My neighborhood is on fire. The beautiful Altadena neighborhood I lived in for years before moving with my family to Salt Lake City. And it’s devastating for family and friends who still live there. Heartbreaking.
The blocks around which my wife, Lisa, and I walked every day with our young kids, along with our German shepherd dog, Pepper, look like a war zone, some houses spared, other houses burned. Think about if that were your street, feeling like celebrating if your home made it through, but crying because your neighbor’s home did not. Talk about cruel emotional conflict.
The golf course I played three times a week, located a few 9-irons from our house, now looks, I’m told, like the surface of the moon, its trees blackened, its fairways and greens torched. The adjacent clubhouse, where a nephew held his wedding reception, is turned to ashes. The driving range, where I hit balls as long and straight and pure as Nick Faldo, before actually getting on the course and playing like a blind man, ruined. I loved that place, cutting it up with friends in my foursome, grabbing a snack, telling each other lies about scores we never really earned, living the good life. So many handsome houses around that track, houses that were comfortable homes.
I’m told many of them, domiciles I saw every day, and visited every so often, and some of the buildings I passed on my way to work, some of the stores where we shopped, some of the businesses we patronized, some of the restaurants we ate in, some of the trees and gardens and lawns my kids used to play in and on, properties we admired, are scorched and cremated by fire and wind.
So many of them gone.
Altadena is adjacent to Pasadena, those communities’ streets intersecting in spots like spaghetti noodles on a dinner plate, the bulk of the former just a bit higher up toward the foothills of the San Gabriel mountain range.
The Santa Ana winds, for those unfamiliar with Southern California and its weather patterns, are as strong as what you may have seen in television news reports about these fires. When they blow, they howl. If there’s a spark, it can transform into a raging blaze in a matter of minutes, seconds even. And that’s exactly what happened in the Eaton Canyon area, near the crossing of roads that’s a mere shout from where my former Mediterranean-style house stands. Stood. I’m not sure that it’s still there. Still awaiting word on that.
The circumstances are the same for people in Pacific Palisades, and other areas, too, made up of neighborhoods and businesses of varying kinds. Obviously, lives are more important than any structures, and lives have been lost in this tragedy, as well. And, yet, these homes and buildings are tied to people’s whole existences, grown, in some cases, to be so significant in everything they do, day to day. Last I heard from friends, folks are trying to put fires out with garden hoses and pans of water. But now, the area has run dry, run out of water.
The physical and financial toll from these fires is overwhelming. The emotional costs stack up just as high.
I talked to another friend there who lost his house in a blaze a few decades ago. His entire street was engulfed in that fire, again when the winds blew. He said the flames swelled up like a rogue wave and destroyed everything. He was able to get a few documents and belongings out, but that all of his other possessions were turned to dust.
He stayed and rebuilt on that road, unlike some of his neighbors who could not, would not, remain. They moved away in an attempt to forget the nightmare that had swamped them. Even now, all these years later, my friend said whenever the wind kicks up, either at his house or wherever he is, he can smell that awful burnt odor from that time of great loss.
One friend said his house is somehow — he can’t find any good reason for it — left in decent shape, but that his patio and yard on one side was burned up and down. He guessed that 80-percent of those neighborhoods are no more.80 percent
It’s a sad day for that part of the world. Blame will be thrown around about how and why this happened the way it did, and plans can be made to limit future destruction. But yet another friend, a firefighter, said fires, especially ones fueled by dry air and large wind blasts, are like living beasts with voracious appetites. They can devour whatever gets in their way, particularly when resources to battle them are in short supply.
Send up a prayer, then, if you roll that way, or a good thought, if you don’t. Neither will solve the devastation or alleviate the heartbreak or dry the tears, but my friends said they’d appreciate and glom onto whatever bits of positivity they can find in such moments of enormous pain.
