THROUGH THE ASHES

The beach is our playground, the PCH our route to school, and Topanga is home to our school. There is life pre-fire and post, and yet we are also so lucky to have our home and our school still standing.

The first 24 hours of this event, we stayed in L.A. trying to debate the best course of action. As they started to evacuate Santa Monica and the fire started to rip up Topanga Canyon, I knew we had to go, not because our house was in danger but because the fear and anxiety had gotten too much that I couldn’t stay balanced emotionally or keep my girls inside any longer.

I packed a go bag, clothes, sentimental items, and government documents. I made sure my car and our camper were stacked with our emergency kits. I always keep a box in my car and one in our camper. As we pulled out of L.A., the Hollywood Hills caught on fire. I was glad to be on the road with my kids.

Over the next few days and even weeks, the app Watch Duty was my new social media, going off with updates of fire progression, new evacuation orders and new fires. I keep us on the road, three weeks in total, finding new adventures all across the Southwest from California to New Mexico and as far North as Mendocino. My family loves a road trip, and focusing on driving to new places and finding new accommodations kept me as balanced as I could be and slightly distracted from the apocalypse at home. There was no school anyway and the air and ocean were compromised, so we stayed on the road as long as we could. 

Having kids and keeping them safe, I knew volunteering my time was not something in the cards. Instead I organized friends who are chefs to cook for firefighters and families that had stayed in the canyon to aid in the fight. I sent money for supplies or donated to go fund me for friends who already had lost their homes. There were so many ways to help. 

 
I already said we were lucky but the way the road trip worked out and aligned with me being able to manage work from afar, I felt so grateful for that privilege. Even with all that goodness, living within a city that is actively going through grief is an unexplainable weight. It’s like the whole city lost a close family member and we are all just energetically flattened. 

I think our city collectively and individually just must allow time to go through the grief process – allow for all the pieces to continue to unfold. This whole process is so far from over. Every day there is a new unfolding of how this impacts daily life – from pollution, to commute, to communities being scattered around the city.

The kids see all the gear in the car or camper and as we’ve traveled by car so much in the Western part of the country, we’ve had to expose them often to the effects of wildfires. The West has been burned quite a bit the past few years, and even in Los Angeles we’ve had a lot of exposure to it before this when Malibu burned a few years ago. However, nature is resilient. Fire is part of the plan that aids in the resilience of our forests’ ecology.

I asked my older daughter if she still wanted to go to school up in the canyon (a good chunk of which burned, and she would have to drive quite a bit of burned out terrain to get to school). She said she absolutely needed to return to school and see the burn scar because she wanted to see how it grew back. We’ve talked about wildfire burn, the people that lost their houses, what our friends are doing now after losing their houses, and how all of this debris has negatively affected our local ocean ecology and their love of surfing. All of it’s connected. The only place I drew the line is letting them see their communities on fire. During that time we kept the TV off so they couldn’t see the actual flames. They seemed too young for that visual, and it’s enough to process seeing the burned out buildings they will be driving by for years to come.

As we continue to process and heal, the support of the local community has continued to unfold. Much of the news cycle has moved past our tragedy and on to the next one, and during these times it’s left to local communities to band resources together. Many of my friends and I have shared resources about how to pack go bags better next time (when you’ve never done it, you’re amazed at the random items you brought and important things you forgot) and suggestions for car emergency kits and home emergency kits. It’s so nice because while at the time it felt like a lot of things to buy, hopefully we never use them and they sit in the emergency storage bin just in case. But it’s hard not to go through something like this and see where there are glaring holes in your plan.