Love letters from Angelenos after the fires

There’s plenty to love about sprawling, diverse Los Angeles: The Art Deco buildings that feel like a discovery on downtown streets. The stately Craftsmans of Pasadena, the Spanish-style houses all over, especially the ones with bougainvillea crawling up their façades. The taco trucks, the Thai restaurants, eateries with Korean bulgogi mole tacos (OK, maybe I made that one up).

I love the hiking trails I can walk to from my hillside house, the feeling that I’m 17 again every time I drive up PCH, the spring months when the jacarandas bloom brightly. I love the memory of venturing together with my young daughters into “the land of the purple trees,” slipping the fallen blossoms on our fingers and pretending we were fairies.

Despite all this, I have spent the majority of my life longing to live somewhere else. I need to quit pretending I don’t love this city. It’s time to stop being an abashed Angeleno. L.A. is my home.

My heart has been breaking as so many beautiful neighborhoods have been reduced to ash and rubble. But, abashed or otherwise, we Los Angeles residents are determined and resilient. Our city will prevail, and this horrible experience will make us collectively stronger, better and more compassionate. And the jacarandas will keep blooming.

Claudia Puig is a former Los Angeles Times staff writer, a former film critic at USA Today and currently a critic on LAist’s “Film Week.”

The first thing I noticed as I entered the Palisades fire burn zone was the smell. Burned wood, soot and chemicals permeated the air. The after-fire scent was punctuated, however, with wafts of salt and marine air that anyone familiar with our California coastline would describe simply as “the beach.” It was like the two worlds of our reality colliding in an olfactory dance of life and death, paradise and paradise lost.

The next thing I noticed was the color. What was once a mixture — the verdant green of trees, the sandy white of stucco homes, vibrant flowers — was reduced to a palette of gray, yellow and brown. Although chimneys remained to mark some homes, or a solitary door frame, mostly what the fire created was one undefinable heap of refuse after another.

Fire’s purpose, if it can be said to have one, is to reduce complex matter to the most basic of elements. The fire has done the same for all of us. Whether we live in Pacific Palisades, Altadena or anywhere in between, the suffering and subsequent outpouring of love produced by the fire has broken down our differences.

We understand we occupy a common space: one of the greatest and most diverse cities in the world. Our differences should be celebrated. Diversity is our strength. But a disaster on the scale of the one we are witnessing is an equalizing force, compelling us to recognize our shared humanity. We all suffer. We all love. We all fear. We all care.

The Torah commands us to “love your neighbor as yourself.” Today, for so many, our world feels distant from love. If the media have it right, then rage dominates the playlist of this era. But this crisis is a chance for all of us to show that love sings a better song.

Our health and our future as Angelenos are inextricably linked. Let love be our theme music as we work together to build a better future.

Rabbi Noah Farkas is president and CEO of the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles, which has established a wildfire relief fund.

Los Angeles is often perceived as a place of glamorous lifestyles and expensive real estate. However, it is also a city built on the labor of many who are far from well off. Expensive hillside neighborhoods employ Angelenos from Boyle Heights and Koreatown, Slauson Hills and East L.A.

The fires’ displacement doesn’t just affect the elite. Housekeepers, gardeners, personal assistants, caretakers, nannies and au pairs have been at jobs in the Palisades, Mandeville Canyon, Malibu and Altadena. Many of them are immigrants; some will have worked for the same families and clients for years now.

What happens to them now? Their communities, far from the fires, will be disrupted for years to come too; the ripple effects will not stop at the boundaries of the evacuation zones.

Taylor Marie Contarino is a journalism master’s student at USC.

Of many beloved works by Octavia E. Butler, the famed writer born and raised in Pasadena and buried in Altadena, I have felt an especially strong kinship with “Kindred.” Its protagonist, Dana — short for Edana — is a Black emerging writer who moves to Altadena with her white husband, Kevin, and inadvertently time-travels to Maryland in the era when slavery was legal.

After civil rights-era changes in housing laws, Altadena became a safe community for Black and multiracial families. In 1988 my mother, who is Afro-Cuban, and my father, who is white, rented a house on working-class salaries near Charles S. Farnsworth Park and then bought their first home nearby.

“Everything is so soft here,” Kevin says of 1976 Altadena. In a partial draft of “Kindred” kept at the Huntington Library, Butler depicts Altadena as a “a quiet little bedroom community” and “rural town” with “no sidewalks,” large yards “full of trees” and neighbors “who kept live sheep.”

I remember Altadena’s softness in the 1990s, growing up on a cul-de-sac and playing in the street with our neighbors. I remember climbing trees at Camp Mariposa; sleeping over at friends’ homes; hiking in Eaton Canyon; learning to swim at the Loma Alta Park pool; and carrying our first puppy home in my arms, an Akita-golden retriever mix born at a ranch just up the hill. I can still smell the trees full of lemons; hear the thud and roll of avocados falling onto our roof; see my mother painting, my father gardening.

I recall the Easter bunny placing candy-filled plastic eggs in our front yard (and smile now thinking of the neighbor who dressed up to do this). I can still see Christmas Tree Lane from the back seat of our car and hear the sound of rain falling on our flat roof — so much rain, even snow one year.

We moved to a new house a short drive west of Altadena when I was 11, suddenly becoming some of the very few Black residents in the area.

“Be careful today,” I texted my parents on Jan. 7, before the impending windstorm. Their power was shut off late Tuesday night, and they received an evacuation order early Wednesday morning that was downgraded to a warning a few hours later. “We’re good,” my mother texted me twice. I knew she was distraught but trying not to show it.

They were lucky this time, their home and neighborhood left intact. Satellite images show that the houses I grew up in burned to the ground.

My heart hurts for all who have lost so much and face great challenges ahead. Altadena will never feel so soft to me again.

We were good once, that much I can say. We were so good.

Dana Murphy is an assistant professor of Black studies and English at Caltech and a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center.

“If you’re rich you live in Beverly Hills, if you’re famous you live in Malibu, if you’re lucky you live in Pacific Palisades.” I was 10 years old, sitting in a chair at the Palisades Barber Shop getting a buzz cut, when I saw that T-shirt for the first time.

My friends and I grew up pedaling around town. We biked up and down Pampas Ricas Boulevard, its oval shape paving the way for time trials and heated races. For birthdays we’d get everyone together and ride for hours. During one, I was demonstrating my newfound “no-hands” ability while drinking a milkshake, and I hit a pothole in the parking lot of the Pali Rec Center. Blood and milkshake painted my face. I survived.

At Pali High, I had a 2004 green Mini Cooper with a manual transmission and white racing stripes — my prized possession. It was a 1-ton reminder of my late grandfather, who helped teach me how to drive it. It wasn’t the comfiest ride. The AC was busted, there was no aux and the left window rarely rolled down, but driving that car I felt like a king. I might have been alone in it, but I never felt like it. My grandpa was with me.

But I was alone when I turned on the news Jan. 7. From the gym at UC Santa Cruz, I called my family to warn them about the fire burning the Temescal Mountain ridge just a few miles away from our home.

They fled for Santa Monica. My parents, aunt, my other grandparents and brother all reconvened at my cousin’s house. I got the call — my house, my grandparents’ house, my aunt’s house — lost. Almost everyone I know and love at home lost everything too.

But we didn’t lose each other. I have never felt more love from my community than I do now. I have no doubt we’ll rebuild. We’ll do it together.

Even now — especially now — I feel lucky to be from the Pacific Palisades.

Emmett Heisen is a third-generation Palisadean. He is a sophomore at UC Santa Cruz.

I am a total-loss survivor of the Camp fire in Paradise in 2018. I get asked how I was able to pick up the pieces and move forward. And now, what advice would I share with the thousands of survivors in Los Angeles.

First, you have to grieve. Losing so much, starting over — it’s devastating. I thought I was a tough old guy and could handle anything. I did not take the time to grieve and I began to lose strength. There is a sure cure for grief and that is to grieve.

Suppression isn’t an answer. I tried to forget what happened, but when you do that, you lose so much. One year after the fire, I asked God for help letting go. When I stopped trying to forget, my mind was instantly flooded with the memory of multiple random acts of kindness that I had buried over that year. If you suppress the horror and negativity, you also suppress goodness, kindness and positivity.

A couple of times a month for almost a year my wife and I had “sanity days.” We took a short trip; we went on adventures the way we would have before the fire. Phones off, no discussion of the fire and its result. Clear your mind, enjoy the day and restore your sanity to the extent possible.

It isn’t easy. I was with friends at Christmas when someone played “Two Tickets to Paradise” by Eddie Money. I had to leave. I heard somebody ask, “Is Bob OK?”

Yes, Bob’s OK, he’ll just never be all right.

Bob Grimm retired from PG&E in 2009. He and his wife live in Nevada.

Like many immigrants, my perception of Los Angeles before I moved here in 2014 came largely from TV. Little did I know there was an unincorporated area just north of Pasadena called Altadena.

I had just married my husband, a writer and community leader. Because of our 24-year age gap, I was often seen as the trophy wife, or worse, the mail-order bride.

So I dove into community work to build my own connections and establish my own identity. I learned about the town’s rich history as a historic Black haven from Altadena Heritage, as well as Zorthian Ranch and Octavia Butler. As my knowledge grew, so did my sense of belonging. My husband and I had our daughter in 2016, making us a mixed-raced, blended family of four.

Yet most of the time, I still saw myself as the oddball in the community. There were hardly any other Asian American families around us, and I rarely saw other Black and Asian couples.

But along with my work, running helped me get to know and love Altadena. There are gentle rolling hills if you go from east to west, and gradual inclines if you go from south to north. In 2020, my friend Mayra and I met almost every morning to run on Altadena’s streets, each logging more than 3,000 miles by the end of the year.

In February 2021, during a pandemic wave of anti-Asian hate, Altadena broke my heart. A neighbor verbally attacked me, hurling racial insults and expletives, for running near her without a mask. I had always seen Altadena as a diverse and inclusive place, tolerant of people of all cultures and backgrounds, and the incident shook me. Yet I continued to run in my neighborhood.

In 2022, a group called Alta Runs was formed, but we do more than run together. Last February my friends Nichola and Kevin hosted a watch party for the Olympic marathon trials. On that day, nobody could have imagined that five families among us would lose their homes in the Eaton fire the next January, including the house we were in.

Friends have asked me what I miss the most from my home. My kids’ artwork scattered around the house. My husband’s comic book collection. The certificate of my son’s Guinness World Record for cubing while on a hoverboard. Memories of my daughter drawing Arctic foxes and Shiba Inus on the coffee table.

But perhaps what I miss most is the mundanity of our lives in Altadena. An easy run around the block or to the trailhead on a Friday. Buying a pack of AAA batteries at Altadena Hardware. Participating in block parties our neighbors organize for Easter and Halloween. Meeting friends at Unincorporated Coffee. The idea of belonging simply becomes part of you, no matter how long you’ve lived in a place, no matter what mixed history you’ve had with it. Altadena is where I found a home.

Jinghuan Liu Tervalon is a writer and a runner.

I awoke at 5 a.m. on Jan. 8 from the stench of smoke in my room. I looked around at my small apartment and realized 10 minutes was all I needed to grab everything important: my laptop, passport, notebooks, favorite artwork and hard drives holding footage from films I’ve made. I stuffed it into paper Trader Joe’s bags, loaded my car and was on my way.

Although I wasn’t in an evacuation zone, I do live in the foothills of Elysian Park. My family’s near-miss experience evacuating from the Creek fire in 2020, in the Sierra, taught me not to take my chances. My white car was coated in a layer of black soot, and white ash fell onto my windshield as I pulled out of my driveway.

For several days I stayed with friends, a couple from a mandatory evacuation zone, and their two dogs, in a pet-friendly hotel 90 minutes south. I sat in the lobby working each morning, watching family after family arrive with their dogs and cats, and — just like me — paper bags full of items.

The hotel staff was extremely kind to the evacuees. One afternoon, two little girls swam in the small pool while their dad sat at a metal picnic table nearby, alternating calls between friends and insurance. A hotel employee told them they might want to get out of the pool — ash had been falling even there: black snowflakes floating on a surface of chlorinated blue. The reflection of a palm tree wavered in the water. Above us all, almost shockingly, the sky was brilliant and clear. Very SoCal.

It has been unbearably frustrating to watch the response to these fires. Not from the firefighters, who are heroically conquering the impossible, nor from L.A.’s (currently heavily criticized) government, but from friends and acquaintances who seem unable to see the full picture.

Part of being a Californian — whether you were born here or are a transplant — should be taking the time to understand fire. The number of Instagram stories oversimplifying the recipe to this disaster — blaming only the mayor, or only climate change — makes my head spin.

I want Angelenos to understand that this is just the latest of many, many fires. Through my own research since the Creek fire, and from talking with firefighters and cultural-fire practitioners, I’ve learned that California’s century-long practice of fire suppression has contributed to these catastrophes. Climate change exacerbates fire, local unpreparedness doesn’t help, but I want Angelenos to understand that it’s not as simple as pointing fingers.

We are simply not taking care of our land correctly.

As I checked out of the hotel, two evacuee families were in line in front of me. One carried a meowing cat in a crate. The other held two designer dogs tightly on leash. Neither had many belongings. Our priorities are so close to being right — we don’t prioritize possessions, we prioritize lives.

If we could only expand that focus to the land that holds us, our home, California.

Abby Royce Neuschatz, a former Netflix executive, is at work on a documentary about an Indigenous woman who works as a cultural fire practitioner with Cal Fire and for her tribe.

My hometown is gone. While TikTok dancers and conspiracy theorists flocked to capitalize on our anguish, we locals picked up shovels, saws and buckets and did whatever we could to save what’s left. I worked with neighbors, retired firefighters and a power washing company to put out eight house fires and countless brush fires. We broke into homes and cars to save people’s valuables and duct tape their vents, and through periodic clearings in the thick smoke I watched Altadena disappear.

I shouldn’t have been anywhere near these fires. Trained firefighters with proper equipment should have been in my place. While officials absolutely did prepare, it wasn’t nearly enough.

Now as the adrenaline is fading and we’re just starting to grieve, people are using the rubble of our homes as a soapbox.

Those who believe in climate change are pleading with everyone to look at the data, but they’re simply repeating talking points we’ve heard before, talking points that didn’t work in the past.

Then there are those who plead with us to see cabals and shadow governments behind these fires, claiming they were planned and that L.A.’s fire response was sabotaged.

I’ve only heard one new phrase: “Let this be the disaster that radicalizes you.”

Now that I’ve had a second to breathe, I too would like to contribute a plea: Let this be the disaster that de-radicalizes you.

No cabal burned down my favorite coffee shop. Climate change is not the reason the bar my childhood dog used to steal food from is now a hole in the ground. And Mayor Karen Bass didn’t burn down our senior center. My hometown is gone because instead of preparing, we were still arguing about it.

Yet somewhere deep down, we all see that these disasters are getting worse. We know these aren’t the last fires we’ll see, and there will be more hurricanes, floods and earthquakes.

Perhaps we’re destined to keep preparing for the last disaster only to be surprised the next is bigger. But having been through this mayhem because of our lack of preparation, I’m begging everyone:

Let this be the disaster that stops you from preaching without first empathizing. Let this be the disaster that shows you your soapbox is only dividing us further. Let this be the disaster that de-radicalizes you.

Maybe then we can be prepared for the next one.

Mateo Abascal is the CEO of Beamlink, a rural and disaster zone telecom company.

So many of us are not from here. We came here — younger — as artists, dreamers to join the Hollywood archetypal cast of hucksters, agents, actors, writers. Very few of us made it in the way we dreamed of. We became moms and dads. We changed careers or managed lesser ones. We paid bills and bought insurance and, if we were lucky, homes, and we ended up living larger, different, smaller, richer and poorer lives than we could have ever imagined.

We all grew up here, didn’t we? And we made of it what we could. It became, for all its luster, an ordinary place. A super special ordinary place. The word we use for that is “home.” This is the heartbreak: What has happened to my home?

The grief of that question is floating over us, immense and varying in scale from those who have lost their physical homes, to those who are unmoored in the homes of friends or at the hotels that will take your dogs (how did we all end up with so many dogs?), and those who still sit tight wondering when the flames will creep toward them. And then the rest of us, everyone under the smoke and ash.

I have always thought I’d be the first out of town in a crisis like this, but here I am, glued to local news, to the new app we all have, sending texts, receiving texts — should we go, should we stay.

Leaving is not only a short-term question.

Some of the leavers might leave with a smug realism about their willingness to face the facts that the rest of us won’t: that this will only get worse. That our climate has changed. Our industry has changed. The jobs that paid for groceries and preschool and health insurance and summer camp are going, probably gone. They aren’t wrong.

Do we go? Do we “go back”? Back to where our own childhoods played out? Our kids, though, they don’t know those places. I think of walking down my beloved hometown Chicago’s streets, and even in that daydream I am afraid I would be a stranger there.

I came to L.A. for the work, but I was 28. I didn’t realize what I was actually coming for. I was coming to make this my home. Here is my grocery store, my gym; here are my people, my restaurants. Here is my family. Here are my dogs (so many!). Here is the way that light glittered through the trees of these beautiful canyons.

Here is the “affluent” Pacific Palisades; here is the “eclectic” Altadena: Here are people who lived here and loved it and hated it and wanted to be movie stars, maybe, and ended up as teachers and real estate agents and therapists … and movie stars. Whatever it became it became. And we don’t know what it will become. But I know I love it very much. And I can’t say goodbye just yet.

Sarah Haskins is a screenwriter who lives in the San Fernando Valley.