The air is getting hotter
There’s a rumbling in the skies
I’ve been wading through the high muddy water.
With the heat rising in my eyes
What do you take when you’re trying to pack your house into your car and have no idea if you’ll be back again? Passports and tax files and the signed photo frame from your wedding, yes. The six bags of avocadoes you picked from the giant tree branch that was torn off int the windstorm earlier that day? Ah, no. The foul ball you caught at the Dodger game? The new LL Bean sweatshirt that you literally just got for Christmas and really liked? The artwork your kids made when they were 4 that were you probably were going to take a picture of and recycle? Hopefully – but probably not.
I saw the glow of the Eaton fire from my porch at 6:30 PM on Tuesday. It was distant, eerie, but not threatening. We had power. The wind was brutal, but our house was 100 years old and sturdy. A few hours later, we decided to be cautious and pack some things. We didn’t think too hard about it, because we weren’t even under an evacuation watch. We were being alarmist.
At 3:25 AM, our phones told us otherwise. We had to go. Now.
Of course, we had no power at that point and the house was freezing. The kids were freaking out. We were freaking out. I got dressed, but spent an inordinate amount of time looking for the right t-shirt, as if I were heading out for a night at the bar. We grabbed flashlights, filled water bottles, and grabbed a few more things. We left far more behind. We headed out into the howling wind, our streetlights dead to the world, and smoke filling our lungs like a bad day on the Western Front. We drove south, my radio still tuned to the SoCal Sound, a relic of another life a few hours ago.
Twelve hours and another evacuation later, we knew house was gone. We had an inkling – a neighbor sent us a screengrab of a KTLA report of their house on fire, with ours in the distance, also burning. Maybe it was just the avocado tree, right? Firefighters were there, so we may have gotten lucky. Around the same time, our smoke detector started sending us alerts, valiantly doing its job to the last, as it probably melted. We told ourselves that the air was a horror show, and just because the alarm was going off didn’t mean our house was necessarily on fire.
It was. Now it’s gone We haven’t seen what’s left of it yet, but neighbors and friends who have snuck back into the area told us, and a few took pictures. We recognized the porch, the coral tree in the front yard, the pavers. Whatever’s left won’t be useful, likely. Today, we started the process of filing an insurance claim, putting our mortgage on pause, and, oddly, cancelling the coffee subscription that sustained us on seemingly endless mornings getting our kids out the door.
We’re safe and far from the fires now. The air is cool and slightly acrid, but nothing close to Altadena, which is still something of a war zone. We’re heading north tomorrow, reduced to refugees in a parade of plug-in hybrids. You always think of people fleeing catastrophe as slow-moving lines of families pushing carts with their meagre belongings, and women wearing babushkas, heading west to avoid rampaging hordes. That’s us now. Except our babushkas burned alongside our avocados, the foul ball from the Dodger game, and the LL Bean sweater.
We aren’t alone in our journey. So many families and friends lost homes that it would be easier to list those who didn’t. Altadena is a tight-knit and quirky community where people come because they want to escape the packed-in constant closeness of LA. It’s affordable, or at least it used to be. Because of the Pasadena area’s long history of segregation, Altadena is where many Black families were able to buy property, and the city is a working-class mix of races and cultures and incomes, all living together in 100 year old cottages and Craftsman bungalows.
Over the last decade, what was once a bit of a wilderness had become a place where younger people and working class families wanted to move, because of the vibe and the green open spaces and the quirky feeling of a place that wasn’t urban, wasn’t suburban, and wasn’t rural. You were five minutes from hiking trails that took you to a waterfall, and a half hour from Dodger Stadium. Nothing like this existed anymore in LA. This wasn’t influencer country or glass and steel box McMansion hell. Celebrities moved into town and nobody knew who they were. Little league teams overran pizza places after games, and the local park drew huge crowds on Sundays for organized soccer games where nobody spoke English. People in Altadena look out for each other, families let their kids walk around the block the way kids used to, we protect the look and historical nature of our houses, and you always run into someone you know when you go out for tacos. It’s a community. A village.
I have no idea if that’s gone for good, but it’s gone for now. It vanished with the fire that I watched grow from a distant glow to a looming inferno to a destroyer of stability. And it’s still going, one of many fires turning Los Angeles into something unrecognizable, driven by a vicious wind that people who lived here for half a century said they’d never experienced. Victims of a planet that increasingly seems to not want anything to do with the fossil fuel and cheap plastic obsessed humans who control it.
Because it’s 2025, there’s been some negativity, conspiracist fearmongering, and brain-rotted lunacy. I’ll get to some of that eventually on this blog. But it’s been vastly outweighed by generosity, mutual aid, good wishes, offers of lodging and financial help, and people reaching out to give whatever they can. The spirit of everyone being in this together that we had in the early days of the last generational trauma we suffered through, the pandemic, is being felt even by people who are not actually in this. It’s incredibly heartening, and I’ll carry it with me right alongside the memories of the stuff we lost, the panicked run from our house, and the confusion and anguish of the next day. It’s bad, but it’s not all bad.
Thank you for going down this road with me as I attempt to document life as a climate change refugee. I can’t commit to any kind of regular schedule, pretense of editing, or coherence. I’ve had eight hours of sleep in two days, so I’m not sure if I’m actually typing words at this point. But I hope to write down what I’m going through, so I remember and so other people can experience something that nobody should ever have to experience. I want to chronicle our adventure, Altadena’s rebirth, and Los Angeles’ future.
And for god’s sake, make sure all your important documents are in the same place.
More to come.
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Altadena Will Rebuild
Mike Rothschild 
This is a powerful accounting of your experience. I’m so very sorry for what you’ve lost. In case this is helpful for your family or anyone you know, here’s a list of resources: