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I lost nothing. I lost everything.
I am lucky beyond all imagination. I am haunted beyond all reason.
I am spared. Nobody is spared.
I am rounding the sharp turn that enters my leafy Altadena cul-de-sac, my home for the last dozen years, and I am loudly pleading.
“Hail Mary, full of grace …”
It is a Wednesday morning, several hours after the Eaton fire began tearing apart thousands of lives, there are still flames shooting up from burning destruction. On every block, the air is still dark with smoke and the streets are still clogged with trees, but my fiancée, Roxana, and I had just endured a night of sleepless terror. We had to come here. We had to see.
Did we lose this most evil of lotteries? Did we take a direct hit from the hand of hell?
I’m shouting and shaking as the bravely determined Roxana spins the car through flames and foliage onto a scarred and sooted street where we see a bit of fence, and a bit of white, and, then, there it is, standing strong amid the ruins of my beloved neighborhood.
Our house. It survived. It survived?
“The Lord is with thee …”
Coverage of the firefighters’ battle to improve containment over the Eaton and Palisades fires, including stories about the latest death count and victim frustration.
I begin crying, awash in gratitude and relief, until I look around at the barren smoldering landscape and my heart almost instantly drops into a much deeper emotion.
Guilt.
I was here, but where was everybody else? Where were my neighbors? Where were my friends? Why was I still standing and they were not?
My next-door neighbor lived in a sprawling, old house that was always full of life. It was gone, burned to nothing, a portrait of death. How did those flames miss me?
Directly across the street was the tidy home of the kindly, elderly professor who lived behind a bevy of beautiful trees. No more. No more beauty. No more privacy. No more house. The bones of her refuge lay crushed and stacked and still flickering with flames. Why was she so cursed when I was so blessed?
Next to her lived a wonderful attorney who never complained when cars from my house were parked in front of her beautifully remodeled home. All gone. Total carnage. Her proud accomplishment had been reduced to rubble. Why did I not lose everything instead?
Of eight houses in my cul-de-sac, four remained standing, three of those absorbed some damage, and mine was the only one that appeared untouched. There was no reason for it. There was no logic behind it. My neighbor Phil Barela said he stayed late the previous night and doused a small fire at the back of our property line, and I’ll credit him forever for saving the structure, but this was surely much more than that.
The fire that surrounded our house on all sides did not consume it. There had to be a reason. What was that reason?
During that frantic Wednesday morning visit, we made a quick dash through the house as flames flickered on the streets below. We were enveloped by the smell of smoke, but everything else felt normal. Everything was just as we left it. Surrounding a brown, prickly Christmas tree were old magazines, throw blankets, hurriedly discarded socks, all the trappings of an ordinary life.
A life that, like that of thousands of grateful Angelenos whose houses had survived, had nonetheless changed forever.
Some Altadena residents returned to find their homes standing, while others are left reeling from the immense loss.
Our house will have to be stripped and scrubbed and basically gutted down to the drywall and insulation because of smoke damage, and we were the lucky ones.
We could lose all of our furniture, and we were the lucky ones.
Once we’re allowed to live in the house again, which could be months considering all the water and power issues, we will spend the next two years living in the middle of a construction zone, and we were the lucky ones.
If you hear guilt in those statements, you hear right, a guilt as oppressive as a flame. Why did so many others lose priceless photo albums while we get to keep ours? Why must so many others rebuild their daily steps from scratch while our basic floor plan remains the same?
A couple of years ago I wrote a book about the resilient Paradise High football team, which played a nearly undefeated season months after its town was leveled by the 2018 Camp fire. It was called “Paradise Found,” and its central character was a tough coach, Rick Prinz, whose house amazingly did not burn down.
I contacted Prinz this week to ask about survivor’s guilt. He said it is real. He said he felt it immediately.
“When we found out our home did not burn it was very emotional, we were so thankful and amazed,” he said. “We also felt guilt at the loss of so many others. We did not share our joy with others and kept it to ourselves. I would try not to mention that our house survived to those who had lost so much.”
Prinz acknowledged the darkest thoughts wrought by survivor’s guilt — “Yes, there were times when we thought it may have been better if our home had burned,” he said.
But he acknowledged that it was so difficult to get his house working again, his focus turned to that. “Living in a burn scar, rising insurance costs, constant construction, terrible road conditions … the survivor’s guilt begins to wane,” he said.
That guilt still is going strong here. I will not complain. I cannot complain. I don’t deserve to complain.
Even one minute spent in that house is better than the horrible fate that awaited so many who were never given that time.
From this moment forward, every day in that house will be a monument to pure luck and good wind and Phil Barela and, certainly, I had nothing to do with any of it, and how do I live up to that?
On Christmas Tree Lane, the large cedars lining the road were still draped with old-school holiday lights — but nearly all the homes were ruined.
There are many of us in Los Angeles in similar situations, houses intact but lives uprooted, forced nomads who may never get home until spring, folks facing a road so long and complicated surely some of them, like Prinz, already may wish their homes were instead destroyed so they could just start the rebuild from scratch.
You know who you are, those of you whose homes were saved as guilt threatens to destroy them. You know who you are, and so seemingly does everybody else.
At one of the recent hotels that we’ve been surfing while waiting to be allowed back home, I was approached by someone walking a big dog down a narrow hotel hallway, a common sight these days.
“Good morning, are you an evacuee?” she asked brightly.
“I am,” I said.
“I lost everything,” she said.
“I did not,” I said.
End of conversation. She abruptly spun and headed in the other direction. I was a pariah. I was not worthy of discussing a loss that could not be quantified. I wasn’t a true survivor.
It was then that I realized, no, we’re all survivors, we’ve all been touched even if we still live in pristine neighborhoods with power and water and life. We all were burned. We all will be scarred.
Just because your house is standing doesn’t mean you are standing with it.
At the moment, I’m trying to stand, but I’m not quite there yet. I am blessed but hobbled. I have learned in the last few days that intangible losses, while no match for the tangible ones, nonetheless can stick deeply in the throat. Those of us with intact houses in burned areas can’t publicly acknowledge it, nor should we, but it’s true.
I’m a creature of habit, a slave to routine, I begged for the same press box seat during the Dodgers’ postseason run, I drive the same weird route to USC football games, I wear the same basic black uniform to every game of every sport.
And now, even though my house is there, everything else is gone, my traditions, my habits, my normalcy.
I used to drive down a pretty Altadena street toward work. That street is now one long junkyard. I used to stop at a corner Chevron station every day to buy snacks and talk Lakers with the owner. That place has become a blackened shell.
As firefighters continue to battle multiple major wildfires, The Times has compiled a list of resources to help.
My favorite hamburger joint, gone. One of my favorite breakfast places, gone. A dive bar that helped keep the neighborhood together, gone. Pizza joint, gone. The hardware store that just sold me air filters last week, gone.
From Altadena to Pacific Palisades, you all have stories like this. You lost your favorite watering hole, your favorite grocery store, a part of your city that had become your anchor, your strength, your best friend. All of Los Angeles has stories like this. Our daily lives have been mangled beyond recognition. There have been deaths, there has been destruction, everybody, everywhere, nobody is keeping score, it’s all bad and it all requires a resilience that was on full, powerful display everywhere last week, including in my little burned-out block.
During the brief visit to our house the day after the fire, my neighbor Brian Pires was standing in the middle of the street waxing in amazement that his house also survived when flames shot up from his corner lot. It was his garage. It suddenly was on fire. He had no water, no hose, no chance, yet he refused to give up. He jumped in his car and raced back to the main road and returned moments later with two firetrucks in tow. He somehow had found the firemen himself and led them to the flames, which they quickly doused.
At that moment, he wasn’t just a chiropractor protecting his home, he was all of Los Angeles fighting to breathe again with an unreal courage that transcends all tragedy.
Many of us may never get over the guilt of having a house that still is standing. But, damn it, we owe it to those who lost everything to keep them standing.
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