At six-thirty a.m. on Tuesday, January 7, I went for a hike in the Palisades Highlands with my buddy Scott. We climbed the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains, enjoying the tranquil morning air and beautiful views of the canyons and the ocean. We were up there for over an hour. Not a hint of smoke.
After we got back, I headed for the Pali Rec Center to play pickleball on the outdoor courts. I waited and waited but nobody showed up. Finally I texted my friend Marco, who texted back that pickleball was called off because of the wind. Yeah, it’s pretty windy, but come on, what a bunch of wimps.
I drove to West LA, to my favorite coffee shop, Kiff Kafe. I planned to write there for a couple of hours. All week I’d been having trouble with chapter eleven of my novel. Maybe today would be my lucky day, and I’d nail it down.
But when I got to Kiff Kafe, it was closed. The owners were French, and I figured they were taking the day off. French people can be like that.
So I went to my second favorite coffee shop, Bluey’s. I got a chocolate almond croissant and a decaf coffee and sat down. After playing my requisite game of online Boggle to get my mind going, I opened up the novel and started writing.
Miracle of miracles, it went well. The words flowed. Unless I was fooling myself, this was the breakthrough I’d been hoping for—
My wife Nancy texted me. “There’s a fire in the Palisades. I think you should come home.”
Oh, for God’s sake. First I can’t play pickleball, then Kiff Kafe is closed, and now, when I’m finally getting good writing done, Nancy wants me to come home?
I googled “Palisades fire” and saw that, yeah, there was a fire up in the Highlands, right near where Scott and I had been hiking. But that was like, five miles from our house. There had been fires up there before, and they never came near us. We lived in the flats.
But if Nancy wanted me home, I guess I should avoid marital strife. I texted, “I’ll head home in a little while.” I figured I’d write for another twenty minutes or so, see if I could get through this chapter.
She texted back, “Okay… …”
If she had texted back just three dots, I would have stayed. But six dots? She meant business.
I was pissed, but I shut my laptop, got in my car, drove down to the Pacific Coast Highway, turned right… and smoke was pluming in the sky.
Okay, it’s a trip to look at, but no big deal. This had happened before. The fire department helicopters streaking through the smoke, spewing foam in the distance? Old news. Mainly I was annoyed at the traffic jam.
Then I got an alert on my phone, saying some crap to the effect of, “There’s a fire. Be ready in case we ask you to evacuate.”
Seriously? I’ve got writing to do.
I drove up Temescal Canyon Road to our house. No fire to be seen. Sure, the sky was smoky toward the northwest, but so what?
The funny thing was, for three or four years I’d been saying to Nancy, “You know, we should think about selling our house one of these days. At some point the value will go down because people are scared of fires. I know our neighbors say it never burns in the flats, but there’s always a first time.”
But now that it was actually about to happen, I magically forgot everything I’d said. I believed it in the abstract, but when it got concrete… Yeah, our house might burn down some time in the future, but not today.
I got out of the car and went in the house, where Nancy was gathering our family photographs. She said, “I think we might have to evacuate.”
“The fire doesn’t look that bad. It’s just an alert.”
“I don’t know.”
“Look, I’m really hungry. I’m gonna make a salad.”
So as the fire grew closer, I mixed salad ingredients. Arugula, scallions, blueberries, and feta cheese with an olive oil lemon juice dressing.
At least I didn’t take time to toast pecans.
Then I went and chatted with our neighbors across the street. Harold, the husband, agreed with me that the wives were getting carried away. He’d had a stroke and she was in her seventies, so I helped them carry suitcases and paintings to the car.
Finally I got to work packing our own stuff. Even if we did get evacuated, we’d be back in a couple days, so I got three T-shirts and three pairs of socks and underwear. I got my passport, toothbrush, checkbook, and phone and computer chargers. I forgot all about my mutual fund records, S corporation records, sunglasses and reading glasses, five hundred dollars in cash… I didn’t think about a wood carving Nancy’s dad gave me before he died, or our kids’ baseball cards and Little League trophies, or my only copy of the very first stage play I ever wrote, forty years ago.
Then I ran out of time to remember all that, because we got another alert from the Fire Department. This one said basically, “Shit’s getting real. Evacuate.”
Nancy grabbed a frog puppet and a stuffed monkey that our grandkids enjoyed playing with, and we got in the car and headed back down Temescal Canyon. We left our other car in the driveway, because we didn’t want to bother with it.
Temescal wasn’t gridlocked—we beat that by about ten minutes—but it was slow. Instead of the usual three-minute drive down to the Pacific Coast Highway, it took thirty.
So I did what I had to do. Nancy was driving, so I took out my laptop and started writing. She said something or other, and I said “uh huh” a couple times and kept clicking away. I had to finish that chapter.
Finally, just as we were about to reach the PCH, Nancy said, “You know, we’re in a very stressful situation here, and I’d rather not experience it alone.”
I’m not a total twit. I put away my laptop.
Half an hour later we arrived at my mother-in-law’s condo near Beverly Hills. She was back east in New York State, so we had the whole place to ourselves.
Then the waiting game began. The doomscrolling. Checking and rechecking NextDoor.com. I finally realized our house was truly in danger. I imagined our thousands of books in the dining room and living room going up in flames. And good-bye, piano. Good-bye, everything. The fire was moving fast: one football field every twenty seconds. Not enough firefighters, not enough water, not enough foam. Too much wind, getting above 100 miles per hour. Too much dry groundcover. It had only rained a quarter inch in eight months, and that stuff was ready to burn.
But hey: we were in the flats.
Day turned to night. We didn’t go to sleep tlll three a.m. The fire kept burning. We didn’t know if our house still survived. We woke up on Wednesday not knowing. Night came again and we still didn’t know.
We studied the maps on the internet—the very incomplete maps. The fire was coming ever closer to our house. It was on our side of Sunset. Coming up Almar.
Thursday morning came, with an updated map. Our entire street had been decimated.
But wait: the map showed every house on our street had burned down but ours.
We found photos and videos of our neighbors’ homes: all turned to rubble. Nothing left. The eight-million-dollar monstrosity next to ours: gone.
But a video showed our white picket fence was still standing! Still white. There was our bird feeder, untouched. Our Adirondack chair. Did our house miraculously survive the fire?
But we couldn’t find a photograph or video that showed the house itself.
We asked someone on NextDoor who had media credentials, could they please drive up to our street and take a picture of our house?
Thursday night came and went. On Friday morning, the media person texted us pictures.
Our home was flattened, except for the brick chimney and a part of one garage wall.
And except for our fence, our Adirondack chair, and the birdfeeder. There was even a bird at the birdfeeder.
As I looked at the ashes of our home, and the bird nearby, my mind went blank with shock and horror. That’s it? That’s all that’s left of our home? Everything is destroyed?
It was like the last twenty-five years of our lives had been erased. They were a dream, a fantasy.
But then something strange happened. I felt my chest start to relax, for the first time in three days. No more desperately hoping. Now we knew.
Nancy and I gave each other a hug, then went outside and took a walk. It was hot and still polluted from the fire, so we wore masks.
But it wasn’t as bad as before. We sat in a coffee shop and I ate a chocolate chip cookie, even though it was morning. We held hands and said to each other, well, we had twenty-five years in that house. We had a nice life there.
Talking to Nancy made my life feel real again.
Then we went back to our mother-in-law’s condo and started texting family and friends that our house was indeed no more.
Ever since Tuesday we’d been receiving a lot of texts, calls, emails, and social media messages, and now they increased. Second cousins I’d never met asked if we wanted to stay with them in Florida. A woman I hadn’t seen in thirty-five years invited us to her place outside Tucson. Old colleagues from years ago offered us clothes and food. Friends took us out for pizza, pastrami, ice cream. Restaurants gave us free meals.
I wrote about our story on social media, because I like getting attention, and because I’m a novelist and it helps sell books. I mentioned that my beloved baseball cap collection was gone, and people began sending me caps. I ended up with thirty of them. I mentioned I had lost my collection of Zippy the Pinhead comic books, and a couple in Connecticut sent me their very large collection of Zippys. Witten Farms in southern Ohio, no relation to me, sent me Witten Farms water bottles, t-shirts, and fanny packs.
As I wrote earlier, I lost my one and only copy of the first play I ever wrote. It was titled, ironically enough, Alaska Fire. I put on Facebook that I’d lost it, and a woman I’d never met named Wendy Revel, from Atlanta, messaged me that she had a copy. I’d sent it to her theatre forty years ago, and she held on to it even after she moved to DC. So when I came to DC in April to visit my father, she gave it to me.
The fire was a reminder that people are basically nice.
I’d say the funniest and most annoying email we got was early on. Someone wrote us, “I’m not sure what to say. When other family and friends have faced fires in their areas, their houses somehow beat the odds.”
Now that made us feel like, he’s right. God must have singled us out. He decided, hey Matt and Nancy, I’m gonna mess with you. I felt that way even though I don’t believe in God.
But in general, we didn’t get that feeling. This was one advantage of having your whole town burn down: it’s not just about you. You have plenty of company.
Of course there were disadvantages too. Our neighbors Gail, Harold, and Joel were gone. My friends Scott, Daniel, Jason—gone. Tara, the lady from Belfast who cut my hair for twenty years—gone. Our grocery store, our kids’ elementary school, the swimming pool we went to twice a week—gone. The farmers market we went to every Sunday—gone. Café Vida, where Nancy and I went most Friday nights—gone. Matthew’s Garden Café, where my buddies and I had breakfast on Saturdays—gone. Pali Rec and the pickleball courts—gone.
I lay in bed sometimes counting up our losses.
Except we were lucky in one important way. We had a second home in the Adirondacks where we’d spent summers for the past thirty years. We had a community there, and a gorgeous lake nearby. We just had to make it till summer, and then we’d be sitting on the beach with our friends on summer evenings, listening to crickets and bullfrogs.
Meanwhile life went on. I found a couple great coffee shops in Beverly Hills. Nancy and I made plans to see our sons and their families in San Francisco and Boston. And we had a whole new exciting project to work on: dealing with our insurance company.
It was like a full-time job. We were required to list every single thing we lost in the fire, re-remembering everything we had cherished. We wound up with over seven hundred line items, and the whole process seemed specially designed to extract tears.
Nancy and I and everybody else who lost their homes were sure the insurance companies were out to screw us. Bad enough that the forces of nature had conspired against us, now we had to deal with these faceless insurance companies. The morning after the fire, I said to Nancy, “You know, I think we just lost a million dollars last night.”
Every time we developed a working relationship with an insurance adjuster, they would quit. Every time the company said they’d get back to us in a week, it would take a month. A thousand rumors flew about how nobody would receive the full value of their insurance. The system would go bankrupt.
Finally, seven months after the fire, we got a call from Insurance Adjuster #5 with shocking news: they were paying the full value of our claim. The check came in two weeks later. We had serious chocolate fudge ice cream that night. Instead of losing a million dollars, I think we’ll wind up breaking even, or close to it.
It turns out, we were lucky our house burned down all the way. If it had been only partially destroyed or smoke damaged, things would have been a lot more ambiguous. Our friends in that situation were very unhappy with their insurance. And if our house had somehow survived while everything around us was gone… Well, I don’t think that would have been fun.
Of course, the main way we’ve been lucky is that we had a second home, and a second community. Almost all of our friends who lost their houses didn’t have that. They’ve been a lot more at sea, still trying to piece their lives back together.
One night recently, as we approach the one-year anniversary of the fire, I sat by the lake in the Adirondacks one evening. I looked out at the ice and reflected. What had the fire taught me? What had I lost? What had I gained?
It was easy to think of things I’d lost.
But I’d gained some things too.
It wasn’t totally bad that our lives were simplified. We had one less house to worry about. We didn’t have to deal with mice in the attic of our LA home, or the garage door not working, or the back porch needing to be fixed.
In the past couple years our lives had been ricocheting between LA, the Adirondacks, our son’s family in San Francisco, our other son’s family in Boston, and travel to Europe. Now there was one less ricochet. We were enjoying living in the Adirondacks. Maybe we’d fix up our house there and live in it more or less full time.
We probably would have sold our house in LA one day. Now we wouldn’t have to meet with realtors, stage our home, do open houses. We wouldn’t have to decide what things to take with us to our new home and what things to throw away. The fire saved us four or five months of aggravation.
The fire also reminded us that nothing lasts forever. There’s a positive message you can take away from that: appreciate every day.
I still feel rootless sometimes when dusk comes, without the books, paintings, board games, and everything else we’d accumulated over the years, and with our Los Angeles friends scattered to the winds. But I also feel free. We’re meeting new people and forming new memories. Just last week Nancy joined a local chorus, and I joined a Sunday night chess club.
We still have two house keys from our old home in LA. Maybe on the anniversary, January 7, we’ll bury them somewhere. Or maybe we’ll turn them into wind chimes.
