Suzanne Guldimann and Elizabeth Guldimann were our TNT Staff “in the field”. Although they never needed to evacuate they were days on end without electricity and cell phone access in their home in Point Dume. They found cell phone coverage in a block up the street and made that trek many times, in the dark and in the wind, to maintain what they could of TNT’s social media coverage and communication with us.
Suzanne Guldimann sheltered in place in Malibu. One of my earliest memories is of my father holding me up to see the orange glow of the Clampett-Wright Fire. That was 1970. I was two. It burned within a quarter mile of our house, give or take. My parents piled me, my two brothers, the photo album, and probably my mom’s prized teapot into the car and drove to Zuma beach to wait out the storm.
In 2018 it was me and my octogenarian mom piling into the car with the dog and the cats, and the teapot and evacuating from the Woolsey fire. It burned to the stop sign 500 feet up the street.
In between those two events, I’ve sat on the roof with my dad watching the fire race over the mountains, I’ve packed the cars and the dogs and the cats and the photo albums numerous times. We’ve hosted friends who have had to evacuate out of the immediate path of the fire. We’ve fled, ourselves, on a couple of occasions staying with family or friends or waiting at the beach to see which way the wind was blowing. I’ve reported on every fire since the 2007 Corral Fire for the local media. I’ve seen a lot. I’ve never seen anything like the Palisades fire. We had a practice run for Palisades in December, when the Franklin fire broke out in Malibu Canyon and burned all the way to Corral Canyon. That fire destroyed 20 buildings and displaced thousands of people, but it was minor compared to the hellfire that erupted on January 7. I’ve never seen a fire move so fast. It ripped up the coast and over Saddle Peak in just a few hours. That night, the sky was red and the flames were taller than the silhouettes of the mountains. This wasn’t a line of flame eating its way gradually across the ridges, it was a racing, thundering giant, devouring everything in its path.
We didn’t have cell phones or the internet when I was a child. We didn’t have them this time either, or electricity. Once again, we depended on our old battery-powered radios, just the way my parents did back in the ’70s and ’80s. My niece Elizabeth handles TNT’s social media for us. She found a spot up the road where there was a glimmer of wifi. She stuck to her post in hurricane strength winds wearing swimming goggles, an old WWII helmet, and a parka. The helmet and the goggles were for flying debris. The fire was still far away from us, and the Franklin fire burn scar provided a critically important buffer, but it was still 48 hours of pure terror, even here.
Friends up near Saddle Peak lost their house that was designed and built to withstand wildfire. Friends in La Costa lost their house that was already a rebuild from the 1993 Old Topanga Fire. Multiple friends in Big Rock lost their homes, some of which had been built in the 1950s and had never burned before. One dear friend lost her family’s house near Topanga State Beach. It was built in 1936. Her husband offered these words of comfort, “at least the view remains,” he said.
I learned later that another friend lost her home in the Palisades Highlands, and some of my oldest friends were burned out of their 1905 bungalow in Altadena where they have lived for nearly 30 years. They are all among the thousands of Angelenos displaced by fire this month.
The Woolsey Fire had a devastating impact on the western half of Malibu. It destroyed the homes of hundreds of families and burned fully half of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, but in a weird way it has been a more private kind of disaster, the grief continues to be suffered by families and neighbors who lost everything and are still in the process of rebuilding their lives, but the scars are no longer as visible. Nature—far more resilient than humans—began to recover almost as soon as the first rains fell, and few people except the ones who live here, witnessed the full extent of the damage. Recovery from that disaster is still ongoing and will be for many more years, but it is no longer news.
The Palisades and Eaton fires destroyed landmarks familiar to everyone who travels through these areas. It burned not just parts of the urban-wildland interface but entire city neighborhoods—houses, apartments, stores, places of worship, parks, libraries—many square miles of apocalyptic devastation. The scars of this fire cannot be easily ignored.
Will it make a difference? Will the new houses and buildings that replace the old ones be built to withstand a changing climate, or will we make the same mistakes again and set the dominoes up to fall in the next fire? Because there will be another fire. Fire is both our past and our future in California. We might be able to adapt but we cannot change that, no matter how many resources are in place or how many promises are made.
I watched the full moon rise above Saddle Peak after the worst of the fire was over. By day, the mountain was gray with char and ash, and still wreathed in smoke, but it looked serene, unchanged in the moonlight, breathtakingly beautiful. This is why we stay, I thought. This is why people return and rebuild and refuse to leave when the fires come. Because, despite the hazards and the heartbreak, there are moments like this, of perfect beauty.
The teapot? It’s back in the china cabinet until next time, because there will be a next time.
“Barn’s burned down; now I can see the moon.” —Mizuta Masahide
