By The Free Press | Created at 2025-01-12 21:33:15 | Updated at 2025-01-13 01:32:24
4 hours ago
There were no phone alerts. This seems hard to believe, since the phone lets out a screeching alarm for anything these days, including when an elderly person wanders away from home—a “Silver Alert.” But there was nothing, at least nothing that I received. On Tuesday when the winds picked up, I took some videos of my enormous Newfoundland dog, Hugo, sitting in the front yard, his fur blowing dramatically and his body standing firm even in 60 mph winds. A few hours later I saw there were deadly fires in the Palisades, some 25 miles away, and felt badly for posting fun videos on Twitter, though not badly enough to take them down, since they were getting a lot of likes. Around 6:30 I learned of a fire in Eaton Canyon, a few miles to my east. I learned of it on Twitter.
There were still no phone alerts so I didn’t think too much of anything until I walked into the front yard around 7:15. On the other side of my across-the-street neighbor’s house, I could see flames at the top of the canyon. Another neighbor told me they were still far enough away and not to worry about it too much. We just don’t get fires over here. By now, I was following the chat in a WhatsApp group for people who use the dog park in the neighborhood. The winds seem to be blowing in the other direction, someone wrote. So that’s good.
I live in Altadena (it seems strange to put that in the present tense but even stranger not to, so we’ll stay in the present). It’s a foresty enclave at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains, north of Pasadena. The elevation is about 1,500 feet, the population is about 42,000, the racial makeup is relatively diverse. There’s always been a significant black population. Altadena has many beautiful homes, but even more modest bungalows. Coyotes and owls and flocks of green parrots and even wild peacocks roam and fly about, even in the daytime. Last spring, a pair of red-tailed hawks built a nest in the giant pine tree in front of my house, and I often found the soft baby feathers of their chicks in my yard. It’s not unusual for bears to come down from the mountains and nose around in yards or even dip into swimming pools. The area is equestrian zoned, and at least once a week I heard a clop-clop and looked outside and saw my neighbor riding by on his horse, which he kept in his backyard.
My house was less than 1,000 square feet, an unfancy two-bedroom, one-bath cottage that I rented from a woman who was renting a place across the canyon on the other side of the city. She’d raised her two kids in that house and was now putting the youngest through college. My favorite thing about the house was the woodburning fireplace. It gets cold in Altadena in the winter—I awoke one morning last year to see snow all the way down to the bottom of the mountains—and building a fire at night was an activity I classified under genuinely simple joy, which I’m sorry to say I probably haven’t had enough of these past few years.
Another thing I loved about the house was that despite all the wildlife and the whole enchanted ambience of it, I could still walk to a coffee shop and to a strip of family-owned businesses in under ten minutes. This neighborhood is not a far-flung precinct of wealth in a high-risk fire zone. It’s a place with probably as many working-class people as affluent people. The walk into town took me down a block lined with rickety apartment complexes emanating with the smell of cigarette smoke and general life chaos.
What I am saying is that this is not a neighborhood made up entirely of people who’ve gotten lucky in life. It is made up of ordinary people who’ve been lucky enough to find their way to this neighborhood.
When I decided to leave on Tuesday night, I took barely anything with me. There were still no alerts, so grabbing a bunch of stuff felt like overkill. It felt dramatic and even insulting, as if I were cosplaying an emergency while so many others were in an actual emergency. I have since learned that this is how just about everyone in the neighborhood felt when they were packing up. We just don’t get fires around here. So I grabbed an extra pair of pants and an extra sweater and some dog food and loaded Hugo into the car. At the last moment, I grabbed a black and white cowhide tote bag that a friend had made just for me. Plus a pair of pointy dress shoes that I happened to know had been discontinued by the designer. Around 8:30 p.m. I backed out of the driveway and headed to a friend’s house about ten miles away in the city. The flames were visible in the canyon as I drove through Pasadena, and there was some traffic but nothing crazy. After all, there were no alerts.
Sometime later that night, or probably very early the next morning, most of the neighborhood burned to the ground. I learned this when my landlady called around 9 a.m. from the site, which I’m amazed she’d been able to get to. The house she’d been renting in the other canyon had been lost in the Palisades fire. Later she sent me this photo, which, like all the photos from these fires, looks like it was generated by AI. Every single house on the block, on both sides of the street, had burned to rubble. The only thing left standing are the chimneys.
Find out more about Meghan’s work by visiting her Substack, The Unspeakable. You can listen to her speak about the fires here.
