“I knew what I had to do. I had to begin documenting the disaster.”
When the Palisades Fire started in early January, I was out of town in a remote area in central California with practically no cell service, and my family was out of the country. I hiked to the top of a hill, and my phone started blowing up. It was time to make a beeline home. The fires had burned along Pacific Coast Highway and now turned north up Topanga Canyon, where the house I grew up in, where I live now, was in danger.
Inside my home were my two cats, my life’s work—hundreds of thousands of photos that live on hard drives—and my mother’s lifetime of work, over a hundred paintings stored all over the house. The house itself could be considered her greatest piece of art. She handpicked every tile, doorknob, light fixture, faucet handle and paint color to create an environment that is truly unique. She moved to the Los Angeles neighborhood of West Hills in the San Fernando Valley, about 13 miles north, and safe from the fires, two and half years ago, but her presence radiates from the walls. Losing the house would be disastrous, and the Santa Monica Mountains and the trails that wind through the canyons and oak forests are my church. The thought of losing both was a dagger to my chest.
As I drove back, I began receiving devastating videos, photos and news from various group chats and apps. My wife and kids called terrified that our cats were going to be burned alive. When I saw a video of the fire ripping up Topanga Canyon in what looked like hundred-foot-tall flames, my heart sank. I began to receive information, some of it misleading, that the fire was about to take Topanga. Panic set in. Luckily, one of my childhood friends had not yet evacuated. He packed up the hard drives and was able to grab one of our cats.
When I got back to L.A., it was night. I immediately drove up to the house and was able to find the other cat and grab a few paintings. The next day, I returned. I parked in the driveway and looked behind me to see a huge plume of dark smoke towering over my neighborhood. I could see firefighters perched up on the hill, and helicopter after helicopter flew directly over the house, the pounding of the blades penetrating my bones. It felt like a war zone. I frantically packed up my mom’s favorite paintings, a bunch of personal items requested by my family, and all my old negatives and photos from the pre-digital days. Once the car was packed, I knew what I had to do. I had to begin documenting the disaster.
I drove up to the top of the street and joined a crew of firefighters protecting the houses lining Topanga State Park. When I first arrived, the flames whipped up high into the sky. Helicopters repeatedly dumped water, and, miraculously, the winds calmed to a near standstill. Chain saws buzzed as the firefighters cleared way for a hose to be dragged up the side of the mountain. For now, they were winning the fight against Mother Nature. I stood with a few firefighters, mesmerized by all the fiery dots spread across the parkland. How could something so terrible be so beautiful?
Over the following days, I continued to document the fire and its aftermath. I drove up around Piuma Ridge, the mountainous area my second son was named after. Everything was burned, as far as I could see, a moonscape with blackened bushes reaching to the sky like demonic hands. Amazingly, most of the houses were saved by the firefighters. As I drove down Las Flores Canyon Road and along Pacific Coast Highway, I began to discover the houses of the people who weren’t as fortunate. When I finally arrived in the Pacific Palisades, the scene was apocalyptic. Abandoned cars that had been bulldozed to make room for the fire trucks to come through lined Sunset Boulevard, half of them burned down to their shells. Block after block of houses were flattened. As I stood on a hill overlooking the Palisades, I thought of something I heard on the radio: “Wind is king.” If the wind did not die that night when the fire was at my doorstep, Topanga would have suffered the same fate as the Palisades.
Topanga resident Ivan Kashinsky is a documentary photographer whose work has appeared in many publications, including The New York Times and Smithsonian Magazine.
