Surviving The LA Fire

…it delayed The Jolt a little.

7.46pm. My view.

Fire.

Waves of fire.

Thundering across the beautiful mountains of my neighborhood.

The devil was surfing, hanging ten, claws sunk into the edge of his salamandrine board.

Boy, was he hungry for destruction.

Fueled by dry winds of nearly 100mph, no fire brigade battalion on earth could have stopped what landed on my town of Altadena the evening of Tuesday 7th January.

Palm trees erupted like incandescent sparklers, possessed by a whistling parasite that would eat them alive.

Embers ricocheted, landing on roofs, sucked into attic vents, where they would feed on the insulation, erupting in seconds.

Fire fed fire in a cannibals feast.

Just 24 hours later, over 7,000 homes in our neighborhood were gone, incinerated by temperatures of over 2000 degrees.

Street after street was reduced to wisps of ash, memories laid to rest in a layer of fine dust, returned to a mourning earth, like all of us will one day.

***

Our house survived.

No more than luck.

I’ll chalk it up to a miracle, but the reality was, we were handed a gift by the god of chance.

Head or tails, sir? Choose wisely.

***

My son and I spent the first 48 hours of the Eaton fire trying to do what we could to help, our heads thumping for answers in a stupor of disbelief.

Pristine trimmed hedges erupted in front of us. Armed only with a baseball bat and the shoes on our feet, we tried to stamp them out. They just popped back up.

A half-working gas mask between us, with t-shirts that stunk of burn, we were amateurs in an amateur hour hell.

Night fell.

No power. No light. No people, only shapes, moving fast in the shadows.

The glow of red from nearby fires felt like a constant visceral warning; I’ll get you. Our favorite hardware store had become a shell.

Gas lines hissed with jets of blue tinted orange flame. Small explosions serrated the air, suburban flash-bangs, like Molotov cocktails you see on TV.

A siren flared from somewhere, visibility was down to 80ft.

“We don’t rest”. My son’s eyes were red from smoke as he spoke.

I felt the punch of age - I wanted to rest.

My phone was thrust out in front of me, my eyes were no longer my own. I didn’t like the idea of filming all this.

But film I did.

These are some of the pictures.

***

The next day we returned to our neighborhood, slipping under the military cordon in my truck. For a moment, we felt like we could do something.

Little did we know that for many, the fires had only just begun.

Houses that had bet on the casino in the early hours of the night, were going up like popcorn in the day.

It was insatiable.

The devil was leaping from house to house.

In the daytime, the fire looked naked. Dancing its dirty business, devouring the watery clothes that had tried to dress it down.

***

My son and I frantically tried to save a friend’s house.

The garden hoses in their yard were empty, the water pressure entirely gone. The house next door was a boxed inferno, flames belching from windows 10ft from our faces, a caustic spit that warned of a searing unwelcome lick.

It felt utterly hopeless.

Unbeknownst to me, my son had gone back into the burning house, his phone stuck to his ear, as our friend guided him to their final possessions.

Two cans of Dr Pepper in his high-vis vest (he had bought the vest so he’d been seen easier), he chugged a small can of beer from the house fridge. It was the only cold thing he could find to take the burn of smoke from his mouth.

I was on a video call with a client at the time, back in my home office, sitting amongst the ash that had blown through the cracks in the windows of our house, smoke reeling down the street.

It made sense to me at the time: the show goes on. Important call. Don’t let the client down. Stiff upper lip and all that.

Hindsight always wins. It was a dumb idea.

The people on the other side of the call didn’t notice me switching off my video and tracking my son’s location back to the property; his phone going straight to voicemail. My mind was spinning to the worst.

He’s trapped in the house while I’m talking about market positioning.

Twenty minutes later I saw his number pop up on of my phone.

It had got too hot for him, the smoke had become intense as he pulled out what he could. A bike. Some ties (bad ties, I might add), personal papers and their favorite pictures pulled from the wall.

He’d gone back to the kids room and grabbed a handful of stuffed animals before the heat pushed him back, the flames coming through the vents, a final bundle of our friend’s belongings in his arms

You’re a hero, my son.

But don’t ever do that again.

***

And so…to The Jolt.

What can we take from events like this?

I can say without hesitation, that the race for hope that follows disaster, is quite breathtaking.

Here’s what crystallized for me;

• Possessions are important. It’s not all “just stuff”. Some things we own are welded to our memories. I have a new found appreciation and gratitude for the things I love.

• People in crisis react in many different ways; from flight, to fright to fight. It’s ok to freeze. It’s ok to run. And it’s ok to fight. For some, like my son, who wanted to fight, it unlocks a door into a new way of being.

• I have witnessed more touches of humanity in the last 20 days than I have in my entire lifetime. The desire to help others rebuild, to create something more magnificent than what came before, has been deeply touching.

We’ve written a lot in The Jolt about how stories allow us to make sense of the world, even when it all feels senseless.

Which is why, as a story teller, I made a short film about our experiences in the first 48 hours. I couldn’t finish it fast enough.

You can watch it above.

With love,

The Jolt.