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It’s almost starting to become normal.
A month and a few days have passed since the Eaton Fire burned down our house, destroyed our possessions, and gutted our entire neighborhood. And time is doing the thing that time does – putting distance between us and a traumatic event, and making the past recede further into the…you know, past.
Life as a fire refugee is just becoming “life.” For those of us who lost our homes, things are settling into something that, while not anything close to what life was like in the before times, is also quite not the frenetic chaos of the first few weeks.
Certainly, whatever your experience is right now is individualized for you. Some people are still bouncing from living space to living space, others might be settled for a few months or a year, and everyone has a slightly different status to their various applications and insurance questions. But the high-wire adrenaline frenzy of the first days has subsided, and most of us are squarely in the places we’re going to be in for the foreseeable future.
The schools are open and kids are back in them, even if some aren’t in exactly the same ones. We’re sharpening our routines, shaving minutes off new routes, and finding shortcuts. The light in our new bedroom almost looks like the light in our old bedroom, and if you close your eyes it almost feels like home. The sore throat we still get after being in the fire zone too long doesn’t sting as much. Maybe we’re used to it, or maybe the smoke has actually cleared.
The constant rumble of ServPro trucks and utility vehicles and cranes is losing its novelty. The shock of going into the fire zone and seeing the burned out homes and businesses doesn’t hit quite as hard once you’ve been there a few times. We aren’t suddenly remembering as many lost items as we once were, and some of them are starting to be replaced. We’ve almost gotten used to using our current address as our address, as opposed to the address of the ash pile that used to be our forever home.
Even the ash piles themselves aren’t looking quite so forlorn. Power poles are starting to go up, damaged trees are getting cut back, and the EPA is starting to complete Phase One debris removal on a few properties. The work crews are busy, the trees are getting marked, and the ruins are looking a bit less ruined. The bulldozers aren’t warming up, but they’re probably in the same time zone, at least.
The feeling of despair and exhaustion and overwhelm that pervaded Pasadena even a few weeks ago seems to be lightening up. Over the weekend, the shopping areas and restaurants seemed utterly jammed, with people everywhere and little parking to be found. There wasn’t as much glum, and more people simply enjoying meals or shopping or whatever it is people not living in constant state of trauma enjoy.
And this is probably the time when this should be happening for most folks. If you didn’t lose your house, or at least lose access to your house, things have been normal for a while for you. You’ve moved back home (if you evacuated at all), and are going back to your life as it used to be and as it will continue to be. Your normal never really changed, except for a few days when you might be worried. You cleaned up the mess in the fridge, rebooked appointments you canceled, and are just doing your thing. Normal.
Of course, “normal” is just a word people throw around between crises. Fire survivors in LA are still spending virtually every waking moment navigating the overlapping mazes of insurance, rebuilding, mortgage forbearance, architecture and design, government assistance, debris removal, finding new living space, and dealing with financial and logistical hurdles. And we’re doing it while going back to work, sending our kids back to school, and trying to make long-term plans. We’re making the appointments we cancelled while on the run. We’re trying to figure out summer vacations. Disaster recovery has become something we do alongside our regular lives, as opposed to the focus of our existence the way it was in January. Giveaways of stuff are ending, GoFundMe pages are bringing in almost nothing, and you’ve probably told everyone you’re going to tell about the disaster at this point.
So yeah, normal. And also not normal at all.
Living in the overlap between the ordinary and the extraordinary is exhausting. Where do you balance it? How do you take time out of meetings and calls for your job to have meetings and calls with FEMA? How do you plan a business trip or a vacation knowing you might get the call from the Army Corps of Engineers that those bulldozers are finally here? How do you plan for the future when so much of that future depends on factors out of your control and deadlines that haven’t been set?
In some ways, the “going back to work and pretending everything is fine” phase of the Eaton Fire is harder than the early days. Back in mid-January, life was moment to moment. Nothing mattered except finding the next meal, making the next call, dealing with the next call. There was no future except ten minutes from now. The world was ending. It’s why people watch movies about the apocalypse, and not movies about the cleanup and rebuilding after the apocalypse. After the Walking Dead isn’t as alluring as The Walking Dead.
Now we have to live the lives we were living before the disaster, while also building what our lives will be afterwards. The zombies are gone, and someone needs to clean up the corpses and build some new towns. The expectations are different. The pace is slackened. The coffee not overflowing. So it’s normal.
But not really at all. And not for a long time to come.
One of the things I most enjoyed in Altadena was walking our dogs at night. The air was clear, the streets quiet and dark, and you could hear birds singing rather than horns honking. Sometimes you’d even hear the hooting of an owl. The other night I took the dogs out for one last pee, and sure enough, I heard an owl hooting. Maybe it was the same owl, displaced from its home the way we are from ours. Or maybe it’s a different owl. But hooting is hooting, and for just a brief moment on a cloudy night portending rain, things were a bit like they used to be.
So here’s to normal, whatever it looks like and whenever it comes.
Mike Rothschild 