Dispatch from Los Angeles
We are safe (for now) from the fires ravaging our beautiful city
When I said I wanted to write more in 2025, I had no idea I’d be starting with something like this. But here I am in the middle of Los Angeles, as fires consume the city, writing to you. For years I have encouraged you to document your own history. Not to rely on historians or journalists or even poets to get it exactly right for your experience. This is me, writing my own history.
Let me first say that as I type this, I am in my home with my family, safe, with our pets, and not currently in the path of any of the multiple fires burning in the area. That hasn’t been true all week, but it is true right now. And every Angeleno I know has been forced to live in the “right now” every hour since last Tuesday.
Right now we are watching the conditions
Right now we are downloading the Watch Duty fire app
Right now we are packing
Right now we are evacuating
Right now we are safe
Right now we are heartbroken
In spite of a bumpy 2024, and an uncertain landscape ahead, we started 2025 with hope. I danced on the beach in Mexico with Jeff lighting the New Year’s Eve sparklers on candles from the resort, and the teenagers rolling their eyes at my rowdy rendition of Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive.
I told my work team that the first two weeks of January were a little quiet on the calendar, and perfect to catch up on some projects. I hosted a vision board party and laughed over zoom explaining that the reason I never do a vision board is because I’m superstitious about dreaming for the future, because what if it all collapses?
These are the little things you think about later and wonder if they were premonitions or just an old trauma response.
Back in Los Angeles, we were told it was going to be a very windy week. And though I know the rest of the country loves to make fun of LA weather woes, the “wind events” really have become a problem in the last few years. There is a lot of damage and debris, and, much like the historic flooding two years ago, the wind causes lots of infrastructure problems for a city built for outdoor living. Many schools (my kids’ included) don’t have cafeterias, for example, because they eat outside. So you can imagine that the inclement weather of the last few years, after decades without these issues, has caused widespread complications. So we geared up for the wind, which is synonymous with fire danger.
Tuesday, January 7, was our kids’ first day back at school after the holiday break. By mid-morning, we had word that there was a fire on the west side of town. The Pacific Palisades is a gorgeous neighborhood along the coast and then inland. It is full of beautiful homes and shops and restaurants. A lot of celebrities live in that area, as you probably know by now. But a lot of normal people, too, live and work in the area. It’s the type of neighborhood (like many in LA) where families have been in the same house for generations.
The wind in the middle of the day was nearly 80 mph. People were stopping in the street to take photos of the smoke that kept billowing up by the ocean. Evacuation orders began and so then we were watching live footage of people fleeing their homes in the Palisades, where there was gridlock. People were stopping in the street to abandon their cars and walk to safety. We started asking ourselves, “What would we do if…?”
Tuesday evening, we got emergency alerts on our phones. School was canceled for Wednesday and likely for the rest of the week. People started sharing the apps and meteorologists that were helpful. By late evening, word of a new fire in the Pasadena area. Alta Dena is so charming, so special. It has these old, beautiful homes and a thriving community. We have several dear friends that live there. I didn’t want to add to their stress, so I didn’t text.
We live in the Hollywood Hills, miles and miles from those first fires, and still it felt ominous. I couldn’t imagine how they could fight a fire against that wind. The conditions were dire and not letting up any time soon.
The various text threads of mom friends were lighting up with controlled panic. When we went to bed Tuesday night, with the wind so loud you can’t hear each other speak, I took photos of my living room just in case.
No one slept on Tuesday night. I turned the volume all the way up on my phone so I wouldn’t miss a single alert, and my phone dinged all night with news, notifications, and texts. We could only doze for a few minutes at a time. By morning we knew that the Alta Dena fire had been enormously destructive. I ventured a supportive text to our dear friends, who lived in absolutely the prettiest home I’d ever seen. Just a few months ago we attended their son’s bar mitzvah in the backyard. It was the most stunning location you’ve ever seen.
“The house is gone,” she wrote back.
It was the first time I felt able to cry.
Though we mentally and physically prepared for it all day on Wednesday, when we got the alert to evacuate on Wednesday evening, it still felt like a surprise. We were lucky that a friend texted us about the Sunset Fire before it had even hit the news sources, and I think that extra ten minutes or so allowed us to get down the canyon easily and to check into one of the last rooms at a pet-friendly hotel a few miles away in the valley. I had been worried the whole time about cars bottleneck-ing in the canyon. Where we live, there are only a few roads in and out. It would be easy to get stuck.
I packed:
Passports
Jewelry
Laptops and hard drives
My childhood journals
Two dogs
Toiletries and a few changes of clothes
It’s interesting what your brain does when you have to grab all that matters. You realize how very little does. There are irreplaceable things like art and fish that can’t go in the car. I also had a light bulb moment about how little I cared about the things in my closet. I admit that I might feel differently about that if I had lost it all, but in the moment it wasn’t important enough to save. I packed comfy clothes that I could live for days in, and sneakers that I could walk for miles in. My thought wasn’t about expensive designer items, but what I would realistically want to be wearing if we were stuck somewhere for awhile.
At the hotel, the lobby was full of people evacuating. There were so many pets. It wasn’t chaos, but it was loud. Everyone was kind. The woman at the front desk had to ask me three times how many nights I needed. I just stared at her blankly.
I’m not sure, I said.
We started with two nights, which felt like both a “just in case we need it” and also “that might just be the start.”
Our family of four plus both dogs stayed all in one room. We couldn’t bear to be apart. There were so many texts it was impossible to keep up with everything. Our friends and neighbors were all evacuating or offering to host those evacuating. We felt scared and cared for. Jeff and I kept brave faces on for the kids, who were stoic and who were also fielding the barrage of phone notifications from their friends and the emergency alert systems.
I worried we weren’t far enough away from the danger in our hotel. I worried that trying to get on the freeway and get farther away would be a mistake. I was surprised at how much relief I felt to be in the hotel, where they had assured us that if everyone needed to evacuate from there, the hotel had a plan. Someone else “having a plan” felt like the best thing I’d ever heard.
Jeff went back out to grab dog food (which we’d forgotten to pack) and burritos for dinner. This errand was perfectly safe, as we were miles from the immediate danger, but we were jumpy until he returned. We all ate on the hotel room beds and watched as another new fire sprouted in Studio City, not far from our hotel and very close to our school community. Our home was now between two active fires, one named the Sunset Fire and the other named the Sunswept Fire. There were too many fires. I didn’t like that they had pretty names.
By midnight on Wednesday, both the Sunset Fire and the Sunswept Fire were contained, meaning our home was then out of the danger zone. The Sunset Fire - which put all of Hollywood, including icons of the city, at risk - was contained almost entirely to the brush in the hillside and never hit residential areas or city buildings. This felt like an absolute miracle. I was hopeful to get some sleep in the hotel. It had only been 36 hours since the fires began and it was already an entirely different city.
We were able to return home on Thursday morning, and we have been safe since. Friday night brought scary developments as the Palisades fire threatened to crest the mountains into the valley, where tens of thousands of homes were at stake. We have many friends in that area, so we watched closely in case anyone needed to evacuate to our home. The firefighters (heroes all) managed to hold the mountain ridge and with a slight break in the wind this weekend, that threat has diminished for now. However, with extremely high winds predicted this week, we are far from out of danger. These conditions are expected to continue through Wednesday.
The last few days have felt strangely like the beginning of the pandemic. We’re all home together, watching the news about an unfathomable disaster. It’s impossible to focus or be productive. The kids keep facetime-ing with their friends. When we do leave the house, the streets are quiet. People smile sadly at one another. There are masks.
But we are enormously grateful for our safety. We are devastated and heartbroken for those who have lost everything. Every day we learn of more friends who have lost their homes. In the last few days, the landscape of Los Angeles has changed. Physically and emotionally.
I have been trying to document and share on Instagram the enormous amount of destruction. I’m also sharing resources there as I get them, though some information is changing daily, so when things have settled a little I’ll post a list here of how to help. This will be a long, long road or recovery, cleanup, and healing. What I’m hearing now is that financial donations are what is most needed. We are giving to Direct Relief, Los Angeles Fire Department Foundation, the Red Cross, and more hyper local efforts and GoFundMe accounts from friends and acquaintances.
I am so proud of (but not surprised by) the outpouring of donations and volunteers across the city. Our school has become a donation site, so we’ve seen first hand how many people want to help. This afternoon I offered up my podcast studio for an important episode about grief and loss for a large show that will help spread the message far and wide to the many who are just at the beginning of this devastating process. I’ll post more about that when I can.
Thank you for letting me share this story. I remain committed to writing more this year, and though I had lots of plans for what that would look like, it seems that dispatches from Los Angeles will be part of what I’m sharing.
Thank you for your love, support, and prayers during this time. This beautiful city will need all of it in the coming days.
