One writer's year-long journal of Altadena, after the devastating wildfires of 2025.
On morning walks for many weeks after the calamitous firestorm in Altadena , California , last January, I would happen upon stray pockets suspended in time. Homes trimmed with Christmas 2024’s forest-green wreaths, or perhaps a tipped-over jolly Santa.
One vestige was most haunting: a grand front-lawn California live oak that was adorned with enormous, still-shiny ornaments catching the sun—a stopped clock.Continuing to the street’s end, however, supplied blunt context. Those structures were sole survivors. The bungalows and ranch houses that once filled the neighborhood had been reduced to fire rubble: twisted metal, shattered stucco, and an explosion of glass shards. For months, it remained that way. Two truths, side by side. The casual arbitrariness of it all, staggering. Backhoes and stake trucks cleared and carried away much of that rough detritus in the heat of the summer. The neighborhood is now a palimpsest—yawning green fields dotted with wildflowers. The new vista, backdropped by the San Gabriel Mountains, looks like something from another century. Though striking, I cannot say that it looks beautiful, nor that it brings me any peace.When the fire sparked in those mountains above us—at dinner hour on January 7, 2025—it felt unwarranted to entertain the absolute worst. We’d just stowed the good-luck black-eyed peas in the freezer; the ink had yet to dry on the New Year’s resolutions and hopes.Nevertheless, the blaze would leap off those mountains, fueled by freakishly intense 100-mile-per-hour Santa Ana winds. It pushed onward, beyond Eaton Canyon—for hours, days—and would eventually claim more than 9,000 structures and 19 lives, upending millions more. Its heat, scope, and force caught even the most disaster-hardened residents off guard.“I thought I’d be back.”“I took very little.”“We always came back. Always.”I evacuated in the early hours of January 8 with two hastily packed bookstore tote bags and the clothes on my back. While I did not lose my home , many people I know and love lost theirs.What people don’t tell you is that in the aftermath of disaster, not only does the ground shift, so does one’s sense of time and self. This catastrophe has rewritten our collective sense of place and safety, even in a region frequently visited upon by calamity.Our communities were descended upon by phalanxes of National Guard troops, busloads of disaster-aid volunteers, and international news crews. Immediately, they were joined by a wave of opportunists of all kinds: lookie-loos, random content creators searching for dramatic backdrops to boost views, predatory contractors, real estate prospectors. It was like beating back kitchen ants in the summer, one friend said—people turning up on her neighbors’ incinerated property, foraging, “going live” on social media. “I’m yelling at them,” she told me. “Really loud. ‘You’ve already been asked nicely to leave, and here you are again!’ ” She took after them in her car. Reckless, she knew. The flare of rage did not surprise her. But how cathartic it felt did. A surfeit of news footage circulated online, though it often churned with the same imagery: landmark structures burning in a loop; residents zipped up in PPE slogging through twisted wreckage. Drones provided a different point of view and allowed for a sense of scale, but nothing told the story like day-to-day life close-up. Longtime residents sped past their own homes in their cars, as there were no longer defining landmarks. Even the street signs had burned or, like mine, been wrenched off by the wind. Other neighbors, with nowhere else to go, returned surreptitiously when their temporary housing timed out and found respite sleeping in the car in what was left of their driveway. When I first moved to the area two decades ago, I would joke to friends, “Altadena is where the ’60s and ’70s came to thrive.” It was meant as a compliment. To my mind, it was a nod to its creative coexistence, open-ended looseness, and ardent embrace of nature. Altadena offered a specific California rhythm, mood—a “protect at all costs” way of life. Now it was chaos and ash and, along some stretches, fully unrecognizable.This, from the outset, has been a story of community collaboration. On the first night of the fire, many in those neighborhoods saved themselves. Residents watered down roofs and lawns with siphoned pool water. They knocked on doors and broke down gates to make pathways when there were no first responders on the scene to do so.The same proved true in the early aftermath. Nikki High, the beloved owner of Octavia’s Bookshelf, turned her store into a relief hub, distributing potable water, food, diapers, and PPE. Claire Schwartz, a trained archivist, displaced for months, set up a website to collect found family photos and other ephemera scattered by the violent winds during evacuation. A volunteer team of residents and preservationists swiftly banded together, naming their cohort after their purpose: Save the Tiles. In short order, they assembled numerous volunteer teams to fan out and rescue the historic fireplace tiles from a forest of wounded chimneys that had become a disquieting symbol of the vast burn zone.It’s been a year of sifting through ambient worry: Is the air safe? The tree fruit? Why do I still smell that acrid smoke stench? What has imperceptibly embedded itself inside?Even still, life roared forward, as residents continued to struggle with bandwidth. There was little energy to respond to the most pressing matters , let alone comprehend the steady march of orders out of Washington, D.C., which included the downsizing of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the slashing of health-care subsidies. All of it would coincide with stepped-up, violent ICE raids across the country. The National Guard would return to L.A. County, but this time federally deployed—without the governor’s consent—to surveil citizen protests against ICE’s force and brutality. On the heels of historic climate disaster, these edicts targeted the most vulnerable at their most vulnerable.Consequences were swift: On a June-gloom morning, a community-based collaborative hosted a one-stop resource fair for burn-zone residents. Inside a modest parish hall, attorneys, contractors, architects, and therapists fanned out brochures and business cards on tables. A medical van was parked outside, offering free blood tests to measure lead levels—yet another post-fire concern. But before volunteers could set everything in place, word made the rounds that ICE crews had chased down and detained four people in an adjacent working-class neighborhood. After a quick confab, the organizers deemed that, out of “an abundance of caution,” it was best to shut down and wait until it was safer. Just when “safer” might be remains uncertain.The expectation has been that everyone should lean into resilience. The handmade signs posted across the area echo this sentiment: “Altadena Strong”; “We Will Rebuild.” But what if you aren’t? Or what if you can’t? What do you do with the jagged emotions that can’t get cleared away, the feelings that have embedded themselves in you?I keep looking to those who have been here much longer than I have, who embody Altadena’s independent spirit—people like the artist Keni “Arts” Davis, who for decades has been documenting the homes and landscapes of Altadena in watercolors. He has captured, with gentle fluidity, Altadena’s tousled beauty, its proud and vivid example of diversity, of life drawn outside the lines. I happened upon Davis one morning post-fire. His sleek easel was set up in a parking lot on Lake Avenue, one of Altadena’s main thoroughfares, which angles north toward the San Gabriels. He was working on the charred flanks of buildings we’d all watched burning in January. As he painted, a convoy of stake trucks made its way up and then down the hill. “They are hauling away all of the people’s belongings—our lives,” he said. This is why he needed to work briskly, racing to finish, not just before the paint dried in the sun but, he explained, “before it will all turn into a parking lot.” This too was now part of Altadena’s story. It had hit him, suddenly, with a sense of profound urgency, that he was going to lose his town not once but twice.Crossing the threshold of a new year, the wide-open space Davis had predicted now stretches before me. I see it through his eyes. The vistas have changed, flattened. So has the light, no longer filtered by structures and trees. There’s an absence of shadow. While last year I’d stumbled upon remnants of the past, now I see portents. Just up the street from where I stood with Davis, a white-brick wall backs up against a short row of businesses, another miraculous still-standing oasis, backdropped by burn-scarred mountains. One handwritten sentence stretches across the field of white. A prediction or confirmation, possibly both: “This is going to take A While.”
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