It turns out it’s not just the acrid smoke blotting out the sun or the falling embers that are burning your skin. No, arguably the most unnerving and oft ignored element of a once-in-a-generation encroaching wildfire is, in fact, the sound. It’s a low and constant murmur akin to the static from a Radio Shack speaker with a busted woofer. The hum is punctuated with the crackle of flames and the buckling of timber and the periodic pop of exploding gas lines somewhere in the distance, all of which gets louder as the fire bears down on you. I know this because on the night of Jan. 7, I was on the roof of my parents’ house in Pacific Palisades with a water hose in one hand and my cellphone in the other and things were going from bad to downright hellacious.
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Los Angeles is a city built on stories, and every major event is eventually spun into a narrative that’s packaged and then sold to the world. One of the advantages of growing up here is that you learn to co-exist with the specter of catastrophe. Fires, floods, earthquakes and riots populated my childhood, and yet we — Gen X Angelenos — lived to tell the tales. The night that both the Palisades and Eaton fires broke out, I knew the story that I wanted to tell. I had covered the Woolsey Fire six years ago for this publication and I had interviewed residents of Malibu who did not heed evacuation orders. Many of those residents were able to save their homes. I wanted to tell a similar story; that I had been able (or at the very least tried) to save the house where I grew up, the one my parents had lived in for nearly 50 years.
I arrived on my cargo bicycle at 1 p.m. to grab the cats and collect some family heirlooms. At around 3:30 p.m., the fire was barreling its way down Temescal Canyon and had started to consume the first homes at the top of Rimmer Avenue in the northeast corner of the Alphabet Streets. A neighbor and I assured each other that the fire department wasn’t going to let any of these houses burn.
We were wrong.
I spent the next few hours soaking the eaves, the awnings, the roof and the trees that lined our property. At around 4:30, when I could see towering flames now devouring our neighbor’s home, I was joined on the roof by my 82-year-old father. I tear up thinking about the courage it took for him to join me, but truth be told, he wasn’t exactly the cavalry I had been hoping for. I had a flashback to 30 years earlier when the two of us stayed up all night armed with hoses on that same roof to try and ward off a fire that was burning in Malibu. That night, in 1993, we prevailed. But in the face of a modern-day climate calamity, we didn’t stand a chance. Unable to breathe or even see, we crawled down off the roof and in darkness scavenged the house for a few more items to grab before we made our escape.
Over the next several hours, my parents’ home — along with almost the entirety of the Alphabet Streets — burned to the ground.
People often ask what it was like to grow up in Pacific Palisades. Like much of the city, this seaside hamlet known for its rambling canyons and collection of bluffs has been transformed in recent years and bears little resemblance to what it was like in the ’80s and ’90s. The wealth that’s poured in over the past few decades has distorted people’s notion of what life here used to be like. It was always a special place, but it was not nearly as gilded as it’s become in recent years. Sure, there was wealth and affluence, but even the well-heeled residents — lawyers, doctors and real estate developers during the Reagan era — seem modest compared to the hedge funders and tech oligarchs who have redefined what it means to be “rich” in Southern California.
For most of its history the Palisades allowed for upper-middle, middle and even blue-collar folks to scratch out an existence. I remember ripping around after school on four-wheel ATVs in the neighbor’s backyard that had been transformed into a muddy racetrack. Homicide cops and grade school teachers lived on our block — my parents were both educators — and my best friend’s family ran the local gas station where we would hang out with the mechanics on the weekends. It was a relatively economically diverse community, a version of Mayberry with all the stereotypical trappings: a local deli (Mort’s), a small-town newspaper (Palisadian Post) and bespoke peculiar rituals (I still marvel at the anarchy that reigned on Halloween in the 1990s).
It’s been largely overlooked, but the Palisades has its own rich intellectual history. In the 1930s and 1940s, it became a cultural sanctuary for a group of European emigres, notably artists and intellectuals who had fled Nazi Germany. Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Fritz Lang and Arnold Schoenberg were among the residents who found refuge here. Celebrities, of course, had always been part of the town’s fabric, but the A-listers who lived here when I was a child seemed perfectly happy to just blend in. You’d see Adam West pumping gas at the Chevron station. Or Billy Crystal at the men’s clothing store. Or Chevy Chase watching his daughter’s AYSO game. Or Walter Matthau — with his legendary hangdog face — walking his sheepdog. In the 1990s, the caliber of the movie stars kept increasing. I can still remember how starstruck I was when I saw Tom Hanks touring the elementary school I attended and thinking to myself, “Why would Tom Hanks, the biggest movie star in the world, want to live here?”
By the mid-2000s, as real estate prices continued to soar, the neighborhood began to transform even more. One by one, the single-story ranch-style homes that had been the signature architectural style of the Palisades were demolished, replaced by mansions. In 2018, developer Rick Caruso opened the 125,000-square-foot Palisades Village shopping center in the heart of town, which put a new, decidedly upscale spin for anyone looking for a stroll through the village. There was a Blue Ribbon Sushi, a juice bar, a vegan bakery and boutiques run by everyone from Jennifer Meyer to Rachel Zoe to Lauren Conrad. The longtime residents I knew ultimately came to accept but could never fully embrace this new, shiny version of the Palisades (ironically, Caruso’s mall was one of the only things that survived the conflagration).
On Jan. 8, as the Palisades still burned, a childhood buddy and I snuck our way into the village using a back route. Our aim was to check in on a few homes of friends who were desperate to know the status. We swung by my parents’ house, which had been reduced to a soupy mess of cherished memories and toxic chemicals. As it turns out, CNN’s Erin Burnett and her team of producers were out in front preparing some sort of coverage. Wearing a mask and ski goggles, I introduced myself. I told her that a crime had been committed. I was furious — in all the hours I’d spent trying to save my parents’ house, I didn’t see a single fire engine. How was it possible that this whole town could’ve burned? Where were the fire trucks? Where was the water? Someone was going to pay for this. I needed her to know that that was the story, and she kindly listened.
We rode on. There were hollowed-out grocery stores, smoldering gymnasiums and the scarred and skeletal remains of more homes than I could count. It was all a bit of a blur. I remember hearing wind chimes next to a house that was still on fire. I remember seeing a firefighter on a cigarette break. And I remember watching looters hop the fence on the block where Vin Scully once lived and where I’m told the creator of Grand Theft Auto now lives, which seems both sad and ironic. We checked all the houses on our list and not a single one was standing.
As I headed home, I ran into another childhood friend, the one whose family ran the local gas station when we were kids. I hadn’t seen him in 30 years. He was standing in front of his family home and, as if by divine intervention, his entire block was entirely untouched. We swapped stories about the fires. He asked about my job and I asked about his kids. We embraced, and as I rode off, he shouted one last thing to me: “It really was a magical place to grow up, wasn’t it?”
This story appeared in the Jan. 29 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
