The sky above us is alive, swirling with thick smoke shielding a pinprick sun. Flames lick the horizon on all sides, glowing above trees and lighting up the mountains as they chip away at houses and melt cars like candles onto the pavement. Our memories and carefully curated lives fade away in minutes, reduced to ash and swept up by the wind before drifting down lazily onto my hair.
Boom. Boom.
Note: the full version of this piece is published in Volume 26, now available
Explosions violently interrupt the steady sound of my heart pounding in my chest, broken by the muffled shouting of neighbors with anxious eyes. I think the blasts are coming from around the block, but with all the yelling, it’s tough to tell. What even is it? Propane tanks? Probably. Handfuls of neighbors and friends scatter the street sporting N95 masks and bandannas to protect their lungs from the thick smoke. I adjust my respirator, grateful I can’t smell the lead-filled air. A few houses up the street, three masked men push trash cans full of water up the driveway to a home half-consumed by flames. Between their masks and the crackling of the fire, they can hardly understand each other’s words and motion with their hands to communicate. They tip the bins over and watch the water flood the scorched floor to save what little remains, fighting against the flames and their own denial. It doesn’t do much.
A woman across the street yells that some neighbors a few houses up are out of town. Between her hat and mask, I can’t recognize her. Probably another neighbor. But the couple on vacation, do they know what’s going on? Someone needs to grab their clothes before their house burns. Where are their documents? Careful of the glass—the wind broke the windows last night. In and out and in again, people rush clothes and loose files out of houses and into idling cars. Someone else is awkwardly stomping out embers smoldering in yards while another man across the street yanks on a kinked garden hose to spray water over his own home as flames tear apart the houses surrounding it.
I threw my hands in the air as a fire truck from a city I’d never been to rolled down the road, but the men inside ignored my gestures as the flames disintegrated our lives into thin dust. Why won’t they stop? Can’t they see our street’s on fire? Maybe they knew the homes were lost to the flames before we did. Maybe they had something else more important than the physical remnants of our lives to save.
My eyes burn as I stand in the driveway of my home, twenty-four years young with two full Nalgene bottles in my dirty hands ready to put out spot fires. I’d called this house my home my entire life, and now I’d do anything to minimize that helpless feeling and ease the growing pit in my stomach. I can hear my heartbeat in my ears. Adrenaline. Is this what it means to feel alive? My father is among the men using what little water pressure remains to hose down homes. A black N95 hides the lower half of his face, but it can’t hide the debilitating exhaustion in his dark eyes. His long-sleeved shirt is caked with ash, but the print underneath acknowledges his membership with the Altadena Mountain Rescue Team. Last night, he helped people evacuate. Now, he’s fighting until he, too, will have to leave.
But once we’re gone, no one else will rescue what we left behind. We’re the last line of defense, neighbors and friends helpless in the face of the deadly Eaton Fire, doing anything, everything, to protect our homes. Is this what a war zone looks like?
A minivan slowly rolls down the street, and two young women inside offer bottled water to anyone who will take one. Inside, my mother cleans the counters, insisting we’ll return home tomorrow. Tomorrow? Would the counters exist tomorrow? My bed, my clothes, my books, and school photos. Would they still be there tomorrow? I’m sweating through my T-shirt from the heat, maybe anxiety. Probably both. As I stand among the flames under an endless dusk, the mourning begins.
I grew up in Altadena’s mountains psyched on high-speed trailer rides attached to Dad’s mountain bike, clutching pine cones while the steep path narrowed and spun along the side of the San Gabriels. The mountains protected me when teenage angst got the best of me, offering a refuge above the world where I could cry alone.
I met friends at trailheads for long hikes to swap the latest stories about school drama or boys, getting into typical teenage trouble between the trees and out of sight from protective parents.
I volunteered at the nature center and obsessed over the running trails, canyoneering routes, and chossy sport crags. Each fold of Altadena’s mountains holds a memory etched permanently into my mind. I remember stumbling across two deer on trail runs. We knew each other’s routines; I’d see them at sunset in a clearing by a fire tower. The pair would watch me jog by as the sun dipped behind the pine trees, leaving us in the dusty evening glow. When I ran after work, I often went miles without seeing anyone else. The deer made me feel safe, in a way; the three of us were always looking out for each other for any bears or mountain lions in an area where sightings were on the rise.
As I sprinted back down from that viewpoint over two thousand feet above my hometown, the trees slowly shifted from pines to oaks, and little yuccas peered through the dirt. Lizards ducked away beneath boulders, and the occasional rattlesnake announced its presence with a sharp sound, like pebbles shaking in a can.
The trails over Altadena offered stunning views of the town, but so did the narrow canyons. I learned how to rappel down waterfalls, found the best places to catch dime-sized tree frogs, ran my first half marathon, and led one of my first sport climbs in those mountains.
I’ve been lucky enough to climb across the country, from splitters in Yosemite to the thin ledges of the Gunks, but a bolted route a short hike into the canyons gave me my first exposure to real outdoor climbing. The rock on Millard Crack is loose and dirty, littered with spiderwebs but comfortably bolted. My dad belayed me that day, and I sent to the sound and spray of a waterfall flowing off to my left.
Photo courtesy of Madeleine Pearce
Opposite the sport routes, the bolts tightly wind up a slick, overhung wall. I used to try pulling on it, long before I understood the aid ladder in front of me was never designed to go free. Before the fire, I had plans to learn how to jug and haul on those routes. It was the perfect quiet spot to learn, generously bolted and unheard of by most other climbers in the Los Angeles area. There would be no need to rush either; the routes weren’t free climbs, and the tiny crag saw very little climber traffic.
Altadena’s grief burned slowly at first, caught in denial. As the wind raged outside the climbing gym on the evening of January 7, I casually checked my phone and saw dozens of missed calls from my parents and friends. Each one urged me to check the news and go home. Eaton Canyon, the stretch of trails a mile from my house, had caught fire in the middle of the windstorm. As I drove home, I could see the flames ripping through the canyons, growing brighter as I cautiously approached my street. But instead of concern, my denial of the severity of the situation gave way to frustration. Even though I could see the edge of the fire as ash clouded my view through the windshield, I was only disappointed about losing my training grounds. I was nearing the end of training for my first marathon, and I had mapped all my future long runs on the trails. I’d have to rework my whole plan.
On that drive home, I never imagined the firestorm would sweep its way over Altadena in a matter of hours. Most of the homes on my street were around a century old, and I had watched the mountains light up in flames from my bedroom window several times over the years. They never crept into the neighborhoods. But the flames never came so low on the foothills like they did that night.
For the next four hours, I found myself completely cut off from the outside world. This was new; earlier fires never resulted in losing service at my house. I couldn’t send or receive text messages. Phone calls, if I got lucky enough to connect to someone on the other end of the line, were spotty and quickly cut off. No one on my block had internet access, meaning none of us could read the news for safety updates. With the power out, I distributed the few extra headlamps I had in my gear bag and lit candles. Every thirty minutes or so, each cell phone in the house screamed an evacuation order.
Despite the chaos, no one wanted to leave. We’d seen these mountains on fire before. Although we could see the blaze inching closer, we had no idea homes on our street would be up in flames by the early morning. So we wrapped bandannas over our faces and took turns standing in the middle of the street staring at the only light we could see, throats burning as we leaned into the wind and dodged debris.
Those of us left on our block choked down smoke until we worried our lungs would give out. My sister and I made the difficult decision to leave our home that night at 11:30 p.m. For the first time in my life, I was forced to seriously consider what physical things I valued. The dirtbag boasts about a lifestyle founded on the bare minimum, whatever an adventurer might need to get outside and nothing more. I’m no dirtbag; I work a comfortable engineering job, antsy at my desk until my computer gives me the five o’clock–Friday send-off to run away to the mountains.
I used to envy the dirtbags, jealous of their commitment to the send over city life and steady employment. They had the courage I could never quite muster to chase their dreams out on the rock. I was fresh out of college and plagued by completely rational fears that I tried to ignore. I liked having health care, a shower, and a steady income to pay for gear or a meal out. I liked knowing I had a place to sleep and keep my things if my car failed me. But I continued running away on the weekends, off to climb or ski wherever the weather looked good, crashing in the back of my car and living off protein bars and pasta. I gave myself permission to choose the average life. The months before the fire, I knew I might not be a dirtbag living in a van bumming between crags, but the dirtbag spirit is alive and well in the weekend warrior….
This is an excerpt from Volume 26. The full piece is available to read in print.
