. Doesn’t like the decision. In a voice we can all hear, “my son is not a closer.” Coaches demur. Coach Foster goes back to sitting on the overturned white bucket where he always sits. Detroit fans inch forward in the chair. We like this pitcher. He’ll be fine. He’s warming up and looks sharp. Come on. We need one more out. We’re ahead by 4 runs. Let’s go.

Walk. Walk. Score is now 5-2. Single. Score is now 5-3. Single. Score is now 5-4. Air is in short supply. This part of the game I can barely watch. We need to close it out here. We’re still alive! Just one more out!!!! Orioles batter at the plate. Get this guy out!!!! A grandparent nearby looks like his pacemaker is about to explode.

Ball one. Ball two. Ball three. In play.

Something happens which I black out for; batter makes contact. I hear the ping of the baseball on the aluminum bat. Not a great hit. Easy grounder. Second baseman scoops it up and instead of throwing it to first base sends it to Homeplate? Catcher has the ball. I swear he has the ball and the play is over. For reasons we’ll never know he chucks it as hard as he can over the first baseman’s head and the runners are moving. Two runs come across the plate. Two runs driven in on that pathetic hit. Orioles Mardi Gras party. What the hell did I just watch? Did that just happen? To say we’re still alive (half an inning left to play) is to omit the truth. Oxygen is gone. 12-year-olds are in shock. A player on our team is screaming at the top of his lungs at his dad. Bottom of batting order. Ground out. Ground out. My daughter Eloise is at the plate. I keep thinking: this horror movie is going to end on her? My daughter is going to be the closing image of defeat? In surreal fashion, Eloise gets a hit. She singles to the third baseman. She looks confused when she gets to first. Astride the plate. One last chance. Batter hits up a pop-up to the pitcher. Game over.

The official recap:

“PPBA 2024 Bronco Tigers Drop Game to PPBA 2024 Bronco Orioles After Late Score. Saturday’s game was a heartbreaker for Bronco Tigers, as they lost the lead late in a 6-5 defeat. Bronco Tigers lost despite outhitting the Orioles 10 to 6.…”

We are heartbroken, yes. In shock, yes. But this is double elimination. We have another path forward (winners go to the winner’s bracket, losers to the loser’s bracket. It’s harder to get to Narnia that way but yes, we can still get there. Mindset will be everything.

What the coaches say here, matters.

Saturday May 11th, 10:55 pm.

Tigers family,

What a tough loss. After a few hours of reflection….I still can’t believe what happened… im kidding. Sometimes a series of unfortunate events unravels in the worst way possible. I have been second guessing my decisions all night. As of this moment I have moved on and I am actually very excited to see how we all respond. I have also decided that the winners bracket is boring and we should all be looking forward to eliminating some teams next week! Happy Mothers day to Currie and all the awesome moms on this team. Practice tomorrow.

-donuts

Parents reply all:

Amen. ;)

Amen!

Beautifully said. Resilience in the face of unfortunate events. Shit Happens. Get over it. 

The fanbase has recovered. Have the players recovered?

Between Wednesday and Saturday, I keep thinking about Jack Nicklaus. Jack Nicklaus “Golden Bear” was one of the greatest professional golfers of all time. He won 117 professional tournaments in his career. What was his secret? Bob Rotella writes about in the book, Putting Out Of Your Mind.

Jack was speaking at an event at which he said, “I have never three-putted, or missed from inside five feet, on the final hole of a tournament.”

At question time a guy in the audience took Jack to task. He said that he was watching a recent tournament and that Jack Nicklaus missed a three-foot putt on the last hole.

Jack replied “Sir, you’re wrong. I have never three-putted, or missed from inside five feet, on the final hole of a tournament.”

The audience member offered to send him a video tape.

“No need to send me anything sir. I was there. I have never three-putted, or missed from inside five feet on the final green of a tournament.”

Of course, that was Jack Nicklaus’ secret. He was good at getting over his mistakes. So good in fact, that he refused to even remember them.

Wednesday comes. I wonder whether to slap a picture of Jack Nicklaus on the Detroit Tigers banner. Baseball is nothing if not resurrection.

Clean spirit.

Let’s do this…

Air feels funny. Sunshine, sinister. First pitch is thrown out. Game begins. Red Sox score a run in the first inning. We score two runs. Okay. Here we go. We’re doing this. Next inning. Red Sox score five quick runs; our star pitcher looks dazed. Infielders look like they stuck their hands in an electrical socket. Frayed, slightly emotional. Still standing. Better than still standing. We score three runs in the third inning, so we’re right there. This is a close game. Detroit Tigers are down by only one run to the Red Sox, 6-5, and we have baseball left to play! Three innings to play. Plenty of time!

Right then, if you walked by the field and looked at the Detroit Tigers, you’d think you were watching a team who was losing 15-0. What got into these kids? No one knows. The ghost of meltdown lurking. Delayed frustration from Saturday. That pesky voice of doubt.

But today is different! Come on. We can easily win this game!

The coaches can’t hide their frustration. Tension in their voices. 

Fans are loyal. We keep yelling hard. You’re so close, right there! Despite our loud, hopeless cheering, the attitudes get worse. The Detroit Tigers start acting like angry, frustrated losers when anything doesn’t go their way. Snarling. Kicking dirt. Bitter and annoyed. Blowing up at the umpire on every call. One our pitchers grows red patches on his cheeks. Pouring hot tears. Refuses to pitch anymore. Lurches off to the dugout. Mound is empty. His dad forces him back to the mound. Car crash beginning. Car crash right here in motion. Buy your tickets to watch the Detroit Tigers end their season in public embarrassment, shame.

The official recap doesn’t do it justice:

“Strong Hitting Not Enough As 2024 Bronco Tigers Falls to Bronco Red Sox.”

It should read:

“Strong Hitting Not Enough As 2024 Bronco Tigers become a Greek Tragedy.”

During the last inning, I looked at my daughter, Eloise. She was inside the dugout looking to the outfield. For Eloise, it would be the last playoff game she’d ever play. The last baseball game she’d ever play.

I wondered what she thought.

Her teammates left the field crying. Several parents walked off because they were too sad to see their kids (and one coach) in tears. The coaches waved the rest of us over to join the post-game huddle. Usually, the post-game huddle is reserved for the players. Tonight, we all gathered in the outfield under a darkening sky. Listened to the other team celebrating in the distance. As the coaches spoke, something dawned on me.

The luck of it—

The luck of being part of it—

We received an e-mail late that night titled “Final Final.”

Hello tigers,

One last note to wrap up the season… one of the strangest years I can remember. Its not how you start its how you finish, well im flipping that expression upside down. I have decided it is fact how you start that matters!:)

I was making a drink after our loss on Thursday, in a bit of a funk and Marlon out of nowhere said “that’s the most fun I have ever had playing ppba.” I dropped my glass in the sink, a bit in shock. I had no idea. Which kind of threw me, how did I not know that? I was really relieved to hear it and I hope it rings true for the entire team. Despite the disappointing playoff run the team was a really fun group of kids and coaches who all felt very comfortable with each other. Credit to everyone involved!!!! Many thanks for all the support.

End of season notes

{List of kids who made 12u and 11u all star team}

Lastly thank you for all the generous coaches gifts. It was my pleasure to be on the field with the kids all spring. Hope to see all of you around the park in the years to come.

ROAR!

-donuts

When Roger Angell told a fellow journalist after the Mets lost to the Yankees in the 2000 Subway World Series, “We should check in on the losers. The story’s in there too,” he was drawing our attention to the luck of it—

The sheer luck of being part of the 2024 Bronco Tigers—

The memory of the darkening sky. The coaches. The kids. Smiling through tears…

The memories live.

On this day as the baseball fields burn, like Laura Dave, I have acknowledgements:

Here are my acknowledgements.

Thank you, Eloise. Thank you, Ollie and Eric. I still have the game ball you gave her after she caught that pop fly in left field. After the team almost toppled her to the ground. It’s on the bookshelf near the desk where I write, and I treat it as my own. It is my own. If you knew what the moments mean to me. If you only knew.

And to Sam and Grey, my twins. Not Minnesota Twins but real twins. Fraternal twins. Pinto Red Sox and Shetland Pirates the first year, Pinto Orioles the second, Pinto Cardinals last year, then Mustang Orioles. All the June and July tournaments. Simi Valley and Agoura Hills and Valencia where it’s 105 degrees with no breeze and only the movie theatre to take shelter in between games. Encino ballpark. The ballpark next to the avocado fields where we won District Sectionals, and I have pictures of your team getting their first pennant. You both wore the Palisades jersey and star-spangled socks well. Sam, you had a black eye that day from being hit in the cheek with a baseball. Grey, you made the number one sign with your hand. You are twins with different everything, different hair color, different eye color, different height and gait. Different running speed and throwing speed. Different attitudes, different tolerance for mistakes. You play different positions. Sometimes you’re on opposite ends of the batting order. You have different ways of listening to your coaches. Different friendships with your teammates. Different aspects of the game that light you up. Different sorrows. Different habits. Different senses of humor. Different ways of seeing yourself in the world. And yet, the dugout is where you sit together.

10:22 am on Thursday January 9th something is happening—amidst the flames—I can’t name. It’s down there too deep. I guard it with everything.

RIP Pacific Palisades Baseball Association. 

Until we meet again.

---

[1] From Roger Angell’s New Yorker obituary: “He was not only the greatest of baseball writers; he had also lived long enough to see Babe Ruth, of the Yankees, at one end of his life and Shohei Ohtani, of the Angels, at the other.”
[2] Angell painted exquisite verbal pictures of players in action. He compared the unique high-kicking delivery of a great pitcher, Juan Marichal of the San Francisco Giants, to “some enormous and highly dangerous farm implement”.

Hell Angeles - Chapter 6

January 9th

Day three. I don’t know when grief comes because fear comes first. Fear comes in waves, so many it’s hard to count. There’s the wildfire. There’s the smoke obliterating the sky over Los Angeles making the city unlivable. There are new fires erupting along mountain ridges high in the Hollywood Hills, far away in the Valley, spreading down the canyons. Both edges of the Pacific Palisades fire, east and west, are raging out of control. Altadena is a lava pit. The blood-dimmed tide is loosed. The death count started low, artificially low, and keeps climbing. The elderly are getting cremated in their living rooms. The first responders, men and women in uniforms, elected officials who appear on TV look bewildered. They blink slowly. As if judgment day has appeared in the side mirror and they might as well slow down the car. Let it catch up. There’s nowhere to go.

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity[1]

We will learn about good and evil today. Of the seven deadly sins, pride greed wrath envy lust gluttony sloth—it is lust we will see on display. Lust is what pushes the vandal, the arsonist, the looter off his couch and into your yard. Lust for chaos. Lust to grab what is there and take it for better use. Covet it. Destroy it. Sell it off the back of a truck for cash to buy weapons and drugs and sex. The hope you carry like a shield, that everything will be okay, the system will hold, the worst actors won’t act on you—well, today is about drowning. The ceremony of innocence is drowned.

My worst fears manifest on Day Three.

I won’t ever have a home again. I don’t mean home in the physical sense—four walls, a ceiling, an oven and a mailbox. I mean home in the real sense. Home as in, where one feels okay. Home as in, the place one feels defended.

I’m a courageous person who wakes up at 5:00 am on Thursday January 9th crippled by fear. The fear is cosmic, so big I can’t do anything but study its outlines. I’ve felt this fear before. I can feel fear’s tentacles all over my body. Is it a childhood fear? Or is it because I have children I need to defend. My son Grey is asthmatic. He has terrible lungs. He travels with an inhaler and nebulizer and most nights he falls asleep coughing. This heavy smoke over Los Angeles has pushed us to evacuate further. Colorado. I wake up in a strange bed on Day Three and try to figure out how I got here. There’s the drone of my noise machine. My husband is still sleeping. He took a melatonin and then collapsed after a 16-hour-drive. His clothes reek of smoke (from reentering the evacuation zone yesterday) and are lying in a ball on the cold wood floor.

The realizations come slowly at the waking hour, but they come. The kids are asleep. There is no school today, tomorrow, or for the foreseeable future. We are 900 miles away and will watch the flames on TV until further notice. There is powerless to this situation. But there has been powerlessness from the start. Fear. Powerlessness. The curtains are thin, made of cheap linen. Through them I can see mountains covered by snow and ice, not fire.

I barely slept.

I check to see if my house stands.

It’s no use. The security app on my phone won’t refresh. Because there’s no power anywhere west of the 405 freeway. I can’t get a live feed from our doorbell camera. Maybe I never will again. I’m getting notifications that the back-up battery on our alarm system is low. On the brink.

Morning.

Jeannie writes to us at 5:20 am.

Does anyone know if US Bank on the corner of Sunset & Swarthmore is still standing? Pic would be great.

Another day of crisis. Shower. Brush teeth. Do hair. Put on real pants. Try not to wake anyone. Carry the phone upstairs to the first floor of the rental condo, start opening and shutting empty cabinets in the kitchen, no breakfast cereal, no packaged bagels, no milk, no cut fruit—nothing for anyone to eat. Piled high by the door are duffle bags of filthy laundry. A Dorito’s chip bag from the car ride spills onto an abandoned iPad. Someone wore flip flops to Colorado. In January. Who made this decision? To evacuate here. Nothing for anyone to do. I don’t want to be here. The kids will be at each other’s throats before breakfast (which we don’t have) on the first day. The thousand-pound anchor called parenting-through-Covid PTSD is pulling me into a depression spiral before I’ve turned on the coffee machine.

Olga writes:

I believe US Bank survived

Judi writes:

I saw a video also that showed Caruso’s village and then the intersection of Sunset and Swarthmore and it looked as if us bank was still intact as the camera swiped past.

Kambiz writes:

I am up and ready to help whoever needs it

(He will regret making this offer)

Jeannie is very connected to US Bank:

We know our home is gone. My family are original owners & although material, we lost invaluable multigenerational items. We have the video Heather took going up our street. But, if you’re able to take pics looking straight at 1110 Galloway & surrounding homes of those I grew up with or babysat their kids, I’d appreciate (1106, 1110, 1111 & 1116 Galloway and 1111 Harzell). Plus US Bank pic where all we have left may have survived. If it’s too big an ask, I totally understand.

Kambiz writes:

I will try.

The day has just begun. I sip my coffee and float back to the surface. I’m feeling better now. Caffeine helps until it doesn’t. I’m still in the helping part of the caffeine cycle. On my bookshelf in Pacific Palisades, I have a dog-eared copy of Pema Chodron’s When Things Fall Apart. I know the heart advice for difficult times. Move towards painful situations with friendliness and curiosity. Relax into the essential groundlessness of our situation. Discover truth and love in the midst of chaos. Mainline coffee.[2]

A.J. writes:

my god

What’s he responding to I wonder? I click on the video. It was taken yesterday late afternoon. It’s turning right from Sunset onto Bienveneda up to the first stop sign. Every house is aflame and some look bombed. Broken. Thrashed. Scaffolding bare, poking into the smoky atmosphere.

Kathy chimes in at 5:20 am.

Any news about the Huntington overnight?

Looking for info specifically about La Cumbre and Camarosa (mid-block on both streets).

Many people have seen Kambiz’s offer to help. They are coming forward without shame or fear, making requests. Leigh then Rebecca then Martin then Gretchen then Joanna and Debbie.

Hoping for some video of El Hito Circle, turning right at the stop sign instead of going straight

Does anyone have video going down palmera from northfield or a confirmation that 675 is gone?

Could you please send me Swarthmore/de Pauw as well. We are 15345 De Pauw.

Does anyone have any intel on the area highlighted in yellow? I saw that Muskingum north of sunset was doing alright. How about Alcima and El Medio?

Hi all, looking for info on Castellammare.

Specifically, looking for Tramonto Dr/Revello.

People want information even if it’s dire. They’re dying for information. Almost 72 hours into this uncertainly hell and the thing they can’t take anymore is the uncertainty. Uncertainty kills. Uncertainty eats the edges of your soul and keeps going. To just get confirmation that everything you own including your sock drawer and tax returns are incinerated in the fire, to just get confirmation of this is the goal. The medicine. At least then you know.

But people still don’t know....

We are looking for info about 16630 pequeno place, off Tellem off Lachman in Marquez knolls area.

There are also others on Tellem waiting to hear. Thanks in advance if possible and for all you are doing.

Desperation before dawn. These people didn’t get any sleep I realize. The chat thread was active the entire night. The only silence was between 1:09 am when Kevin asked to be added to the Bluffs group (parallel threads are running for each neighborhood) and 4:19 am when Kelly posted a heartbreak emoji in response to an LA Times video showing the kindergarten playground and auditorium survived at Marquez elementary school (she notes, that is no longer the case). 5:55 am, we circle back to cats. Cats again. Tawny is desperate as she writes to us.

I need to look for my cat. Any idea when they will let us in?

Kambiz writes:

Where do you live? I am planning to go there this morning

Tawny:

965 Chattanooga Ave. our house is gone but our cat was outside.

Kambiz:

That area was tough to get to yesterday, if I can get up there today, I will try and look.

Rebecca:

@Kambiz if you’re able to, we have not been able to get eyes on 626 Bienveneda and its neighboring homes (630, 620, 627).  

Kambiz:

Is that south of sunset

Rebecca:

Yes.

Kambiz:

I’ll try but I’ll be honest, it wasn’t good yesterday

It wasn’t good yesterday. No, it wasn’t good yesterday. A quick selection:

Can anyone tell me if 736 muskinghum 4 houses in from Sunset is on fire yet? According to app look like it’s getting ready to burn

TRIGGER WARNING – Alphabets in the hour

Horrifying

{Video of a house burning}

Is the house across the street still standing? That is my house

Status of Casa Gateway Complex at Palisades Drive and sunset? Has the whole place burned?

Tawny posts a picture of her cat, Sansa, peering from the footwell on the passenger side of a midsized sedan. No offense to Sansa (and Texas Longhorn fans) but she’s not an attractive color. Burnt orange, dark grey and white. Ragged. Shaggy. You imagine her to have cataracted eyes. Another picture comes of Sansa. In this one she is stretched sideways across a couch sleeping.

If anyone sees her (Sansa) just put her in your car and call me

Tawny adds her phone number which we don’t need. Because she’s writing from it.

Our home is in Marquez Knolls. Please get her if you see her and call me.

The next thing we know, a crew of professionals has air-brushed and groomed Sansa. In this next photo (it’s an official poster) Sansa is perched on a stone patio looking directly at the camera with dreamy blue sky and green trees waving in the backdrop. The cat looks perfect. This is the problem with Instagram. Everything looks better (*absurdly better) than it does in real life. And, I have a theory that the gap is getting wider. Restaurants, coffee shops, public places pets and people get filthier, more neglected, more decayed, as Instagram becomes the only measure. I’m sorry to say this, but Sansa doesn’t even look like herself in this photo. MISSING CAT: SANSA. Address and phone number repeated.

People who didn’t sleep are on their third cup of coffee or cocaine, firing off messages asking for help. With reckless abandon.

any word on 16581 via Floresta

Has anyone heard anything about upper Jacon way?

If you were able to see the corner of alcima and Las Lomas, please let me know.

could you provide any more video of De Pauw? You stop short of our house

Anyone with eyes on the Livorno loop area?

17000 block of Livorno, lower Marquez? We are 17047 Livorno. 2 story gold house, white trim, brown garage?

Anyone know anything about upper Michael lane?

Does anyone know if the condo building behind Gelson’s is still standing?

Where was the video of or pic of Hampden and Swarthmore?

Would you be able to go to 912 Kagawa St?

Still hoping for las Pulgas road and las Pulgas and place news

same

Could you go by 931 Jacon?

Could you check Las Lomas/Anoka and 16160 Anoka if you’re still over there?

Can someone check on 761 Lachman Lane?

732 Via de la Paz. The owner is abroad. I’m thinking it’s not good news but could someone please confirm?

If anyone can check my parents house I would be forever grateful 16611 Merivale Lane

Just off Lachman past Akron

Did any of those standing Hartzell homes happen to be my beloved 810 Hartzell? You sold us this wonderful home 25 years ago and I cannot stop crying.

1200 Tellem?

This is Sahel I am a spiritual advisor and healer and here for anyone struggling and needing some inner peace and guidance…. we all do I am sure. Pls keep praying and visualizing better days and believing we will all make through this together as Palisadeians.

Kambiz we are looking for info about 16630 pequeno place, off Tellem in Marquez knolls area.

There are also others on Tellem waiting to hear.

The chains of charity grow heavy. The few (like Kambiz) who put an offer to help into the chat are being bombarded by the needy. By 6:21 am on Thursday, Day Three of this apocalypse, 12,880 people or 56% of Pacific Palisades residents have had their single-family homes, condominiums, apartment units, duplexes and mobile homes destroyed by fire.[3] Finally, Kambiz asks for help.

If anyone wants to be admin on this chat, send me a message.

The word “looter” appears in the early hours of Thursday.

Victoria writes:

My concern are looters. Am I being unreasonable?

Omar, who must have missed yesterday’s bike spree writes:

I don’t think it’s easy to get up there and what can you see honestly in ruble.

Nima has a different answer:

Totally reasonable, if you have things to be looted.

Chantal-Price writes:

Not unreasonable. Our home was broken into. Police surprisingly came. Looters.

Nima adds:

If your home is still standing, I suggest renting a UHaul and gathering as many belongings as you can.

Nima’s suggestion is interesting. If you’re lucky enough to have a house that’s still standing in Pacific Palisades, rent a U Haul and take out all your stuff. Protect it from looters. The suggestion makes total sense except that a) there’s a 23,000-acre fire raging and there’s no safe way to breathe b) while it’s easy to get in on a bike it’s not easy to get in with a U Haul and dollies and strap a weight belt on and spread plastic covering on your floors so the furniture doesn’t scratch and c) we paid the state of California 143 billion in personal income taxes last year hoping it wouldn’t come to this.[4] For the love of god. Has it come to this? As if moving isn’t stressful under normal conditions? Now we’re moving furniture and clothes and beds out of our homes while a wildfire tears down our street? As windows explode? We need to remove the contents of our home, so looters and arsonists won’t carry them off in fake firetrucks? We’ll get to that in a minute.

My friend Jessica is calling. She has breached the police barricade for the third time in three days. Bravo. These are the moments in life when you realize why you liked certain people in the first place. Her husband issued threats, forbid her from doing this. She did it anyway. PS: this is why divorce rates spike in the years following a wildfire.[5] Jessica sends me a picture of herself. She is in front of her house in the Huntington, wearing a lot of protective gear. A gas mask, WWI-style, plus lab goggles and a red-brimmed trucker hat. She wears the same expression as Walter White in the pilot episode of Breaking Bad. Walter White wore a gas mask too, goggles and a pair of dirty underwear while the police and FBI chased him through the New Mexico desert. In the opening minutes of the award-winning drama (maybe the best TV show of all time) he staggers out from his RV slash methamphetamine cooking lab which he has harpooned in a ditch. He can’t go further, and the cops are closing in. He records last words. “My name is Walter Hartwell White. I live at 308 Negra Arroyo Lane, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87104. To all law enforcement entitles, this is not an admission of guilt. I am speaking to my family now.”

I’m thinking, maybe Jessica would do well to record a few words to her family. Instead, she writes to me:

I need a valium

Later we talk and she tells me she saw looters. “Where did you see looters?” I ask anxiously. She drove down Corona Del Mar on her way out of the Huntington. A very nice street which in normal times has tons of security. No security today. Guys jumping over the fences. Going right into the homes, wearing masks. Filling duffel bags. “You’re sure they were looters?” It’s a stupid question to ask. Of course they were looters. It’s everywhere in the chat threads now. Like Chantal-Price said:

Our home was broken into…. Looters.

S writes:

Many looters unfortunately are getting in but many are getting arrested too…… over 50 police units on pch on wait for that and other security purposes…….I stopped and talked to them and they assured me they have our community s back and areon top of looters…… our cul de sac got looted and we called them and arrests were made

Victoria:

Police are stopping looters on SM. Just saw it.

Open-mouth emoji added by two people.

Sam writes:

Omg, thank you for posting. what streets?

S:

Maybe it’s best bc looters for everywhere yesterday when we hiked our way in after 1 hour walk from santa monica and another 40 minutes hike through bunt hills…not recommended

Many homes still standing are now destroyed on the inside by looters

Joel has information:

400 officers currently assigned to Palisades Fire.

Looters are being arrested, 7 recently, including two posing as firefighters.

Here’s a new fear. One I didn’t anticipate. Looters dressed as firemen. I start making a file of arrests and investigations. Only way to deal with this. Track it like you’d track the weather before a storm, the polls before an election. Team Germany and England and Cameroon and United States and Costa Rica and Spain and Italy before the World Cup. Track it. Study it. Pick it apart. Get curious. Put your fear aside.

The fear is still there.

Home invasions, looting, arson, the collapse of law and order; this landscape scares me. It scares me more than fire. To wit, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, Major Crimes Bureau takes into custody a suspect named Ivan Cedric Reed, 34, who broke into 18343 Clifftop Way around 5 p.m. He was caught wearing what looks like a child’s Halloween “firefighter” costume. Yellow cloth jacket. Black vest with a ballpoint pen attached and an American flag badge. The suspect is charged with impersonating a firefighter, receiving stolen property (odd verbiage), unlawful use of a badge and unauthorized entry of a closed disaster area. “Reed is accused of wearing a yellow firefighter jacket and having a first responders’ radio in a mandatory evacuation area,” LA District Attorney Nathan Hochman announced. “The defendant allegedly told deputies he was a firefighter.”

Later, other people are charged with arson in connection with fires set in South Gate, Huntington Park, Los Angeles, Hawthorne and Compton. Luis Felipe Gudino, 28, is charged with one count of felony arson during a state of emergency for allegedly igniting a coach at the rear of an apartment building in South Gate. The fire spread from the flaming couch to a utility pole, which charred the exterior of the apartment building. Richard Alex Peterson, 36, is charged with one count of felony arson for allegedly dragging a Christmas tree onto the sidewalk in front of a motel in South Gate and igniting the tree, which burned and burned well. Omar Lopez, 35, is charged with two counts of felony arson for allegedly lighting a dried Christmas tree on fire that was on the sidewalk in front an apartment building at 6915 Templeton Street in Huntington Park. What is it with lighting Christmas trees on fire?

Manuel Rodriguez, 35, is charged with one felony count of arson for setting a fire inside a trash bin behind Donald Bruce Kaufman Brentwood Branch Library. Note. I spend a lot of time at this library. It’s a grimy place that attracts loose ends. Travis Glodt, 34, is charged with three counts of felony arson for using a lighter to set fire to a Hawthorne city water shut off valve and vegetation at 11601 Hawthorne Blvd., gathering up trash against the wall and front door at 11939 Hawthorne Blvd., and igniting it, then lighting bushes on fire next to a cement post at a store at 11983 Hawthorne Blvd. According to the District Attorney’s office, whose phones are ringing off the hook. They’re busy. 

Leopoldo Reveles, 49, is charged with two counts felony arson for using a blow torch to light trash on fire next to the train tracks at Carlin Avenue and Alameda Street in Compton, causing a fire that damaged a fire hydrant. I’d say the fire hydrant is a win. The train tracks on fire would have been worse.

Joshua Love, 29, is accused of attempting to burglarize an apartment complex at 416 San Vicente in Santa Monica. He is charged with one felony count each of looting during an emergency or evacuation, attempted second-degree burglary, and unauthorized entry of closed disaster area; along with one misdemeanor count each of possession of burglary tools; interference at the scene of the emergency, misdemeanor trespass by entering and occupying and possession of an injection/ingestion device in case 25ARCF00081. There’s more to this story I’m guessing, but I’m not going to call the DA’s office. Like I said, they’re busy.

Nathan Hochman gets on TV and makes an an example of an individual charged with stealing $200,000 worth of property from a home in Mandeville Canyon. Another looter stole an Emmy Award from someone’s evacuated home in Altadena. “To anyone who believes they can use this disaster as a cover for criminal activity, let this be your warning: You will be caught, and you will be held accountable. The citizens of this county deserve safety and justice, especially in the wake of such unprecedented devastation, and I will not rest until we achieve both.”

Hochman won’t be resting for a while.

Professional “Scam artists” are now appearing. Convicted arsonists get caught driving a fake firetruck into the Pacific Palisades fire. Dustin Nehl, 31, and his wife, 44-year-old Jennifer Nehl (interesting age gap) are arrested on suspicion of impersonating firefighters and unauthorized entry of an evacuation zone. For background: in 2017 the Oregonian was sentenced to five years in prison for a five-year arson spree. Free at last, Dustin Nehl and his older sidekick, Jennifer, were spotted by an LAPD patrol unit which contacted the LASD that they had observed a fire truck that did not appear to be legitimate. What could tip them off? Maybe the ridiculousness of the firetruck. Both suspects were wearing turnout gear and told authorities that they were volunteer firefighters for a nonexistent department “Roaring River Fire Department” in Oregon. The words were written across the front of a decommissioned firetruck once owned by the state of California. Another joke on California taxpayers. 

The Nehls were wearing CAL-Fire t-shirts under their turnout gear. They were both wearing helmets. They both carried radios tuned into official channels. That’s frightening.

Los Angeles Magazine tells us Nehl’s five-year prison sentence was followed by 3-years’ post-prison supervision which appears not to have worked. Jennifer gave birth to a baby boy named Makenna last November. It was a complicated birth that led a friend of the couple to set up a GoFundMe page to raise money for the couple’s travel to a Portland ICU unit. The baby later died, according to Dustin Nehl’s YouTube channel. By convincing people they were firefighters, the Nehls acquired a free hotel room on their way into Pacific Palisades, a fire official confirmed.

Fati writes:

When were the looters arrested ? Last 24 hours?

Now the inevitable. Confusion about who is good. Who is evil. Who is firefighter. Who is a looter, thief, arsonist.

Joel has information:

Firefighters in Palisades are in “seek and destroy” mode, looking for hotspots and putting them out before the day heats up and the Santa Ana wind returns.

They are entering private yards by hopping the gates.

Hence the danger of confusion with looters who dress as firefighters.

Someone comments:

Wow. People just really suck re: looters in firefighter ‘costumes’

Ben:

The national guard should get special authorization to deal with looters

Joel has information:

L.A. County D.A. Nathan Hochman just told me that there have been more arrests of would-be-looters in Altadena than Palisades. However there is a concern that looting has been underreported because most security cameras aren’t working (no electricity). People may discover thefts when they return home.

What a comforting thought.

People may discover thefts when they return home.

That night at 8:33 pm our house alarm goes off. My phone is exploding with notifications that the kitchen door has been breached. I don’t know if the window is smashed or it’s just the door that’s been opened. It could be wind of course, or the house is on fire. Both these conditions are probable, but there’s been so much looting these past twelve hours that my mind goes to looting. Not fire. This puts me into a panic spiral.

I call the security company, Gates Security, who patrols our neighborhood. Our homeowners’ association hired Gates Security in 2024 to deal with the string of home invasions that plagued our area the preceding two years. It was rampant. The home invasions went up and down the street, and no one from LAPD cared. If they cared, they had no resources to send our way (it’s awe-inspiring what the State of California gets away with). The people coordinating the attacks took notice that there was no law enforcement. The home invasions picked up. It didn’t matter if you had security camera footage, front and side facial pictures, fingerprints, if you managed to rope the guy in your arms and carry him into the police station. Gascon’s DA was like the confession box at a Catholic Church. Doesn’t matter what you did. Say the rosary. We forgive you. No detention. No prosecution. Finally, our neighbors came around begging us to throw $10,000 into the pot so we could get security. Some balked. Some said they’d spend ten times that amount if it meant they could sleep at night. Gates Security was our answer.

Gates Security picks up the phone tonight. The operator listens to my distress. She sounds bored. She is unhelpful. Now I remember that I wanted our homeowners’ association to hire Nastec Security. They are a Calabasas-based company whose owner is Israeli and served in the military. That sounds like who you would want to patrol your home. I call the owner. Ben. He picks up my call immediately. We start talking. I get on well with people who have spent their lives dealing with seedy people. I have no idea why. We talk for a long time and my panic spikes. Ben tells me I should be panicked. He’s never seen chaos like this (and he’s seen a lot). For instance, his guys, private security patrolmen, haven’t left their clients’ homes in 72 hours. They had to stay through the fires, sleeping in garages and on couches (with permission) to fend off looters, thieves, burglars, intruders. Ben tells me it’s the wild west out there. He would love to help me, but he can’t get any of his guys north of Sunset. His guys are south of Sunset. A few are in the Huntington, holding their ground. He issues advice, “Call 911 and keep calling them.”

Instead of calling 911, I try Gates Security again.

I can see it on my call log. 8:45 pm.

Finally, with no other choice, I call 911. When was the last time I called 911? Why does it feel familiar. Recent. I can’t remember. My hands are shaking. I’m too panicked. Now it’s coming to me. My mom’s friend passed out in her arms last July from an opioid overdose; my mom called me instead of calling 911. She was too distraught to make the call herself. She was in her friend’s bedroom and couldn’t remember the address. After a few minutes I was able to calm her down, convince her to call 911 so they could trace her location. She was sobbing as she hung up. I guess I didn’t call 911 then. But now I’m calling….

I’m on hold….

911 picks up after a disastrously long time. Five minutes. Ten minutes? The operator runs through her script and records details. She doesn’t like anything I have to say. She grows surly. Can I describe the men coming through the kitchen door? No. I can’t. She needs an exact description of their faces. What color clothes they’re wearing. I explain that my alarm is blasting, I have no electricity, I’m getting notifications the kitchen door was breached, and could someone just drive 1,000 feet up the road (there are a dozen patrol cars parked on Sunset) and look to see if the house is on fire or being burglarized? No. They don’t do that. She isn’t sympathetic. I beg her. Did you hear that our town is on fire? Houses up and down our street are being looted? Looters getting arrested? While houses burn? Looting. Burning. Is any of this landing? She is not holding space for me. Not part of the California yoga community. This woman on the phone could run Stalin’s campaign. In her last life she dragged peasants across the frozen tundra into the Siberian Gulag and tied them to posts. Made them carry blocks of ice from one side of the lake to the other. Starved them. Whipped them. I ask her if she saw Nathan Hochman on TV promising Los Angeles citizens that looters and arsonists will be arrested and prosecuted to the full extent. I’m a Los Angeles Citizen. Please, help me, please…

911 operator hangs up. Or I hang up.

Our friendship is cut short. I’m in a full sweat. There’s a 99% chance (in my head) that my home is being burglarized while it burns. This is the all-is-lost-moment. We’ve reached it and there’s nothing I can do. No one can help. Whatever the hero was supposed to do in this moment doesn’t happen. Hero is defeated. Flames are raging on the TV; a reporter is standing on a shoulder above the 405 freeway, telling us that the fire is approaching Brentwood from the back of Mandeville Canyon. Fresh resources are being deployed. Massive airplanes are crossing back and forth shooting pink flame retardant down. There are dozens, maybe hundreds of firetrucks barreling up the fire roads. Where the hell were these planes on day one? Or day two? Just one of those planes could have extinguished the fire that started near 1190 Piedra Morada Drive mid-morning on January 7th. Why did they wait until now to pull out all the resources?

Anger. Resent. Fear and powerlessness followed by anger.

Grief is forming like a skim over the surface but it’s not there yet. It’s not there yet. I won’t sleep tonight. I’m quaking, raging, trying to find something concrete to hang onto. This is a waking nightmare from which I can’t get free. A bad acid trip. I’m free-falling in the expectation that someone will call tomorrow to say the house is lost. Good news. Your Italian wedding plates and 40th birthday gold watch (inscription rubbed out) are nicely photographed. Ready and available, listed for a good price on eBay. Repurchase opportunity. 60 cents on the dollar.

Late Thursday night my friend Allison texts me. Her house is on Mandeville; the fire is raging her direction. I ask her where she is. She’s on a plane. She writes:

I am eating the ice cream sundae now on the plane. First time in my life.

---

[1] The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats.
[2] The coffee is my addition to Pema Chodron’s advice.
[3] LA Times February 21st, 2025.
[4] California State Controller’s Office. Data is for fiscal year ‘22/’23.
[5] I have absolutely no data to substantiate this claim.

Hell Angeles - Chapter 5

January 8th

There’s a moment I feel light. Not light-headed. Light. At 8:18 pm on January 8th I’m in my pajamas standing in the bathroom of a rental condo (my family is now in the fourth spot in two days, we will stay in this spot two weeks) and I’m on the phone with a friend who asks me if our house is standing. I say yes. My house is standing. There’s a pause. She can’t believe this. She tells me the fire is raging in Sullivan Canyon, still, and now threatening Mandeville Canyon. At the tippy top of my neighborhood on a street called San Onofre there’s a house exploding. “Look at the picture,” she says, as if I might need to see facts in evidence. I’ve finished brushing my teeth. About to floss. Moisturize. I’m a creature of habit and for two days I haven’t done anything normal. I’ve lived in the world of crisis and phone and crisis and TV and crisis and phone. This small bedtime routine feels good. Until she sends the “live” picture across where the flames are moving. The house on San Onofre is exploding. An orange fireball. A rocket about to launch for Mars.

Suddenly, I feel weightlessness.

Just minutes before, my head was storing all the human suffering attached to these last 36 hours. The chaos. Despair. The sadism of this wildfire. 

Now nothing. A void.

The book I’ve read the most times in my life is by Milan Kundera. It’s called The Unbearable Lightness of Being. He wrote it in 1984 exactly four years after he wrote The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. From the titles, you can understand the question he was wrestling with. Does it all pass? Does any of it mean anything?

Kundera was a Czech artist born in 1929 in a spot where Nazi and Soviet tanks would roll for the next sixty years. Every flavor of bloodshed, slavery, destruction, oppression and pathos he saw. Exiled to France, he wrote this story, Unbearable Lightness of Being, this melody, I’ve read so many times. It’s about a young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing. It has everything to do with his era and nothing to do with his era. It’s a simple story with a theme. Everything occurs but once. In a world where everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Its matter. We feel the “unbearable lightness of being” not only as it relates to our private actions but also in the public sphere.

Everything occurs but once.

This lightness; it’s the worst possible feeling but it’s also erotic.

Truths large and small mean nothing. Like the character in the book, you can torture yourself about the man you love who can’t give up other women. You can torture yourself about living in an America where nothing much works. Where something basic is missing. Where stopping a fire at 1,000 acres or 2,000 acres or 5,000 acres or 10,000 acres or before it even starts—before it even starts—is suddenly impossible. Where the bureaucratic riptide is so strong we will drown. Where the police tell the homeowners to turn around, you’re not permitted to watch your house burn, we’ll watch your house burn for you. Where events bring maximum pain, and where we’re told it is normal. Inevitable. Mass vandalism, the taking apart of your life every five years but please still pay your taxes. And vote. Please participate in a system that is swallowing you. Obliterating your wellbeing. You can wail and gnash your teeth and suffer over this torment—your powerlessness in the face of it all—or you can face truth.

It's a choice.

Excruciating torment.

Lightness…

What then shall we choose?

From Milan Kundera’s own mouth:

We need take no more note of it than of a war between to African kingdoms in the fourteenth century, a war that altered nothing in the destiny of the world, even if a hundred thousand perished in excruciating torment.

He goes on to describe our choice.

Weight. Light.

The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man’s body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life’s most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.

Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.

When then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?

The house on San Onofre is leaping like a fireball towards heaven. KTLA-5, playing on mute in the dark living room of this rental house is reflecting light, fire onto the dark windows. The ridgeline over Los Angeles is aflame. A strip of light tearing open the darkness. The camera pans out over a sleeping city. A city that may burn.

It all passes.

Rome burned on July 18, 64 AD.

Only a lunatic could get upset now about the day Rome burned.

Samurai poet Mizuta Masahide wrote five hundred years ago:

My storehouse burnt down,

There is nothing to obstruct the moon-view.

The handcuffs are there to be taken off. Probably, the owner of that house on San Onofre is not watching. Drugged out somewhere. Unable to see or feel the lightness. His house is spilling down the canyon in chunks of flaming metal, sending coyotes and bobcats running into burning holes. The other homes are igniting, tumbling. The owner isn’t watching but he should watch. The part of his life that he spent there, all the grief, joy, anxiety, regret and shame, the secret satisfaction, that part of his life is gone. Vanished.

To know this in advance is to feel lightness.

Fire brings light.

It’s a movie we can turn on and off at will. Nice cinematography. Wild effects. No soundtrack yet but Philip Glass’s “Opening” would do. Robert McKee calls movies, film, the ultimate art form. Why? Because they are temporal. Kinetic. The picture moves through time. The story changes as the light changes. Oil paintings are still. Sculpture is still. Dance and music move, but movies capture everything. To watch a movie is to be alive and then dead. To feel our nature. Dust. Air. Birth and death and the emptiness on either side. Memories, chaos, cramped in the middle.  Everything is here today. Tomorrow it will be gone. To feel this. To let it pass.

Absurd freedom.

9:10 pm I’m trying to come down from this light feeling, and I can’t. The rental house has polished concrete steps. I take off my socks to feel the cold concrete on my feet as I go up and down stairs. Trying to regain a sense of physicality. Weight. Angst. I try to watch the flames on TV with a sense of doom. I can’t feel anything.

Certainly, I can’t sleep in this state.

I need a pill.

Rarely, if ever, do I take pills. I have Flexeril, a muscle relaxant that works by blocking nerve impulses, pain sensations, sent to your brain. The expired prescription is in my dob kit from when I hurt my back a few years ago. I try to imagine all the bad things that could happen by taking an expired pill then I take it anyway. I crawl into bed. My head is a rock on the pillow. Leaden dreams carry me to morning.

12.48 am on January 9th while I sleep—a political argument rages on the chat thread.

Sam writes to the group:

California government is so incompetent, a 3rd world country could have done a better job! No foresight, no prevention, no mitigation plan, not even able to send a couple of drones to update the fire map regularly. Its’ a shame

100 pct emoji from four people. Crying face added.

Sean writes:

I think this goes in the not helpful pile.

Thumbs up from nine people who agree.

Victoria writes to us:

100 pct we can also thank our mayor for cutting funding for first responders etc.  

Person named clapping hands writes:

Here we goooooooooo

Elizabeth cuts in (I’m glad I’m asleep)

Do you know where on Amalfi was burning? Our home is near there and we’re trying to get more information on the Riviera too.  

Ashley writes:

We can all agree this is an apocalyptic disaster. It’s all done. Politics don’t help anymore. Family, neighbors, rebuilding.

Fifteen people like that comment. Heart. Thumbs up.

Clapping hands writes:

Not helpful / fucking stupid pile.

Laura asks about Amalfi burning:

Amalfi was burning, anyone know if it was contained? Any more info on this?

Note: it’s bananas, insane, that for the first time in 36 hours and thousands of chat thread messages my street is in full focus, the topic du jour of the conversation, and I’m missing all of it. I’m asleep.

Brandon writes:

Please take your political arguments to a different app.

Clapping hands writes:

they’re not even political. just wrong.

Note: I can’t always tell which side of the argument clapping hands is on.

Martin writes:

My folks are at 905 Napoli. Their Furbo is still operating. All is quiet on the street. No fire.

Heart emoji added.

Adam writes:

The only shit (emoji) pile is out local government-mayor ASS-shithead newsom & his smelt & the “last responders” that sat there with thumbs up their ass for hours (video proof) as our houses burned to the ground & after repeated 911 calls failed to rescue our elderly next door neighbor who perished. They will all surely BURN IN HELL for their negligence & so will all the morons who voted them into office

Thumbs up. One like.

Chantal-Patrice writes:

The two houses next to us burned. I’m on north Amalfi. I haven’t heard of any other homes burned.

Clapping hands writes:

respectfully, shut the fuck up.

Can someone contact the owner of this group and get them to kick out the MAGA fuckwits?

Heart emoji. Thumbs up emoji.

Elizabeth adds:

Stop, please stop! This group was created for people who are trying to find out actual information about the status of homes and neighborhoods in the Palisades plus perhaps evacuation information. Your rants do not belong here.

The owner of the chat starts removing people….

Adam is removed.

Hon is removed.

Oddly, I don’t recall Hon ever contributing to the chat.

Clapping hands must be a dem because he’s allowed to stay in the chat. He writes:

exactly. they need to go back to truth social and twitter

Ashley writes:

Any further political discussion will be reported from Block. Please this is to protect our families.

The chat owner explains his actions. He writes:

I started this chat for friends I know so we can help each other. All you stupid fucks that are making it political and are not willing to help, LEAVE THIS CHAT.

Heart. Thumbs up. Prayer. Halleluiah symbol.

Fourteen people heartily agree. If there’s one thing no one wants at this moment, it’s a political argument. Even though everyone jumping in to stop it is making a political argument. Except the people on Amalfi, who are tracking which homes on the street have burned or are currently burning.

Chantal-Price writes:

1201 burned and 1179 and ½ of 1169

Someone adds a wide-eye emoji.

Clapping hands beseeches us:

please block them, they are poisonous and dangerous

The owner of the chat thread answers the call:

Next person to make a comment that is not helpful to others on this chat, I will remove. Take your shit to Next door

Alisa writes:

IF I MAY…suggest something. There are over 1,000 people on this thread. We are broken and we are hurting. I am mad as well but for now I need community members who will mourn with me and be supportive at this time. In turn, plan on offering support to my community. Any posts on this chat that are less than nurturing and helpful are only adding to the pain and trauma we are all feeling. I ask that you find another chat or that the admin please block such people.

Andrea writes:

This is devastating. Many of us lost everything. I for one failed to pack even one photo and our home is ash.

Quick note: in 2025 the average American stores 2,795 photos on their phone.[1] Smartphones capture 92.5% of all pictures, leaving just 7.5% to conventional cameras. 92 million selfies are taken daily. The average American takes out their smartphone to snap a photo six times a day. This, or some version of this data set, has existed since 2007 when the iPhone was invented. And yet Andrea, like so many others, are devastated by the photos they left behind. It’s odd to say the least, that we can carry this many photos in our pocket, but we’re tortured by the ones we don’t have. The ones buried in a box in a basement we swear we’re going to clean out.

Jiayrun adds a Halleluiah symbol.

Someone asks again about which homes on Amalfi are burning.

Chantal-Price writes:

1201 burned and 1179 and ½ of 1169.

Dan jumps into the thread:

How far east is the fire?

Alisa writes:

Same here; the loss is overwhelming.

The owner of the chat thread is still fuming. He writes:

Send me privately any people you think should be removed and I will

Four people add heart emojis.

No one is removed from the chat.

Elizabeth brings up Amalfi again:

Amalfi? Sorry to ask again, but the overlapping threads are getting confusing. I don’t want to give anyone incorrect information.

Kris doesn’t care:

Does anyone have intel on Mandeville?

Chantal-Price is about to repeat, for the umpteenth time, which houses are burning on north Amalfi when Elizabeth scrolls back in the chat thread (there’s an idea!) and looks up the information that’s been posted so many times.

Elizabeth reposts:

1201 burned and 1179 and ½ of 1169

Then she adds:

 Thank you.

1:15 am on January 9th everyone on this chat thread has been awake for two straight days and starting to act weird.

The chat thread owner can’t seem to cool off. He writes:

Back to the purpose of this chat. It was meant to help each other. I will do whatever it takes to build this town back up inch by inch. I am a general contractor. I develop and build apartment buildings but willing to help Anyone any way I can throughout the process of rebuilding. Feel free to reach out to me when the time is right and I will Do my best to help. We will build this town again.

Heart. Prayer. 33 people give a thumbs up.

Sean writes:

That definitely goes in the helpful pile.

Every time Sean writes, he adds an up-arrow emoji to his comment.

1:17 am, the earth shifts. James asks the fateful question that will consume the people on this chat thread from now until eternity:

How long do you think it will be until clean up and building can start?

---

[1] Statistics gathered by photoaid dot com. See website for details.

Hell Angeles - Chapter 4

January 8th

Has anyone tried biking up Palisades drive with a bike? A woman named Jasmin wants to know. She writes into the chat thread. Waits for a response.

Time is piling up, but time has lost all meaning. No one can keep track of the hours because one thing is becoming clear. We’re on a carnival ride we can’t get off. The “vegetation fire” that started at 1190 Piedra Morada Drive in the Palisades Hills on Wednesday January 8th was our ticket to the fun. Remember the Gravitron? We’re spinning round and round on this whirling cylinder of shock and disaster, terror and panic, watching flames eat sky and earth and roof and gutter pipe and the grocery store and Palisades High. The ride is spinning at 24 rpm, centrifugal force three times gravity. Every time we turn on the TV to see another street we know burn—we can feel our organs press flat to our spine. The walls are spinning. The floor drops out. Metallica’s black album from the early 90s is blasting. You want to get off the ride. You scream. Beg it to stop. The operator smiles. Cranks the speed. The numbered pie slice panels slide up and down with the music and riders near you are getting their extremities caught, their arm and leg flesh stuck in the cracks. Vomit sprays on the ceiling. People are upside down howling for mercy.

Will it ever end? No.

Julia responds to Jasmin in the chat thread.

Our bluff is basically burnt to the ground. My son went in on the bike. Today and our house is gone. Only pull up bar is left.

You can get in on a bike.

You can get in on a bike, she says. While the fire is raging out of control. This kicks off a discussion about bikes. On a day when 23,707 acres (95.94 square km, 37.042 square miles) are in flames you wouldn’t think bikes would be popular.

I find one woman driving her car.

Nechama drives and cries. Filming out her windshield. She is raw, vulnerable, laid open in this moment. Does she realize she’s crying as she records? She is driving along a bluff west of Pacific Palisades high school. It is obvious she is trying to maintain a semblance of dignity, hope. Trying to hold it together. Can’t. The fire has come through this area and ravaged everything in sight. We glimpse the monstrous Pacific Ocean hundreds of feet below. Grey, churlish. All that water. Nothing to halt the fire. Nechama keeps driving. Sniffling softly as she turns the wheel left, inland. A huge white building is in flames. The fire stirs a reaction in her; a guttural cry, her foot hits the gas.

I watch the video again.

Something about the woman, the crying.

People breaking.

Have I seen this many people break at once? Her name. Who is she? She’s a rabbi’s wife. They work together at Chabad of Pacific Palisades. Two young children. A community of people they care for and support. It accounts for the crying. I hear layers in her tears.

I watch the video again.  

Extreme states of psychological stress. James Hollis, the Jungian analyst comes to mind. “Think of the psyche as a large mansion. In anyone’s mansion there are many rooms and in one of those rooms there is always a terrified, frightened child. The choices of others or our choices or unforeseen circumstances may suddenly place us in one of those rooms and we will feel absolute panic.”[1]

Primal fear. Losing one’s home.

Panic applies. Dissociation applies. People who fled to adjacent cities of Santa Monica, Brentwood, Westwood, Venice, Playa Vista and Mar Vista, Bel Air and Beverly Hills, Cheviot Hills, Century City, Culver City, as far down as Manhattan Beach and Hermosa Beach and as far up as Oxnard report that the smoke is thick where they are; there’s ash dropping from black clouds. They decide to evacuate further. A mom at Eloise’s school tells me she’s taking her three kids to New Zealand. She’s booking flights.

A dad, a knee surgeon reports he’s headed back into the evacuation zone. Into the flames. On a mountain bike. With a crowbar in hand. He decides to take his 14-year-old-son with him because they often mountain bike up the trails at Sullivan and Temescal canyon. As if this were any other day. It's not any other day. I wonder, if the knee surgeon with a medical degree might be concerned about the health risks of heavy aerobic activity when it’s raining ash. They live in Santa Monica. On a good day, from where they live to where they’re going it’s about a 5.3-mile bike ride. Today it will be a longer route. They’ll need shoot the gap amidst a 23,707-acre fire. Be alert for fallen, tangled power lines and cops who are chasing down bikers with handcuffs. Tanks are rolling in. The National Guard has been called.

I’m all for adventure. But this?

Enthusiasm (insanity?) for bikes is building in the chat thread. Whoever first spread this idea of peddling into the inferno has a lot to answer for. 

If we want to enter palisades on e-bike to get to our house on upper Bienveneda do you know best place to enter? 1:13 pm on January 8th Dave posts this thought. You can bike… up tenescal and get up that way. Thomas jumps in. My son just biked through the area… all of De paw is gone… his house is gone. Anna says enthusiastically, she just saw people on bikes going on the bike lanes through the beach from Santa Monica. The route seems like a good option. There’s even a place you can rent bikes near the pier in Santa Monica.[2] Jeremy is curious about how the cops and firefighters feel about the bikers. Are they letting any residents back in if they show id? Or just on bike? Gregg asks about his house at 549 Muskingum Ave “if anyone is on a bike.” Darrell says he was on a bike but sorry he didn’t go further than Marquez Bollinger Livorno Edgar. Amani chimes in and asks a woman I know a question. The woman runs a Botox clinic. It’s news to me that she has a house in Pacific Palisades or that she’s a biker; or maybe she doesn’t have a house anymore and isn’t a biker. Unclear. Please let us know if you are thinking to bike or walk up, Amani asks her directly. Dr Ed jumps into the chat. His name reminds me of the 1960s show about the talking horse, Mister Ed. He is also concerned with which homes are still standing in his neighborhood, the highlands neighborhood, but he’s not willing to take a bike up there to check it out. Sheryl writes: For anyone by the sunset mesa area: Blue Sail took a hit. We live up that way and my husband took an e-bike. Cindy writes: Seems like people getting in on foot and bike. Yes, it does seem that way. Thomas writes: A friend borrowed my bike. Got to Sunset. Cops said they would take him to check on his place. a condo. But would not let him continue to ride the bike.

Brief interlude. Dogs and cats.12.24 pm Jessica writes to us. Please message me if you know any good dog sitters that would be open to taking two Vizslas for a few weeks. I’m bewildered that I’ve never seen this word “Vizsla.” It sounds like a car not a dog. An AI-powered search engine no better than the one I’ve been using for two decades but has triggered trillions in market cap gains tells me this: Vizsla is a multi-purpose dog suitable for work on upland game, rabbits, and for waterfowl retrieving. My instinct tells me Jessica has never used her Vizsla dogs to capture upland game. I’ve met people all over the world who take their dogs hunting, and I’ve never met anyone in LA who does this. Also, I’m thinking, she should just take the dogs with her. Nothing good results from pet owners leaving their pets behind. Facts are in evidence. Megan asks about her house and her cat.

600 block Via de la Paz?

Also I am missing a cat.

Camille would also like to know about her house on Embury, but more importantly:

My cats were still there. I just tried to get in to get them but was turned away.

Alisa is pessimistic:

Hi this is Alisa at 810 Hartzell. Any news? Likely it’s gone but just want confirmation.

No one seems to have any news. Sometime later, she reports to the group that both her home and office burned to the ground. She’s upset which is to be expected. Still, she feels compelled to tell us:

My friend lost her 3 grey cats – ran back to find them yesterday but the flames and smoke were too hot. Devastating.

Heartbreak emoji.

Megan reminds everyone. In case we missed it.

 Also missing a cat.

Camille is the only one listening:

So sad. I’m sure our 2 are gone but want to look anyways.

Back to bikes. Someone pipes in: has anyone biked up to the highlands? The reply comes. There is still some smoldering. Carolyn apologizes profusely. Sorry I know this has been asked and answered. She knows she shouldn’t ask it again. She takes the plunge. Tomorrow if someone wanted to come in on motorcycle or bike to the Via Bluffs what is the most likely way to enter?

I can only explain this odd impulse, this neurosis to ride a bike—through one of the worst wildfires in California’s history—as an answer. To what question? This question: if the end is near, if the apocalypse comes and everything you know will go away—do you want to experience it on your phone? Or do you want to feel it from the seat of your bike? Move your body through it? Confront it with your five senses? The choice is clear. You can lie on a couch in an evacuation hotel room eating a Jersey Mike’s sandwich listening to your kids fight. Or you can get out there. Pump the legs. Fill the lungs with smoke. Taste the ash. Scream, yell, urinate shout and laugh as you peddle under flaming branches.

It's an impulse. To feel alive.

I get it. I understand this impulse.

I’m still trying to talk my husband out of it.

Jamie’s impulse to get close to the fire is real. The argument has been simmering between us all morning. Since 8:50 am. Send me a list of items you want me to retrieve. I refuse to send a list. If I do, then I’m placing “stuff” in psychic order over his physical safety. I prefer he not return to the evacuation zone at all. The kids happily handed over their lists. They are looking forward to seeing their Freddy Freeman bobble heads again. But they are kids. I’m an adult. I know better. Maybe the only gift of middle age is a wherewithal to understand that “stuff” i.e. material wealth means nothing. That will come as a surprise to the thousand pundits who are right now elucidating for us the grave difference between the Eaton Fire and the Pacific Palisades fire; their estimation is that the Eaton Fire is the one we should care about (morally, spiritually) because the people in Altadena have less and the people in Pacific Palisades have more. Well, I’ve got news for the pundits. One. It doesn’t matter. Stuff doesn’t make anyone happy. You’ve never been poor, they’ll say. Yes, I have. I’ve been poorer than you know. The suicidal souls I’ve met don’t have money problems. Most have decimals in their bank account. Two. If you live in the United States in 2025, literally anywhere in the four corners of this nation you are richer than 99.9% of humans who have walked the earth since the beginning of time. You have access to more edible food, potable water, medicine, warm clothes, sturdy shoes, roofs, screens, books, roads, airports, schools, etc. than almost anyone in history. Three. This fire is tragic because it’s destroying community. Community in Pacific Palisades. Community in Altadena. If you think of community as soul, then souls take fifty or a hundred or five hundred or a thousand years to build. We are spiritual people. I’m not the first to say it. When the community is destroyed by fire, when every place we’ve connected is burned to ash, something dies that can’t be rebuilt with federal grants and fast-track permits.

At 12:01 pm on January 8th I’ve officially lost the marital argument. My husband parks near Brentwood Country Mart. He can’t get closer to the checkpoint with the car.  He’s jogging on foot. Would he prefer a bike? I don’t know. The wet washcloth is pressed to his mouth. He’s reporting, garbling his progress to me and the kids, intermittently, when he encounters cell service. The kids are hanging on his every report. Every twist and turn of this adventure. There’s a high fence around the Riviera golf club. He decides this is his angle of attack. He will jump the fence onto the 1st fairway, a 501-yard par 5 with a tee box that sits 80 feet above the fairway that offers tour players a lot of choices (this hole is mentioned in the opening of Bob Rotella’s Golf is a Game of Confidence). Jamie goes through the abandoned gate house at Riviera and up Capri. He’s approaching Sunset. Happily, he reports, he doesn’t see any fires right here. The smoke is so thick he can barely breathe. No cops or firetrucks or tanks at the intersection of Sunset and Capri. Green light. We lose him.

I decide to send him a warning from a person who lives nearby.

The fire is coming up rustic canyon towards Amalfi in the lower Riviera. Please don’t walk back into the evac zone.

It occurs to me I should put away the phone for a while. He’s in the thick of it. If he makes it out, it won’t be because I’m forwarding him text message warnings.

I send another one. This one is from Kambiz who just left the area.

Please stay away. It was very dangerous.

Trees and power poles falling because they are on fire.

I’m getting reports that on Romany, a street which curls off our street, every house is in flames except for the two at the end. Briefly, I look at X. That’s a big mistake. Someone named Dolores Quintana is mentioning the gas line that runs near our house, “Here’s some news from Sullivan canyon in Brentwood.” Then she fails to include news. Is there news? Utility companies aren’t known for their reaction time or transparency when it comes to reporting issues. But I might as well check the SoCalGas website. I find a tab called the “Interactive Map” which reveals a dark blue line, the transmission line that I’m worried about, running below Sullivan canyon. It meets a light blue line, a high-pressure distribution line on a busy intersection in Brentwood. Both appear to be fine.

I made the further mistake of asking my search engine this question.

What happens when a natural gas pipeline explodes?

Oddly, the first answer that pops into my browser is from Green America. Greenamerica.org reports “Natural gas pipelines explode with alarming frequency in the US, killing and injuring people. In just two years, there were 12 deaths and 10 injuries.” I think to myself, I shouldn’t read this list. I read the list. February 17, 2017: a natural gas pipeline operated by Kinder Morgan in Refugio Texas exploded, shaking homes 60 miles away. February 1, 2017: A pipeline in Panola County Texas exploded and created a crater in an airport runway, shutting down the airport for a month. August 10, 2016: 10 people in New Mexico were killed when they were camping near an underground natural gas pipeline owned and operated by El Paso Energy that suddenly exploded. April 18, 2016: 2 workers were killed when they struck a pipeline in Bonnie View, Texas.

Now I put away the phone.

KTLA local news swings its eye back to the Pacific Palisades fire, to a spot not far from where we live. I’m watching with new intensity as if whatever news I glean in this moment, might save a relative. In defiance of that, the newscaster stands with a veteran fire fighter. The two of them look half-asleep. She asks him about prevention. He rummages the contents of his brain. We wait. Finally, he says, “I could save thousands of homes from burning in California if people would just listen to one piece of simple advice.” We wait again. The lady in the yellow jacket holding the microphone shifts her weight onto the other foot. “Rodent screens,” he finally says. Rodent screens? The veteran fire fighter implores us. Stop whatever you’re doing right now. Drive to Home Depot. Pick up rodent screens that will cost you just five dollars. For just five bucks you can save your home by gluing rodent screens inside the vents in your attic or roof.

Reasonable advice. A bit late.

John jumps into the chat thread. I’m not sure if he’s on a bike or on foot, but he’s standing across from his kid’s school and he’s upset. He writes:

Our spirits were not made for this.

How we debrief our kids…. Will stick with them forever.

His kid’s school. He’s standing across from Pali Presbyterian which is burned to a corn husk. He tells us this is the jungle gym, the playground where his kids played before kindergarten. There’s a poster stuck to a column, “JOY TO ALL.”

I need to step away.

Someone attempts a joke. It’s easier to get back into town through checkpoints if you wear the LAFD hat that was free when you donated to the fire department.

John writes again:

My head is killing me

All of us have heads that are killing us. What was safe this morning isn’t safe at all. Flames that moved away are coming back. New angle. Different canyon. Smoke, embers, flames. The fire keeps coming, keeps coming, keeps coming. Circling. Returning. Nietzsche’s principal of eternal return. “The idea of the eternal return, the prospect of having to live one’s life over and over, every detail repeated, every pain alongside every joy—”

This fire is making a mockery of our sanity.

I’m right now watching internet footage of pipeline explosions. While following news of Eloise’s school. The principal of St. Matthews sends out a schoolwide e-mail. The school has miraculously survived the worst of the fire. Most structures intact. Later, another e-mail comes. The fire encircled the school. Most structures destroyed. Immediately the question pops into the chat:

Is anyone else hearing that St Matthews is now on fire? Any insight?

Jennifer responds:

Yes I just heard that

John did not step away. He writes:

Pali presbyterian was very badly burnt

Yes, we know John. You showed us pictures and videos of the jungle gym. Since people are repeating themselves, I half-expect Megan to jump in to remind us she’s missing her cat. Instead, someone writes in with just about the worst possible question at this moment.

Mary writes: 

Does anyone know if planes will drop retardant? Seem to be focusing on Sullivan canyon as there is a gas line there.

Sullivan canyon. Natural gas line.

Horror of horrors, this is being mentioned again. The fear is not just in my head. The possibility of a pipeline explosion about 1,000 feet from my driveway is something that I will carry for these next few minutes. Or hour. I keep calling Jamie. He doesn’t pick up the phone. He sends me another text which predictably says:

 Send me a list so I have it written down pls.

I’m busy though. I’m talking to my 9-year-old, Grey, about pipeline explosions. Grey doesn’t fall far from the tree. He takes an eccentric interest in manmade disaster. He often shows up to breakfast, bleary-eyed, in his swim shorts and Under Armour turtleneck toting a yellow glossy National Geographic book. The topic is always the same but different. Deepwater explosion in the Gulf of Mexico. Chernobyl. Fukushima. Exxon Valdez. He bows his head to eat cereal, flips pages, watching oil-soaked birds lying dead on a plank. He studies tsunamis. Earthquakes. Wildfires that start industrial fires. Buildings melted to lumps. Scaffolding stuck in the sky. Trees uprooted and cars overturned. Wreckage littered on barren earth. He asks me questions that aren’t answered in the book. The other day I told him about Bhopal. He never heard of Bhopal. During the Bhopal disaster, on December 2nd, 1984, the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India, released highly toxic gas (methyl isocyanate) into the surrounding area. Officially, 8,000 people died. Unofficially, it was five times that amount.

I try Jamie again. He doesn’t pick up.

The Carl Jung quote comes to me, “What I refuse to face within myself will meet me in the exterior world.”[3] Did I do something to invite this fire? It’s an insane thought. But it won’t pass by. Another insane thought. Is Jamie going to grab a few things that are important to me? Even though I refused to give him a list? Maybe the Christmas stockings. Maybe the handwritten cards we save from the kids. The art. A children’s author visited my daughter’s 2nd grade classroom. Gave a talk. At that time, I had just left one career and was struggling with a new one. Trying to be a writer. Eloise, in her 7-year-old head, knew this. She barely knew how to write or spell. On a white piece of construction paper, with a number two pencil, she laboriously took notes for me:

1. reWrite

2. Write What you hear arownd you

3. give the Carickters Your problems and them worse

4. doble Check words

5. reread

6. make it intisting

7. think about it

8. if you where not the author Would you like the book

Something else comes to mind. The signed photograph that Toots and the Maytals gave us after he played at our wedding. Our wedding was in the Bahamas in 2008. We had a 10-piece wedding band. When they finished, we announced Toots was coming onstage. He was a “surprise” we gave to our guests. Toots is Jamaican but he’s a reggae legend in the Bahamas, so when they heard the opening chords of “54-46 Was My Number” the cooks emerged in their aprons. In awe. They flooded the dancefloor with other 170 guests. My brother found a mop and was for some reason pushing it around, waving people into the center. Tequila shots. Toots was smoking a fat blunt, passing it down, lighting another and passing that around too. Pressure Drop. Country Road. Funky Kingston.

One of the great moments of my life.

Toots is dead now. He can never sign another photograph. Will Jamie remember to take that framed photo down from the wall, “To Tyler & Jamie on your wedding. Love, Toots,” throw it in the garbage bag?

Maybe my objection to making a list of things I want from the house is just that: an objection. A refusal. Denial. Inability to see, deal, imagine or consider the possibility that there are 1,000 other things in my house that tie me forwards and backwards to every moment in my life. To everything I know. To people who are gone. Places I love and will never see again.

Writers write to avoid suffocating…

My books…

I can’t even think about the paperback books that will ignite. How many pens have I dried filling the margins with my notes, thoughts, plans to write something similar. Ideas that spark a new direction. Turn of phrase. How many shelves? How many different dorm rooms, apartments, homes have my books lived in? The last time I moved, from East coast to West coast, I took each book off its shelf in New York and wrapped it, put it carefully in the cardboard box and marked the side of the box by subject. I didn’t trust anyone else to do it. When I got to California and felt more forlorn than I’ve ever felt in my life, more lost, more unrooted, when the duty to be a parent in a community where I knew no one was a constant heavy chore, when pleasantries and falsities were too suffocating to stand—when I was sure I’d never know anyone again and they’d never know me—I took refuge in those books I wagon trained across the country. I spent hours in the little room off the TV room. Organizing. Browsing. Rereading. I talked to Jack Kerouac. Hunter S. Thompson. George Simenon. Alan Ginsberg. Jhumpa Lahiri and Kurt Vonnegut and Primo Levi and Norman Mailer and Truman Capote. Milan Kundera. Ha Jin. Cormac McCarthy. Patricia Highsmith. Salinger. Tennessee Wiliams. Jorge Luis Borges. Michael Lewis and Danny Kahneman and John Kenneth Galbreath. John Krakauer and Raymond Carver and and Chekhov. Hannah Arendt. Maya Angelou. Solzhenitsyn. Albert Camus. A thousand more.

They were all jumbled. Putting them in order meant something.

Those books…

Have I felt like this before? I go into the cellar of my subconscious and dig around for a comparison. Nothing comes. Robert Frost wrote, “The afternoon knows what the morning only suspected.” My brain is now barb wired to a notion; I should have known this disaster would come. Predicted. Avoided. We never should have moved here. Never. I get a cryptic voicemail from Jamie that I can’t understand. Smoke thick. He’s in a panic. Alarm being left off because the battery is low, and power is gone anyway. House burning at top of street. Then a broken text. I’ll call you when I’m out.

I ask around to see if anyone knows which house is burning at the top of the street. Everyone is occupied. Everything is flammable.

Still, plenty of people on bikes. Avi writes:

Tried to get in with electric bike, got to Temescal, they turned me away, went up Chautqua, biked along the bluff, all houses are in good condition, made it to the village, they stop me there, I beg for the officers with no success, not happy.

He adds two sad faces. Rachel writes to us that she found a dog roaming north of Montana. Then she forgets to include a picture of the dog. Camille wants to know about her cats again.

Anyone seen any cats in the alphabet streets? Mine were there;(

Just when I’m feeling the weight of darkness, thinking this will never end and if it does it will end in natural gas pipeline explosion, just when I can’t imagine relief—

It comes.

2:41 pm on January 8th my husband writes to me:

Safe. Across Allenford.

---

[1] A Life of Meaning by James Hollis PHD
[2] This suggestion is made several times.
[3] The Eden Project, James Hollis.

Hell Angeles - Chapter 3

January 8th

With shock comes fantasy and I couldn’t get rid of the fantasy. My house would be okay. It sits on the most bucolic street in California. The road is gently sloping, rising from sea to sky. The homes are big, close together, and have short driveways flanked with lemon trees and wisteria and lavender and sweet hip rugosa rose bushes and boxwood hedges and white thistle. The air is crystal-clear most days, dry, temperate, tinged with salt water and desert wind and the scent of eucalyptus. Sunshine is habitual. To live here is to live inside a dream; the mailman waves, children ride scooters, spandex-clad e-bikers pass our driveway huffing their way up canyon trails that loop for hundreds of miles along the mountain ridge. I walk those trails endlessly. If I walk down the canyon instead to where the road dips, I can see the entire Pacific Ocean like an aquamarine tablemat spread out in every direction. I chose to live here, chose this place, anyone who visits Pacific Palisades will choose to live here if lucky enough to be given the choice of anywhere to live on earth. The natural beauty is extraordinary. The landscape surreal. The other place like it is the coast of Italy; not surprisingly the streets in my neighborhood are named San Remo, Capri, Napoli, Amalfi, Sorrento.

Beauty is a shield. I tell myself this again and again.

10:30 am Flames swallow the center our town. To watch Corpus Christi Church burn (the news keeps repeating this footage) is to stir up something in the soul. Some primitive force. Some memory. They are burning Rome again. It’s July 19, 64 AD. Nero openly desires to destroy the city. He sends out men pretending to be drunkards, they ignite the merchant shops around the chariot stadium, and the flames spread out. This turns into the Great Fire of Rome. From his palace on the hill, Nero watches the city burn while singing and playing the lyre. Other people are having this thought.

My friend J stands on Ocampo Drive, experiencing the paranormal. She is watching her house stand while both her neighbor’s houses burn. The across-the-street neighbor’s house is burning. Her house stands. She texts me:

I am furious they could not fly helicopters to get more accurate coverage because of Biden being in town. I feel like we could have made an exception.

I wonder why she’s bringing up Biden. Until now, I didn’t know Biden was in Los Angeles when the fire started.

Someone proposes a different angle. K writes:

California has the best land and the worst government in America. Gavin Newsom’s failed water and forest management policies helped turn what could be manageable fires into devastating infernos.

Staci adds:

I want to sue the city and the state

This is not ok

Amani agrees wholeheartedly.

I’m in. Newsome for crimes against humanity

100 pct emoji appears.

A concerned Liz just wants to know about her home:

Anyone know anything about the top of Lachman? 1461 Lachman?

No one responds to Liz. Lots of people are driving back into the evacuation zone right now, dodging downed power lines and exploding objects. Why? They can’t endure the waiting. They want to know which structures will stand. But apparently, no one is driving to the top of Lachman. Which is why no one responds to Liz. The lack of response, the note under the note is this: everything is burning.

Small wars are breaking out in our hotel room.

2:00 pm the day prior, we evacuated to a hotel room in Carlsbad, California 109 miles down the coast. My four kids have been cooped up in this room at the Park Hyatt Aviara for going on twenty hours. They are starting to fight. The room is claustrophobic. Foul smells emerging. Too many pancakes. Too much syrup, sugar cereal, iPads, frantic trips to the toilet, lumpy pillows and rollaway cots, sodas and sour patch kids snuck from the minibar, video games purchased without permission. They are wearing dirty school uniforms from yesterday. Backpacks lie like carcasses in the corner with forgotten schedules and forgotten homework and smushed sandwiches in tin foil. The mood is tense, the air is unstable—order has evaporated—in its place something else arrives. Some liminal state where parents can’t impose authority. Parents are losing their minds. Anything will be permitted. Even war. The kids know it. My third child, a 9-year-old boy with a blonde helmet of hair and legs the size of Q-tips has the accurate sense that if he attacks his brother now, if he knees him in the gut and grinds his head in the carpet no one will intervene…

I don’t intervene because I’m watching footage of Jimmy Carter. Dead.

And Staci is fuming on the chat thread:

Who saves the stupid smelt fish over refilling reservoirs for people!

They need to pay

Lindsay, like Liz, searches for news about her home:

Is there any hope for Glynn drive off the top of Lachman?

Nima wants to know about her safe deposit box:

Does anybody know if the bank safe deposit boxes are fireproof?

Someone responds immediately. Wells Fargo Bank does not guarantee the contents of its bank safe deposit boxes. That fact is stated explicitly in their contract. Check the contract, the person suggests. To which I think: really? That’s true? That can’t be true. I worked at a bank for fourteen years and I never knew that. What is the point of bank safe deposit boxes if a) the bank doesn’t guarantee contents and b) the contents aren’t safe? Is there a force majeure clause that frees the bank from liability or obligation in the event of a wildfire started by a meth head funded by the state wandering private property in a town where a single drop of lighter fluid and a strong gust destroys $150 billion in property damage?[1] My thoughts are running away on this one. Back on topic. Our favorite local news station, KTLA, is bored showing the church spire of Corpus Christi burn. They keep switching coverage to the Eaton Fire.

So, we all switch to CNN.

Jimmy Carter’s coffin lying in state. Yes, we’ve all secretly been wondering if Los Angeles will finally burn to the ground. For seventy years, artists have been writing songs, painting murals about Los Angeles burning. Now it’s burning. It’s finally burning. CNN is at this moment is not interested. Instead, CNN wants us to watch a President who no one can remember anything about being carried into a stone mausoleum (is that the Capitol building?). The coffin is carried by uniformed men. The coffin is draped in an American flag. Facts we forgot about Jimmy Carter are being whispered. Hyperinflation, energy shortages, an embarrassing standoff with Iran. It’s amazing how nothing changes. Oh, but he was a humble man who lived a life of service. A peanut farmer and a born-again Christian. Who sold the HSS Sequoia and replaced alcohol in the White House with pitchers of sweet tea. Remember him? No. Of course you don’t. Lillian Carter, his mother, said in a 1976 news interview in the heat of a presidential campaign, “There was really nothing outstanding about Jimmy as a boy,”[2] which pretty much sums it up.

Back to Biden. What was Biden doing in town I wonder? And Nixon. I read somewhere, though I can’t remember where, that during the 1961 Bel Air fires Richard Nixon refused evacuation orders. He played hero. The narrative states that he stayed behind at his home in Bel Air to fight flame after flame, to defend his plot of earth. But then so much about the Richard Nixon narrative is subject to change. Here’s Jimmy Carter again flashing onto the TV. The black hearse is moving down a wide, empty street in Washington DC. Are they moving him? Again? Or playing footage in reverse? Joe Biden, I learn from my phone, flew Air Force One from Washington DC to Los Angeles yesterday or the day before, to sign a proclamation that would establish a Chuckwalla National Monument south of Joshua Tree National Park. The mission was aborted after he got here. Due to wind. Not fire. Or maybe fire too. But we we’ll never know. Add that to the list of things we won’t know.

My 9-year-old sons are battling. My husband has a glazed look in his eye. He announces, he’s going back to the house.

I see on my phone a warning. There is a fire coming up rustic canyon towards the lower Riviera. Please do not walk back into the evac zone. We have what could be described as a tense conversation. I ask him if he misunderstood the warning. Silently, he pleads. Our house is going to burn down today. There’s fire raging on three sides of the canyon, running up the bottom part of our street. Like Richard Nixon, he’s going back to fight.

What is your exact plan I ask him?

Not fight flames exactly. But do the next best thing. Retrieve crap from the house.

Why not try to save a few things?

A note on me: I’m a minimalist. I delight in throwing things out. One of my favorite pieces of wisdom of all time comes from the Nobel prize winning economist Amos Tversky who said: if once a month you don’t regret something you threw out, then you’re not throwing enough out. A similar but unrelated piece of advice. McKinsey consulting firm once published a statistic that the most efficient people miss one flight a year. If you’re showing up the airport three hours early and making every flight, you’re wasting precious minutes of your life. Missing one flight a year is a sign of health.

Back to my husband, who is putting at his shoes.

I point out: this is insane.

The kids stop fighting. They are excited. They are cheering for dad. Dad is about to engage in a dangerous act of bravery, he might die or be maimed getting crap from their rooms that could be purchased on on Amazon right now. My 12-year-old grabs a red crayon and starts scribbling on a hotel notepad. The red crayon reminds me of the movie The Shining, and her jagged handwriting matches—

Stuffys

300 Leotard[3]

Babybook

Pictures

Cards

Drawings

Big sis crown

Metal

Seaglass

Clothes

Shelf stuff

 “Shelf stuff” is great term, I realize, as I read her list. As a blanket term it works incredibly well. If an item made it to my shelf, it’s probably important, so just sweep it into the garbage bag and take it with you before the house burns.

My husband is nodding, listening intently to what everyone wants from their room….

My 9-year-old wants his collection of tiny, plastic NFL helmets. The other one wants his anime drawings off his bulletin board. My 14-year-old daughter wants mascara out of her bathroom, and an eyelash curler. We can buy this at CVS, I point out. There’s no need to go headlong into a 22,000-acre fire to retrieve an eyelash curler. Is anyone listening to me? No. No one in the family is listening to me.

And here’s Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass on TV. Making her first appearance. Fresh back from her trip to Ghana. Refreshed, cultured and relaxed. She stands mute inside the glass door of an airport terminal, waiting for the door to open so she can go outside. Presumably, she wants to get outside because inside, there’s a reporter shouting questions at her. More than one reporter. They have questions about the dry reservoir and why so many fire trucks from Oregon and Washington were turned away and sent back to Sacramento for carbon emissions testing and why did the hydrants not work, and the water pressure disappear at a critical moment. Why weren’t more air assets called to the scene? Why? Why? Isn’t the Mayor a command-and-control position? Why is it your priority to be in Ghana when your office has issued drought and high wind and brush fire warnings? Bass takes the fifth.

Anger, blame rising… 

My husband calls his friends excitedly; he’s headed back into the evacuation zone. Any tips? Someone says bring a chainsaw in case a burning tree falls across the road and blocks your way. Bring rope. A wet towel for your mouth and nose. An N-95 mask is fine too.

The images rippling into the chat thread are hard to look at.

That can’t be our town. This can’t be our situation. This can’t be happening. Make it stop.

Jimmy posts a video that looks like the opening scene of Hurt Locker where a bomb crew is stationed in Baghdad 2004 and something bad is about to happen. In Jimmy’s version, he’s driving down a street looking for his house. The landscape is bombed out, smoky, black palm fronds lie everywhere. Even the shaky, handheld camera footage matches Kathryn Bigelow’s directorial work. Jimmy adds the name of the street: DePauw.

Staci wins the frequent flier award for the chat thread. She is responding to everyone, everything, every post, video, image, comment—

I mean the taliban may as well dropped a bomb on our town because that’s what it looks like

Jimmi corrects the caption:

Sorry that was earlhame standby

He misspells the name Earlham.

Honey writes:

Can’t sue the government. They have governmental immunity. But you could vote differently.

Staci’s rotates between anger and sympathy:

Is that your house Jimmy

Then:

I vote Red all day long for years!

Scott jumps in. He’s excited by this—

If the taliban did it at least we would have federal intervention but good luck with the CA dipshits in charge

Jimmy finally finds his home. He posts a picture of it. 15263 something (De Pauw? Earlham? Or somewhere else in Via Bluffs?) on a normal day we’d be shocked about what we see. Today, at this hour, the reveal is stale. We’ve been watching people post pictures of their eviscerated homes since dawn. The picture that shows an evergreen Christmas wreath hanging merrily from the gate. A beige stone pathway leads to a pair of charred palm trees which once framed a doormat. Spoiler alert, the house isn’t there.

Jimmy receives only three heartbreak emojis.

Martin rallies to Scott’s side.

First we build the wall then we build Palisades…

Pause in the chat thread.

Silence.

That was a bridge (or wall) too far. Recall: 99.9% of people in this chat thread make Mao’s cabinet look Republican. Pacific Palisades, California is a “Vote Blue No Matter Who” town and thank you very much, we will keep it that way. Fire or no fire.

Jackie puts her foot down.

Can this chat stay informational only pls

The crowd cheers. Ten heart and thumbs up, surfer hand emojis added. Someone adds a turned-hand-pointer-finger-up emoji, which I’m not familiar with. It’s not the middle finger emoji. It’s an emoji which requires research.[4]

Karen cheers:

I agree!

Maggie reposts and rejects Staci’s comment “I vote Red all day long for years!” with:

This isn’t the place for this. Please stop!

Five heart and thumbs up emojis.

Karen writes:

We are desperate to find out about our houses.

Lindsay agrees.

Exactly. Our homes were just destroyed. Please

Staci, momentarily silenced by the liberals, still wants to post:

Jimmy- any news on Alcima?  

Shannon responds:

I have a complete list of Alcima houses between las lomas and el medio

A person who named themselves with a clapping hand emoji writes—

Don’t feed the trolls, kick them out of the chat.

Staci asks:

Are they all gone?

Cut to confusion. None of us can track the fight. Has Staci flipped sides from Republican to Democrat? Red to blue? Is she asking if all the red trolls have left the chat, “are they all gone?” or is she worried about the homes on Alcima between Las Lomas and El Medio?

Impossible to know.

Shannon writes:

My cousin’s husband is fighting the fire nearby in the canton and then will move to the las lomas smaller fire

Staci writes immediately:

Do you know what houses?

Kristy adds:

Glad there are still firefighters in the palisades

Now Shannon posts a complete list of Alcima as of 4:30 pm.

15900 ok

15912 burnt shrubs in front yard and back but ok

15907 all good

15920 construction ok

15921 ok

15926 ok

15925 ok

15933 fire in backyard and side where construction. Fire truck onsite

15934 ok but stubs burning. Put out fire

15954 just put our fire in front yard close to house. House is ok

15960 ok

15964 ok

15965 contruction ok

15975 burned down

15976 ok. I met with Jay who is watching your house

15995 burned

15986 ok

16101 burned

16121 ok

16120 burned

16127 burned

16126 burned

16132 ok

16139 ok

16138 burned

16145 ok

16144 burned

16150 burned

16156 burned

16155 ok

16162 burned

16168 burned

16165 ok

16174 burned

16177 ok

16180 burned

Las Lomas fire is active and that’s what they will move to next…

Jay, who might have evacuated with his family to the same spot, who might be sitting right now in a hotel room down the hallway watching his kids make lists of everything they miss and want from their rooms, who might be waging debate with his wife about the risk benefit of driving back just stopped breathing. He writes:

Thank you for that list. We were at 16156

A brave soul writes to Jay:

I’m so sorry. It’s so terrible.

---

[1] As of February 4th, 2025, the estimate for property destruction is $150 to $160 billion. This estimate is likely to change along with the theory that a crystal methamphetamine addict lit the fire that erupted into 200 acres of burning brush near 1190 Piedra Morada Drive in Pacific Palisades at 10:30 am on January 7th.
[2] Growing Up: From Farm Boy to Sailor by Steve Dougherty, Life Magazine, Jimmy Carter 1924-2024
[3] This is her gymnastics competition leotard which is studded with rhinestones.
[4] In December, my daughter did poorly on a 9th grade history test. Her teacher gave her the option to “make up points” by filling out a survey full of emojis (the questions were emojis, her answers needed to be emojis) that he pulled from Chat GPT. My daughter found this request confusing. If you ever have the sense that the world is losing its mind, our teens sense it too.

Hell Angeles - Chapter 2

January 8th

The night is long and full of terror. On day two of the Pacific Palisades fire the morning was worse. Morning was much, much worse. Morning should have brought hope. We had dreams (inspired by California state income taxes we pay, 13.3% in 2023) that during the night forces would multiply, firetrucks, air assets would increase—a plan would take shape—we’d wake up and turn on the TV to find the heroes from 9/11, a thousand soot-covered men, broad-shouldered, triumphant, standing side by side fighting flame with every inch of their soul—the heroes, the heroes—

But no. No heroes. This Los Angeles after all. We make up our heroes and villains and give them spray tans, fake teeth, pectoral implants, an all-is-lost moment imagined after we resolved it. We don’t worry about details that violate the laws of physics or simply don’t make sense at all. As long as the lights go down and everyone enjoys the show, hey, this is what we came to Los Angeles for. When Frank Lloyd Wright said, “Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles,” he was referring to the species of people who live with the lights turned down in their theatre. They know about reality, but they don’t like it. The hall of mirrors called image, luck and expedience is more fun. Fairy dust can be managed. Reality is stubborn.

A wildfire is real.

Mountains burning all the way to the ocean, are real.

A dry reservoir is as real as it gets.

Operation skill required to manage a large fleet of firefighters is real.

Admitting your limitations early, naming the challenge, iterating, is real.

These things can’t be imagined.

The gap between expectation and reality widened so far that morning, for the residents of Pacific Palisades (I count myself among them) that we entered a period of not being able to see what we were seeing. Call it denial. Cognitive dissonance. Shock. We woke that morning of January 8th to see half our town in flames, but still believing, still believing, the adults would show up with a plan. Eighteen hours into this thing, there would be a shred of progress. Or an idea. Or hope. Despite what anyone tells you now, that morning of January 8th, large swaths of town were there to be saved. Keep reading, and you will find evidence of that. As the community came together we held a common belief. The bet isn’t lost. Please. There’s time. Help.

They will help us.

Just give them the morning…

7:13 am, Wednesday. There on my phone is a message from my son’s baseball coach.

First of all, I hope everyone is safe. I am here if anyone needs any assistance.

14 people added heart emojis.

What an absolute nightmare. We will get through it together.

Same. If anyone is injured and needs me, please call me directly (FZ, Ortho).

The baseball coach chimes back in:

Please add whoever you want. In all seriousness, do not hesitate to ask for help.

Thanks K!

Someone even cracks a joke:

Hey bros. Finally I get invited to the good group chat.

Like I said, the mood was heavy but light. We’ll get through this.

Someone adds:

To me the most helpful will be if anyone has any reliable updates on neighborhoods burning down. A lot of chatter don’t know what to believe.

Now someone posts the first of many “live” maps showing which blocks and which houses, exactly, are on fire. This map shows El Hito Circle between Bieveneda Avenue and Shadow Mountain Drive under the Temescal Canyon ridgeline. The “live” map shows approximately 25 homes in salmon-colored territory (exclamation marks and flags) and a home labelled “16490” at the end of a cul-de-sac, in an ocean of deep red.  The deep red extends up and into the area just south of a mountain ridge. From this map, it appears, those streets are in danger but not yet combusted. Again, hope. Should we feel hope?

Unclear…

Immediately someone combats this “live map” information.

Watch duty is not up to date

Most of alphabets gone

Then the person doubts himself.

Well, I’m not sure. That’s what was reported. Definitely homes burnt on alphabets.

Now we switch to talking about the alphabets. Note, there are several neighborhoods we will talk endlessly about on January 8th. Highlands is north of Sunset, running up into the mountains. Since the origin point of the fire was way up high, near 1190 Piedra Morada Drive, on the edge between suburbia and 153,000 acres of flammable brush known as the Santa Monica Mountains National Park, this is naturally, where people expect destruction. If your house is up there, your fear index is at a 10. If you live in the alphabets right behind town, maybe your chances are better. This is the flat part of town, and as of the morning of January 8th, entire pockets of the alphabets were untouched. We know this because we’re looking at a picture taken a minute ago—

7:36 am. Chautauqua and Sunset.  A row of olive trees stands guarding an untouched white stucco. A hurricane seems to be in the making (tall palm trees that line the street are whipping in a vortex of wind) but mainly, the theme is regularity. This part of the alphabets is regular. Fine. Unmarred. The bottom of this street is crisscrossed with tire marks and flooded with black puddles. Maybe oil. It looks like a racetrack. In the background, deep distance, is a plume of fire. But the picture gives us the narrative and the narrative is that that morning has come, the sun has risen, and some of us will be fine.

So, there’s hope.

The firefighters are there… 

A hopeful resident wants to prove this. They post a photo. It’s a man in an orange traffic vest with his feet planted among the small cactuses on median. There used to be a “Vote Robert F. Kennedy” sign there until someone vandalized it. Orange traffic vest man has his back turned to us and he is staring at two firetrucks parked under dark traffic lights. The traffic lights are out because power is cut. The taillights on the firetrucks are glaring, almost as if it’s a rainy day and they’re caught in a haze. Orange cones knocked over. The road is flooded. What are the firetrucks doing? Controlling traffic at the intersection? We don’t know. The guy who posted this picture adds no explanation. He writes:

7 am.

A parent we know, who works for a large bond fund manager, is just joining. The chat thread contains a warning. “This conversation is being archived and monitored by {XX} Capital to satisfy regulatory obligations.” The discussion on the Palisades Fire is now subject to securities law. 28 other people, some I know, some I’ve never met before are invited to join. They join instantaneously.

Thanks for setting this up K. Good to have a place to share intel.

7:54 am a guy named Andrew is playing Pearl Jam, driving along in his car. He’s filming out his windshield. The car looks to be going east on Shadow Mountain Road. On the right side of the road blue recycling bins lie flat, mouths gaping. There’s a white Tesla and a white pickup parked there, intact. Abandoned. Several homes are intact. Good. All is well in the world. To the left, a different story. Now we see—out the windshield to his left— the entire mountain ridge is aflame. This neighborhood sits below the 153,000 acres of wilderness; until today, right now, the two have coexisted. Suburbia and Mountain. As hellfire explodes along that ridge and Andrew drives calmly along, the flames can’t be more than twenty feet above his car windshield, we start to wonder… about false hope…

My neighbor just saw a news crew reporting from our street and every house except a few near sunset are gone

We’re on the 700 block

Iliff

Has anyone attempted to drive into the Palisades?

Now Andrew, who might have pulled to the side of the road or else is just texting and driving writes (and inexplicably, refers to himself in third person):

People have tried.

One guy got into the highlands and says it’s all burning.

In effort to refute this claim, someone posts a video.

This video is from Greg. Greg we know and trust. He’s a born-and-bred Palisadian who went to school in the East. He’s a parent of two kids at St. Matthew’s Parish School and used to be the facilities director there. He’s a jeans and chainsaw type guy, friendly, outgoing, competent. Everyone likes him. Greg is posting a video.

Great…trustworthy information…

Greg’s pickup truck is parked somewhere in a high section of town. The video is running but nothing is happening. The camera is mounted to his dashboard, no one seems to be in the car, the car isn’t moving. It’s not even clear why he's filming. Is the video a mistake? We keep watching it. It’s like a slow-motion Nature Channel clip of a flower or animal changing over time. But time is passing and nothing is changing. Wind rustles through a palm tree stuck between five homes on the block. It’s oddly peaceful. The sky is a thick soup of grey, and there’s no sign of fire anywhere. Literally anywhere. It could just be an overcast day. Hum drum. Now we start doing other things while we watch this video, like getting coffee, pouring dry cereal into paper cups for the kids, turning on the TV again to see our favorite KTLA reporters (note: for all of Los Angeles’ shortcomings, the local news is excellent. Truly, shockingly excellent) and at minute ten we’re about to give up on this thing. This video sucks. On any other day, if our town weren’t burning, we would have ditched Greg’s video. Why didn’t he edit out these first ten minutes? Maybe he is busy. At minute eleven, finally, finally something happens. The car door chime. He lumbers into the truck next to his friend (his friend was there all along? Saying nothing?) and now the action starts.

We see Greg.

 “Alright,” the other guy, the passenger says, as Greg climbs behind the wheel in a soot-covered red t-shirt with an N95 mask dangling around his neck. “Still on?” Greg asks (he’s referring to the video camera which yes, has been on, recording nothing for twelve minutes). “Still on, you got 150 people watching,” the passenger says.

They are posting this on X. The camera knocks off balance for an instant, swivels, and we see the backseat of the truck which is piled high with crap. Two framed pieces of geometric art sit on the pile of crap. So maybe that’s what Greg was doing. His wife gave him a list of things he should have evacuated from the house the day before, and he waited until now.  Now he throws the truck and gear and drives. We get a sense of where we are because he's narrating the plan, the location, where he intends to conduct and audit and how.

 “I taped the Starlink to the roof, I duct taped it,” Greg says. His friend replies, “Great. So. this is Shadow Mountain here. Total loss on the corner here.” The friend points the camera to a house that is burned to the earth. “Yup,” Greg replies. Heavy sighs. Greg puts on his blinker; it makes a chunky blinker noise, and the friends crack a joke about how it’s good he used his blinker so everyone driving behind him (town is evacuated) will know he’s about to turn. New road. Another torched house. “Total loss on the left here. We already showed it but—” “Yup. This one’s gone. Via Anita is—” “Two houses burned on the left but then one that’s fine, the one after that is burned. The houses along the right side of the street are fine.” The friend starts coughing. They drive down many streets in this neighborhood, then they drive to another neighborhood, repeating the exercise.

Doing an audit.

Jacob S. joins the conversation, posting an Instagram clip of himself taken in the hours before dawn. The sky is black, he’s in ski goggles with dark rim glasses underneath, a yellow cloth jacket John Wayne style (chic, vintage?) and he’s standing the perfect distance from a huge house on Pampas Ricas that is right now erupting in flames. Because of this house the night sky is an explosion of fireworks. Drama. At the perfect moment, he talks to his followers, certain affection in his voice—

Hey, this is a message for my Palisades people. It’s a really tough situation out here. I’m on Pampas Ricas where Sunset meets Chautauqua. I drove into the village earlier. Most of the houses on Sunset between Chautauqua and the village have burned down. On both sides of the street. The firefighters are trying to save the fire station. Ralph’s is burned down. Gelson’s is burned down. The car wash. The library. The area where the park is in the Huntington. Many of the streets are on fire. Alphabet streets. Just hope everybody got out okay. And everyone is looking out for on another…. Just wanted to send my love.

Mood swing in the chat thread.

People grow angry…

8:00 am. The baseball coach who started the chat is upset about the comment that Andrew, Pearl Jam, made earlier.

[Repost] One guy got into the highlands and says it’s all burning

 Can you please not post rumors and post facts?

Travis adds:

No access to neighborhoods. Police blockades at every entry point.

Note, this guy must have just woken up. Has he not seen the deluge of video footage we’re getting from people we know, Greg, etc., driving the streets of town?

Andrew defends himself—

See the photos.

Jonathan posts a video of the center of Palisades Village, which looks like Pompei was just dredged out of the earth. He writes:

This is what’s left of the Pacific Palisades. The mall survived. Most everything else is gone. Homes, apartment complexes… businesses.

Karl who I know, who has lived in Pacific Palisades for 20 years writes:

Where is that video taken? I can’t even tell.

Looks like Sunset somewhere.

The video was literally taken in the center of town, town center, which we all drive through five times a day and which Karl has driven through 5,000 or more times in his life. His brain isn’t working. He can’t process what’s he’s seeing.

Town center looks like that?

That can’t be town center.

8:02 am, Gregg in the alphabets (different than Greg in the highlands) drives with his wife down the street of a close friend. An hour ago, right here, we felt optimism. This is where those olive trees guarded a white stucco house that stood on a street filled with houses. It was morning. Everything was okay. Now, in Gregg’s video, it’s turning night again. Out his windshield, we see the sky turning black and bright orange. The fire is here, and its blotting out the sun. Greg turns the wheel. He’s wearing a blue puffer jacket and filming with his phone, while his wife holds her phone to the windshield, getting a second recording. The wife talks in a raspy voice to Jessie, who we hope is watching somewhere.

 “Jessie this is what’s going on on your street right this minute. There’s your house. There’s your neighbor. There’s your other neighbor. Your house is standing but I don’t think it’s going to be for long. Nope.” Husband and wife say the last part in unison. Then she says, and this bears repeating, “There’s no fire department here—”

There’s no fire department in the alphabet streets.

The wife has a point, we realize. The chat thread started at the crack of dawn. We’ve gotten dozens of images, videos, and every minute we’re getting more images and videos from people driving around in their cars documenting, the town ablaze. Even the KTLA reporters can’t find firefighters to interview this morning. It is odd, as embers fly—as this thing goes parabolic in the moment we expected hope, a plan—

8:06 am Andrew, busy defending himself, reposts a video of the center of town, every building (save Rick Caruso’s) eviscerated.

Town is eviscerated.

Now Karl’s brain is coming around to the idea that the center of town is gone. Karl writes:

Wow

To which Andrew strangely decides to show us what Starbucks looked like before it burned down. He posts a Google Street View of Starbucks at 901 N Swarthmore Avenue on some earlier, normal day. It’s sunny. Blue sky. A nurse in turquoise just got her mobile order and is crossing the storefront to her car. A burly guy dressed like an L.A. gym teacher, black netted shorts, black t-shirt, black socks, black shoes, shield glasses, walks under the familiar green square awnings. Yes. That was Starbucks before it burned, Andrew wants us to know.

People are getting desperate.

How did Almar look when driving down?

Where is this one?

Looks like El Medio near me

Think it’s muskingham

Ugh shit

My house is gone on the corner of earlham and Swarthmore. Pictures to verify.

Fuck. So sorry Mike. Brutal.

Anyone have any word on Hartzell?

Our house is gone on Via our neighbors are saying.

This is 900 block of Kagawa just below Bashford. No photos since then.

Thanks for sending… as expected our houses on Kagawa was on fire 927

Someone posts a sepia picture of a tree and a house. The photo could be an Ed Ruscha work. 1960’s horror element to it.

911 Hartzell. My house. In flames. See pic.

Dan drives into the center of town. He wants us to see the burned carcass of Starbucks, and the entire block beyond it which looks like a bomb dropped. Dan has a friend is in his passenger seat (people take risk in pairs) and the friend is having a conniption. “Right here, right here this is where’s it’s got to be – Oh my god—Oh my god—I’ve never. Look at this. It’s beyond comprehension.”

It is beyond comprehension.

Another person I know adds that his neighbors’ brother is a fireman and just got access to McKendree above Bestor. Everything is gone on the back side. All the homes on McKendree except one is gone.

I’m not sure this was an exaggeration.

This is so so sad.

This is so sad.

Oh and he said not to try and enter there are downed power lines everywhere and it’s really dangerous

A 3rd grade teacher I know writes to the group:

All of highlands on fire. We lost our house too.

Ugh, so sorry H.

Is all of Haverford gone?

Note, in a calamity of this magnitude, people’s sympathy extends for exactly a second. It is not unlike (what I imagine) WWI trenches to feel like. You gaze down at your neighbor, bleeding on the ground, and are about to say you’re sorry until one lodges in your shoulder.

Cut to me.

I was apoplectic, albeit fine, at 8:00 am on day two.

My neighbor down the street is reaching out to me. She’s a jeweler with four children, who during the evacuation packed her cars full of valuables (including unsold gems) drove the cars to “safety” in Westwood and then had both cars, and everything inside, stolen. She has been on the phone all morning dealing with credit card companies because the thieves are charging thousands of dollars of purchases right now as this fire curls up Sunset towards her home, which sits on an embankment in the lower Riviera. She texts me:

Did ur house make it?

I can see my house it’s intact thank God

I respond:

I don’t know. How can you see?

She calls me. She is standing on a bluff along San Vicente in Santa Monica looking into Pacific Palisades. She can see our neighborhood. She plans to drive to our neighborhood (with what car I wonder? If both her cars were stolen) just to check that what she is seeing is in fact true.

Can it be true?

Our street is clear.

This is news. Recall: midnight before, flames were swallowing my friend’s house which is up and across from us, not very far away. From our doorbell camera we could the midnight sky turn scarlet and orange, exploding with embers. Then the power cut, then we couldn’t see anything, and we had no way to get information. No information at all. We assumed the fire jumped the canyon, took our house, and we’d find out in the morning. But what did we know? Apparently, nothing.

Now my friend is saying our street is fine…

She’s driving there now…

I need to sit.

8:37 am, I collapse. Almost vomit. This is one of many times in the coming week where my emotions go parabolic. Waves of emotion. Emotion I can neither predict nor control. I barely believe what she writes, and yet, she writes.

Ur house is ok

I’m here

As I read this, I want to cry. I am crying. Is this the first time I’m crying since the fire started? I don’t know. It isn’t important. The gestalt coming through my body is huge. Space releases in my chest. I can breathe. But I’m crying hard. It takes me a minute to type back.

Omg!!!!

You’re there?

Wheels turning. Who can I share this news with that my house is still standing? It’s not a good time to share good news with anyone in Pacific Palisades. Not while (on the chat thread) the apocalypse is getting its workday started, tearing down every street in every neighborhood and torching houses that were fine just an hour ago. Literally, everyone I’ve ever met in this town is getting word that their home is burned down. But my friend, the jeweler, just confirmed—she’s standing in front of my house—that our house made it.

I write to someone in Maine: our house made it.

At 9:02 am, I’m still thinking about my friend the jeweler who like Johnny Appleseed is wandering up and down the street, spreading cheer. I’m so grateful to her. She has made my day. My husband and kids’ day. Sure, terrible, terrible catastrophe is unfolding all around us and we’re losing things we can’t see, but on a local level, a microscopic level, things will be okay. The house is standing. Our sports equipment is in the garage. All is not lost. We’re going to get through this. Now for some reason I have the impulse to check back in with her. Why? Why right then? I don’t know. I write:

Is it safe there?

She immediately responds:

My house just went up

Because I don’t believe it, I write—

No

Stop

She writes back:

Yes

Now all I can think about is myself. 22 minutes? I only got 22 minutes of bliss, peace, conviction that things would be okay before satanic forces rolled back in? I try calling her. She accidently picks up and I hear her scream before she hangs up. She can’t talk. Her roof is burning. She’s watching the fire explode from Sunset right up the embankment, taking her house and her kids’ rooms and possibly the home to the right. While this happening my selfishness is blinding. My greediness is all consuming. I just want my house to be okay. It was okay 22 minutes ago. But now, if her house is in flames, then soon it will go up the street and my house will be gone.

9:13 am, I desperately want to call her again but it’s rude to call someone when they’re watching their house burn. I write—

Are there firetrucks there?

No none.

9:27 am, my life mirrors the chat thread. The chat thread, which includes every person I’ve ever met in Pacific Palisades, is exploding with panic. The theme is panic. Panic, panic, more panic. Panic porn. Panic party. Panic for breakfast. Panic topped with panic. You’re panicked? Watch my house burn. Here’s the video. Yours will go next. There it is. Yours is going up in flames. But why? Why? Because there was no plan. There was never a plan. They’re going to let all of the Pacific Palisades burn including all the homes, sky and earth, every canyon, just look what they did to that Starbucks building. You can’t even tell if a Starbucks was ever there. You want to understand the scale of this problem? Look at it from the point of view of a pilot. The pilot shot this aerial video five minutes ago at 9:22 am.

The plane is loud. Rotors above. A black arm extends under the left wing, which appears to have a cupholder. The pilot is flying west to east over Pacific Palisades. The entire mountain ridge is burning. The mix of colors is oddly pleasing. Deep green. White smoke. Bright orange flame. The flames rip from one mountain ridge to the next, creating a seam in the earth, as if what we’re watching is volcanic eruptions. The plane turns and all we see is smoke—smoke choking the earth—the whole, massive landscape—

They’re going to let it burn.

How are you?

Katharine types that question into the chat. There might be 1,000 people in the chat thread now (whatever max capacity is) and its totally unclear who she is addressing. Nonetheless, a guy named Patrick responds.

Via burned. I think my brother’s house on Friends St near the Bluffs is also gone.

Patrick isn’t doing well, we assume, by the picture he adds to his comment. A large lot with no home. Or rather, the home is a pile of ash. The terracotta tiles and a little artichoke plant in the corner of his driveway made it.

This is Mt. Holyoke & Beirut in the Via Bluffs.

We have been told our entire block was burned

Heartbreak emoji

OH god… Its so bad… in daylight

Which block?

Beirut

Anything by Channel? Or canyon charter?

Desperation takes hold. Desperation trumps panic.

Which part? Wondering about 15207 friends

He’s 15263 and said it’s all gone

Heartbreak emoji. 

What about Lombard?

A good friend of mine, a lawyer named S, who helped evacuate our daughter from school the day before, posts a video of her street.

Via de La Paz all homes gone. Our home is gone.

Crying face emoji. Heartbreak emoji. Someone writes:

My neighbor just went into Marquez. Marquez elementary is gone, Ronnie’s is gone. Houses are burning on Livorno. Bollinger Livorno loop homes burning actively and spreading. Just so devastating.

Can you drive down Haverford as well please?

Finally, someone responds to my friend whose street and house burned—

I’m so sorry S.

9:30 am, at what looks to be the gates of hell, Nima encourages us.

So heartbroken. But thankful for our community. We will rebuild!

People can’t resist. They are desperate for their plot of earth:

If anyone is in the alphabets can you please try to drive down the 900s block of Iliff?

And 1100 block of Galloway, please?

And all of Fiske too?

800 block of Galloway please.

So sorry to everyone! And 1111 Embury? My cats are still there.

Back to cats. At some point, I start measuring time and destruction in cats. Fernando is missing. He has black fur and white paws. Here comes a “FERNANDO MISSING” picture but it’s lost so quickly, it ripples into the ether, because other people are posting pictures of their homes burning and cats they’ve misplaced. Can this many people have left their cat behind? Why? By mid-morning we’re at max chaos. Nothing is real. Except chaos.

Hell Angeles - Chapter 1

January 9th

Two days ago, on January 7th, 2025, the angriest fire in American history ripped through my hometown[i] of Pacific Palisades, California. I will qualify that statement in time— by showing you the cutting room floor of the movie. Both beauty and terror alike. It is beyond my skills as a writer to tell you what these images and stories mean. Except to say: they mean something. What we’re witnessing now as black sky and mountain meet in orange flame and as populations of 50,000 are evacuated at a clip and entire towns are wiped out and as 747 planes fly in the night spraying red retardant on the earth— as Los Angeles teeters, as my house teeters—what we’re watching unfold in this California, the capital of ego, the locust of extreme wealth, the massif central of media and technology and a government so broken and backwardated by its riches—yes say it, say the unsayable—there’s schadenfreude in watching it burn—this, today, is our ingress. It’s new, fresh and ugly. Paranoia released. A war on ourselves. Destruction pornography.

Two days into this, my town looks like a nuke was dropped.

Everyone I know is scattered.

Some of us have our passports and a few pairs of underwear, a toothbrush we grabbed before the flames jumped the canyon. Medication. Credit cards and car keys. Maybe not the car. We have our phones, which contain universes of suffering.

What I’ve tried to do here is record, record, record. Because my tentacles run deep in this community, because I live in the furthest east canyon of the Pacific Palisades between Wil Rogers State Park, Sullivan Canyon and Mandeville Canyon, because I spent a thousand sane hours in those hills hiking, exploring, because I have children at three different schools in this community and neighbors who touch every aspect of life in this town, because my world is at the baseball park and Caffé Luxxe coffee shop and Gelson’s grocery store and all the roads that run in between—because it’s embers, all of it embers—because the fire is still raging and people are gutted, spilling their insides, on the verge of nervous breakdown, hallucinating their way into a new reality—because the looters are out—because I can make no sense of the time warp except to say that I’m in it and it’s bizarre, surreal—because of this I am in the business of recording. Recording is what I can do. Recording is what I can handle.

A note on what is here.

My chat threads contain images and videos that are hard to process, to understand, unless and until you know the human at the center. This, too, I am trying to get down on paper. The humans are changing rapidly, and this is part of the story.

Also, know this.

For me, the surprise of this fire was profound. I grew up in the frozen tundra of Maine and Massachusetts where mountains are hills, oceans never bring tidal waves and the ground never shakes. My ancestors were wise not to come west. This place is extreme in every sense of the word: I’m not the first to say it. What started two days ago—this inferno—is known in this state but it’s not known to me. In a strange hall of mirrors way, I was one block away from the trade towers on September 11th, 2001. I was working that morning from the Brown Brothers Harriman Building on Wall Street, and I watched everything. I watched airplane and building collide, humans jump from burning windows, sky and earth turn to ash. I was unlucky to be there but lucky to stay alive. Now, as I clock the surprise of watching flames I’ve seen before (albeit, swallowing an entirely different landscape) it is impossible not to wonder if threads exist between catastrophes. This I will explore…

One more note before I begin.

My aim is to get everything down. The precipice has never been further. There’s a phantasmagoria of anecdote and image and plot beat to work though; people are calling me breaking apart, our home is surrounded by fires still raging in two canyons, we’re getting burglary alerts by the hour, my kids are out of school and my husband, a stoic figure, is walking a psychic tightrope that just might snap. Every person I’ve ever known has reached out to ask if I’m okay. If I’m okay, it’s because I sit here writing at a time when writing feels like a crime. So, for all of you reading this, if you don’t hear from me these next few months it's because I’m recording. I start with my own story and go outwards.

So, it begins.

January 7th

Day One

Joan Didion wrote, “The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion real live here in only the most temporary way.” I believe children are the exception to this rule. My children were living happily in a world that was very real to them—as real as anything— that morning of January 7th, 2025. I will begin there. 7:25 am. My 12-year-old daughter, Eloise, stands in her school uniform, a blue-and-white plaid skirt and white polo shirt, blue zip-up fleece, sky blue Jansport backpack on her back, hard plastic clarinet case on the ground. She is at the end of our driveway, which is also the bus stop for our neighborhood. Alongside her are twin kindergarteners, a third-grade boy and a sixth-grade boy also in uniform. Some other kids. The kids are chattering. The skies are clear. The sun is out. Wisps of clouds skid by overhead. The winds are approximately 30 mph. On our bucolic street, gently sloping from sea to sky, with short driveways where you can see into people’s yards, there is foliage is blown everywhere. Lawn furniture knocked over. Today, the recycling bins have minds of their own. The blue bins are rolling up and down the street with the wind. Wind, wind, wind. This will feature prominently in our story.[1] The kids are laughing now. The school bus arrives and Edwin, the driver, waves. My daughter boards the bus. She is off to school.

11:44 am. Messages ripple onto the “6th Girls” parent chat. “Stay safe!” someone says before posting a video of soft grey smoke billowing into the sky.

Oh no where is that?

Yikes - is that the Highlands?

Yes – and blowing right over school.

The winds are so intense.

KW says piedro morada

I’ve been watching as the flames and clouds grow rapidly…first responders on it now

Another video is posted. In this video, a bird cruises across the screen in front of great spires of grey smoke. Everything in California is big—sun, sky, mountain and ocean—so there’s always a moment of pause, wonder, about whether what you’re viewing is in fact big enough to be relevant. But now we start getting notifications from the school. So, either the size or the location of the fire, is of concern. Dear Families, we are aware of the fire on the 1100 block of Piedra Morada Drive in the Palisades. All students are evacuating to the Meadow. Please DO NOT come to campus or call at this time. Please standby for additional updates. These notifications get progressively worse. Dear Families, due to the fire, all families, please come to campus to pick up your children. If you are having another family come pick up your child please email us. Another one: ATTENTION: Due to the growing fire, please come to campus to pick up your children. If you are having another family pick up your child please email attendance@stmatthewparishschool.com.

The last notification in this series contains typos. Whoever is writing these emergency notifications is writing fast and is in a panic. Notification from St. MatthewJs Parish School. UPDATE: All students, staff and faculty….

Noon. Roads gridlocked. Traffic to make you sweat. The major thoroughfares in Pacific Palisades are impassable. My husband left his office at 401 Wilshire in Santa Monica to pick up Eloise from St. Matthew’s Parish School (children are standing on the meadow waiting to be evacuated) but he can’t get anywhere and eventually he gives up. In a panic he calls me, and I call another family with children at the school. They have a home in the Bluffs neighborhood on a road called Via De La Paz, all of which will burn in a few hours. They don’t know that yet. Neither do we. I’m trading back and forth between calls, at my desk, frantically checking chat threads because a) we’re inexperienced in evacuations, b) local firefighters are telling people that after a fire exceeds 200 acres the thing goes parabolic, c) even the people who have lived here the longest, say, since the 1979 fire, are losing their composure. It’s all over the news and on my phone. The people who are trying to stay optimistic, to send upbeat messages, are quickly conquered.

We got this

Absolutely

Firetrucks all up our street

The wind is so intense

These flames are too much—I’m going

This is from our house. It’s so bad.

We can see flames from our yard

Right here, someone asks for help. They can’t pick up their children because of traffic coming west. Another person writes encouragingly, “It’s okay. Take your time,” which is ironic because at that moment, the clock stops.

The chat goes blank for five hours.

Everyone is evacuating.

During this time, KTLA local reporters are doing yeoman’s work recording the chaos. They stand at the bottom of Palisades Drive wearing yellow jackets with reflective gear, pointing to bulldozers pushing parked cars aside. People are fleeing on foot, leaving their cars and possessions behind (at the advice of policemen.) A bulldozer moves into frame. The road is cleared for firetrucks, though we don’t see any firetrucks emerge. A palm tree is burning. Actors whose names we can’t recall (i.e. Steve Guttenberg from Three Men and a Baby, Cocoon) are jogging down the street with a glisten of sweat, a shine of purpose, happy to find a camera pointed their direction, imploring residents to “leave your car keys inside your car, so we can move your car!” as if this public service announcement is obvious and would occur to anyone who just went through the motions of packing their car with valuables, evacuating their house, then evacuating their car full of valuables. The reporter interviews a Rabbi in front of Starbucks, whose wife is afraid to leave the car. The Rabbi has soot on his polo shirt but is calm. Tranquil even. He’s talking about what a wonderful community this is and how long they’ve lived in Pacific Palisades and where his condominium is located. He points up the hill (past the palm tree still burning) and in the background, we see Calvary Christian School which the news reporter understands, is under threat. Or maybe it isn’t. We’re getting conflicting reports. The news reporter holds her earpiece to listen. Apparently, earlier, the roof of the nursery school caught sparks. They evacuated the children in a calm, orderly manner. The Catholic toddlers are safe. The Rabbi sighs relief. The news reporter moves to another interviewee; this is a woman clutching her small dog to her chest and here enters the zeitgeist of cats, dogs, and fire.

But first a baby.

Sometime during those hours of evacuation, my friend Courtney (her entire family lives in Pacific Palisades and has since 1990), wrote this:

My sister just drove the wrong way up Palisades Drive. She was in the village doing errands, at the store, etc. Husband was at work. Her 6-month-old baby was at home with the babysitter who smelled the smoke and heard they needed to evacuate but couldn’t figure out how to get the baby strapped in the car seat. So, the babysitter just decided to stay behind in the house. Obviously, my sister was losing her mind. But the road was blocked and no way back up the canyon to her house. Until she switched lanes and just went up the wrong way… didn’t listen to police or anyone… got the baby…

Back to dogs.

This is from a parent in my son’s 3rd grade class.

I made the news. Running up a burning canyon to get our dog. I evacuated my son and his friend from school and dropped them off. Tried to get back to my house but deserted my car, which is now gone, most likely along with my store and house – I ran about two miles to the bottom of palisades drive ad sunset and then walked a mile and a half up the burning canyon road with deserted cars everywhere. Fire truck came down and made a U-turn and asked if I needed a ride down. I said, no, I needed to go up and go get G’s dog. He already lost a dog during the house break in last year – I’m not having him lose another dog. Made it to my house and couldn’t get in- the car had the garage clicker and my front door key didn’t work. So I had to climb up to the second level of the town house and kick in the bathroom windows to grab the dog and a couple of bags. And started walking down the hill. Got a ride halfway before my ride freaked out and wanted to turn around, so I walked the rest of the way and ran into a news crew.

Babies, dogs, cats, and now spies.

In a further is-this-really-happening moment, the woman above called me to talk. We got talking. She is a great talker. She spent the afternoon (post action sequence above) riding around in the car of a friend, watching houses burn. That friend of hers, the man who drove the car, was not sure if his house was on fire because he was stuck in a meeting with the FBI all day. Why? Oh, because he’s being investigated. Why is being investigated? Because he claims to be a CIA spy. Is that a crime? If you’re not a CIA spy you can’t claim to be a CIA spy. This same man rented a $30 million dollar house in Pacific Palisades and never paid rent, then when the owner confronted him, he reacted by selling all the furniture and every bottle of wine in the wine cellar. And he’s a huge political donor. And a story just ran on him in the Financial Times about how he helped a Geneva commodities trader trade billions of dollars of oil with Russia despite severe sanctions. This man, who contain universes, who belongs in the “only in LA” file wanted her to drive with him up a road with no outlet so he could see if his house was burning—and I never heard the answer— because the call dropped. I will circle back to this story when I have time, because it’s too good to abandon. But the fire is spreading too fast…

Every breathing soul in Pacific Palisades without a fire hose is evacuated.

6:21 pm. I know someone who is still there. She is a resident of Ocampo Drive in the Huntington Palisades, located in the flat section of town. It’s very flat, and very far from Temescal canyon, the last place we heard the fire was spreading. There’s an entire small metropolis—hundreds of buildings, the high school, the post office, several elementary schools, the library, clothing and jewelry and grocery stores, hardware store, nail salon, strip mall, taco trucks, skateboard outfitter, hair salon, car wash and gas station, Palisades Recreation Center with its flag football field and playground and sand pit and jungle gym and bocce court and pickleball and basketball gym and tennis courts and baseball diamonds with stadium lights—a galaxy, a galaxy— between her and where you’d expect the firemen to stop the fire. But alas, the sky over her street in Huntington Palisades is black turning bright orange. There’s a 40-foot poplar tree, waving, blowing side to side. Other trees on the street still wear their Christmas lights. She is there.

The houses are big but they are close.

Here’s the first video she sent me. This video is the first of hundreds like it that I will receive in the coming 24 hours. She drives slowly, maybe 10 mph, filming out her windshield. The kids and dogs are in the car. The dog is panting. The kids are rumbling around excitedly, knowing this is a once in your childhood type event. She’s about to take the right turn from Pampas Ricas Boulevard onto Ocampo Drive, but then she slows the car. “Shitballs! That’s the—Oh no, oh no…” Her kid yelps “our house is going to catch on fire!” and she corrects them, no, no, because while there are flames, it’s not yet clear that her house which hosts the largest Halloween gathering in Huntington Palisades won’t be able to host it next year. Maybe the tricker-treaters can still get their Kit Kats and glow necklaces, and the parents can take tequila shots in her driveway while wearing pink bunny costumes. Come October 2025, maybe her house will stand. In a follow up video she says, “Wait, wait, wait, nobody talk! Oh my god. We are getting out of here…”  then the video cuts.

7:23 pm. The gates of hell are open but we’re all sitting on our ass watching it on a screen. All of us. All the residents of Pacific Palisades plus the rest of the world. Anderson Cooper hasn’t shown up yet (CNN hasn’t jumped into action) so we’re relying on local news reporters, KTLA men and women, and they’re doing a great job. They’re on it. The flames have pushed them down the wide 4-lane road that cuts through Temescal Canyon that connects to the Pacific Coast Highway. A year ago in this spot, a confused and marijuana-addled driver (these are common on PCH) veered out of his lane into oncoming traffic and killed innocent people. But that’s ancient history. Now we’re focused on the “Palisades” for which the town is named—a line of bold cliffs hanging over the ocean—and though the ocean isn’t on fire yet, the bathroom at Wil Rogers State Beach is exploding in flames. The scrub grass on the interior side of the PCH is neon orange. We wonder what’s happening to homes right above. The cameramen are careful to keep our eyes on the news reporters, who sees valor in the face of the fireman. The reporter asks the fireman a string of meaningless questions, “What do you think of this fire?” “Have you ever seen anything like it?” as the hill burns in background. The fireman looks like he just arrived for his shift. We’re going on the tenth or eleventh hour of news coverage—early days, though we don’t know it yet—and the script is already repeating. We gaze down at our phones. We know the chat threads are about to turn dark, very dark, when we see this:

Thinking of you all and sending love.

Sending you all {heart emoji heart emoji}

Love you all. Praying for everyone.

Will do

That last person must have responded to the wrong thread, or else they thought the line above was a call to prayer. There should be a call to prayer. Because the next thing that happens is that no one says anything, but we all know what’s happening. The Pacific Palisades fire we thought would stop didn’t stop. Every neighborhood between 11900 Piedra Morada Drive where the “vegetation fire” started at 10:30 am to where the news reporter stands here at 10:00 pm on the shoulder of the highway (is the public bathroom behind her still burning? Why is no one putting out the fire? There are plenty of firemen giving interviews) everywhere, everything, earth and sky is burning—

Now it becomes personal.

Our house is gone

I’m so sorry, M. My heart goes out to you. To everyone.

Your life is more important.

Ours is gone as well

Oh L, I’m so sorry.

L, I’m so [despair emoji]

Our entire bluff is gone. Every house on Via and surrounding streets.

Oh god, S. Yours too? It’s so devastating and horrifying.

Sending you all so much love.

[Heart emoji]. We will all literally hold each other up.

Our neighborhood was burning all day and night, we watched until the power went around 8. Feeling lost.

10 pm – Midnight. Lost is a feeling I would welcome. Instead, I’m feeling as suffocated, tethered and anchored to a specific spot on the earth as I ever have. My home. My home as I mentioned is in the Riviera section of Pacific Palisades, as far east as you can get before you hit Mandeville Canyon and the edge of Brentwood and Santa Monica. We live far. Mercifully far from the raging inferno at the center of town. By all accounts, I shouldn’t have to worry. But here we go. This fire which has successfully torn through entire swaths of wilderness and hopped thousands of feet of elevation, and leveled neighborhoods, one after the other, this fire is growing, gaining fuel, as it climbs the side of our canyon. The power hasn’t cut off yet. Out my ring camera, I can see Dante’s inferno. The sky is hell red. I’m calling neighbors. I shouldn’t be calling neighbors. My best friend up the road. Her porch is in flames. They just received the permit for the retaining wall, there is no retaining wall yet, and there never will be. The flames are in their living room. The homeowner next door is sending a better angle of their house in flames—is there a such a thing? A good angle of your home burning? Our alarm is going off.

At one point I turn off my phone.

My back is seizing.

My lungs won’t fill.

I’m no stranger to this earth; plenty of calamity marks my past. I take an eccentric interest in war, genocide, coordinated attack. But this I didn’t see coming. My house. My house. The flames popping and exploding in the air over my driveway, the driveway where at 7:35 am that morning—a lifetime away—my 12-year-old daughter Eloise stood in her school uniform, a blue-and-white plaid skirt and white polo shirt, blue zip-up fleece, sky blue Jansport backpack on her back, hard plastic clarinet case on the ground. Alongside her are twin kindergarteners, a third-grade boy and a sixth-grade boy also in uniform. Some other kids. The kids are chattering. The skies are clear. The sun is out. Wisps of clouds skid by overhead. The winds are approximately 30 mph. There is foliage is blown everywhere. Lawn furniture knocked over. The blue bins are rolling up and down the street with the wind. There is no fire in this picture yet.

No fire…

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[i] Pacific Palisades is in fact the hometown of my children. My birthplace is Boston, Massachusetts.
[1] A Colorado river guide I know won’t say the word “Wind.” He says “W.” It’s an old superstition among river guides that if you say it, it might come. Wind is lethal on the river. If an upstream blast comes out of nowhere, the rapids can change instantly and swallow you alive.