My Earliest Fear Was Fire
Evacuating and losing our home in the Eaton Fire
My earliest fear was fire. In the small Colorado valley where I was born and raised, I spent countless hours awake past my bedtime as a child, my five year old body trying to hold too many challenging feelings. Whatever those feelings were, they manifested in a fear of fire. Not of candles or fireplaces, but of wildfire, house fire, a burn-your-life-to-the-ground type of blaze. I would sometimes anxiously rush to my dad in the late evening and ask him to check our roof for flames. I could have sworn I smelled smoke on those nights, and maybe I did. Colorado has burned for a long time. But my parents’ house, fortunately, never actually caught fire.
We are no strangers to fire in the American West, and while there is no particular fire that haunted my childhood, the idea that my house could burn down, the fear of that happening, has lived like a seed in my heart for over thirty years. My parents’ home has been put on evacuation notice twice in the last four years, and each time my parents have called me and asked me, “what of yours do you want us to pack?” Since I moved away from their home when I was 18, I have always lived in small apartments, none of which could fit my childhood mementos—my purple plastic box of swim team ribbons, the wooden toys I played with as a toddler, my photo album and deep pink tallit from my Bat Mitzvah, the videos I made on my camcorder of my brother and cousin skateboarding on our street when we were maybe 13, my baby book. One summer when I was visiting my family, I reorganized my childhood bedroom, got rid of everything I no longer wanted, and made it easier for my parents to grab the essentials in a hurry. But none of these evacuations ever became mandatory and I would watch in relief from a thousand miles away as the news called the fire contained before it reached the only home I’d ever known.
In 2023, my husband Jason and I (though we were not yet married) started searching for our forever home. He, who had lived in countless apartments and in unstable conditions his whole life, and I, who had lived in one home forever, then a few apartments before I found my long-time apartment in East Hollywood, would find ourselves a place to root our future family. We weren’t sure exactly where in LA county we might end up, but the more we thought about it and the more we drove around each neighborhood, the more we realized Altadena was our place.
I will never be able to do justice to Altadena’s rich, complex, and beautiful history without years of combing through research and writing a book’s worth of essays, but I can tell you why we chose to enter into a relationship with that place. Jason's great aunt Antonia had been one of the few members of her family to leave the family home in rural northern Maine and head west. Maybe her Spanish style estate in East Altadena answered her call back to the Lebanon that she dreamed of. She would come back to Maine and tell the Ezzy family about community olive and citrus trees and that she taught piano lessons in Altadena before eventually consenting to calling it “Los Angeles” for the family members who couldn’t hold a place for Altadena on a map. We don’t know how she afforded her life. Maybe she married rich? We’ve spent the last year trying to track down more information about her history in the area, but what we do know is that she was kind to Jason when they met, that she believed in him in a way he needed to be believed in, and that whatever drew her to that mountain town drew us, too. When Jason first came to LA, he didn’t know anyone, didn’t even know Antonia had lived out there, but he ended up finding Eaton Canyon one day when looking for a nice hike. This was before we met, but when we settled on Altadena, he told me how he’d driven up there on his motorcycle from his apartment in West Adams on his birthday and thought, “this is where I want to live someday.”
I found Altadena through Octavia Butler. When I taught her book Parable of the Sower in a 2016 course I’d called “Los Angepocalypse”—a course about how the real apocalypse in LA is segregation and systemic violence against its working class and poor Black and Brown communities—I learned everything I could about where she was from. She is buried down the street from the house we eventually bought. Buried nearby is also Owen Brown, son of John Brown, the abolitionist who informed much of my own sense of political legacy, whose grave my husband and I visited only a few weeks after we moved into our house.
Our house was hard won in so many ways. It was listed for much less than it was likely worth in an inflated real estate market. The woman who had lived there died and had no next of kin other than a couple of estranged nephews in Texas. It was in probate and the listing agent didn’t try very hard to sell it for market rate. We were the first offer, only offered the asking price, and our offer was accepted the same day. But later that night we were told a slightly higher offer had come in and that we’d have to check back the next day.
The next day they told us they did indeed accept our offer. We were thrilled. No paperwork ever came through. We got ghosted. A few days later, we were told they were selling to someone who was willing to pay a million dollars. A million dollars for an old middle class house in a regular little neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. A house that needed quite a bit of work. We were devastated. My heart lived inside of that house the first time I saw photos of it online. After we lost out to the other buyers, I couldn’t stop talking to the house in my mind. “I know you want us with you” I would say to the house in my imagination. “We want to take care of you.” We cried a lot that week, and then tried to move on.
Eventually the house came back on the market. The other buyers dropped out. We tried to buy it again. We were outbid again. We let it go again. We looked at many houses in Altadena but they were either out of our price range or needed more work than we could afford to do. We looked at houses in other neighborhoods but nothing compared to Altadena. And then, eventually, our house came back on the market for a third time. We tried once more but were told we would have to wait until they could entertain all other offers. We waited. And finally, on a Wednesday afternoon in October of 2023, our agent called and told us the house was ours. Something we had already known in our hearts for months, but needed everyone else to agree to on paper.
Moving into that house was a dream come true, but it was also one of the hardest things I had ever done. I hadn’t moved in over 11 years, so all my belongings were tightly packed into my 360 square foot East Hollywood apartment. Moving decades worth of things that had been in the same place for so long was not easy. I carefully wrapped my most fragile possessions in layers of bubble wrap. I wouldn’t let my husband pack most of it because I needed to see for myself that each item was packed with as much care as possible and I was stubbornly convinced that only I would give each object the level of care it needed. I was also heartbroken about leaving the neighborhood where I became an adult and learned how to build community. I loved my neighbors like family and I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to build such a sense of safety and rootedness again.
It took us about a year to settle into our new house. To buy or scavenge or build the things we needed to make it feel like a home. We had so many dreams for that house, for renovating its bathrooms someday when we had some money and time. We planted our first garden and it yielded over a hundred pounds of the best tomatoes I’ve ever eaten. We had friends and family visit. We fed people from our gorgeous kitchen that was stocked with everything you’d ever need to cook whatever meal you could think of, a combination of our individual histories of acquiring kitchenware. We had unified our books, our legal documents, our crystal collections. We hung art we thrifted together. We tended to plants we’d kept alive for years, many of them cuttings of plants gifted to us by loved ones. We had an altar near our dining room to honor our dead as well as the love we were building together. We filled the house with every sentimental thing we had, things we were going to gift to our children. And my mom finally sent me all those tokens and records of my childhood that I had been keeping at her house all these years, all the physical proof in the world that I existed before my adulthood. The same stuff she had previously packed up during their pre-evacuations. I carefully covered it all with a tarp and stored it under our house, waiting for the day I could share it with my own child, show them who their mom had been before them, show them where they came from.
I got pregnant three days after we married in November 2024. The life we had both spent so long dreaming of, separately and together, was blossoming in ways I had never let myself imagine. We started thinking about how to prepare the house for new life, envisioning baby gates between rooms, painstakingly digging out poisonous oleander along the side of the house. On December 30th, at our nine week ultrasound appointment, we learned we had a miscarriage. On January 3rd I had a procedure to remove fetal tissue from my uterus. And on January 7th at 6:18PM, an electrical tower sparked on a mountainside in nearby Eaton Canyon.
I was at home with our dog and two cats when the fire started. Jason was across town near West LA at an appointment. Usually I would have driven him to his appointment, but that day the winds were gusting near 100mph, the dog was scared, and I knew one of us needed to be home in case we needed to evacuate. The Palisades fire had broken out around 10am that morning, and I watched on Instagram as flames licked up the hillside at the Getty Villa. If living in Colorado and California my whole life has taught me anything, it’s that a fire can start in an instant and with winds like the ones we were facing, could spread just as quickly.
When I saw the notice on Twitter that a fire had broken out just a few miles southeast of us in Eaton Canyon, I called my friend Andrea who has extensive experience navigating fires. She calmly walked me through evacuation steps. Told me what apps to download for evacuation notices and fire updates. Told me what kinds of items to bring: documents, food for the animals, a couple days of clothes for me and my husband, flashlight, masks, chargers. I also grabbed some sentimental things. A photo album of my childhood photos, the framed photos of Jason’s family on our alter, my dead cat’s ashes, a necklace from my late friend and collaborator Kiwi Burch, a little statue that belonged to my late grandma, the four books of poetry my late mentor wrote and inscribed to me, Jason’s backgammon and cribbage boards. Descriptions of what I didn’t grab would fill a hundred pages and everything I left behind will haunt me for the rest of my life.
I packed up my 21 year old Honda CR-V and texted Jason to tell him that everything was fine but that I’d be picking him up from his appointment. My heat rate remained around 130-140 beats per minute the whole time I was evacuating, and I kept having to tell myself “it’s ok, you’re going to be ok, one thing at a time.” When I walked outside, the sky was dark but the orange glow to the east was too bright and the air smelled like burning. My 81 year old neighbor came over to check on me and I told her I was evacuating. She told me they’ve had several fire scares in the near 50 years they’d lived in that house and that we always end up safe. I told her I was recovering from a miscarriage and that I did not have the capacity to navigate the stress of waiting for embers to blow our way and that I had to leave. I asked her to keep me updated from afar and to stay safe.
As I drove down our street toward town, I realized the power was out down the hill. Everything was dark except for the glow of the fire. The car’s gas tank was on empty but all the gas stations were turned off and the wind was whipping like mad. Quiet houses stood still under swaying branches. I headed west. Once I entered the 210 freeway, I allowed myself one look backward toward our home. The entire mountainside was engulfed in flames, a ring of fire defining the rapidly-growing perimeter. I knew in that moment what I knew earlier that day, what I knew as a five year old kid in a mountain valley in Colorado. I knew I would lose my house to a fire. I kept driving.
That night Jason and I stayed in the newly-completed guest house (formerly a garage) on my friend’s property in Windsor Hills. They brought us over some vegan chili and we unpacked what little I’d been able to bring and got ready for bed. Every ten minutes my phone would sound off with an alert from Watch Duty telling me which zones were being evacuated. I waited and waited for our zone to be put on evacuation notice or even pre-evacuation, but much to my relief, the alert never came. Every half an hour I would check all the websites with evacuation updates and I’d see our little triangle of a zone in all white, no notices. My body went through the cycle of anxiety, relief, anxiety, relief over and over again until around 2:30am when my neighbor Kelly, the adult daughter of the neighbor I’d talked to on my way out of Altadena, texted our cul-de-sac group chat to say the fire had made its way to Cobb Estate, a trailhead just a few blocks from us. My entire body shocked itself fully awake. We texted back and forth and with each new update, she would send a blurry photo of increasingly less blurry flames. Finally, sometime after 3am, she told us the fire was here, in their backyard, and that she had only just got her parents to leave the house. Embers were flying everywhere. The sheriff had come with a bullhorn to scream evacuation. I checked the evacuation notices. We still hadn’t received one.
My body kept trying to fall asleep, but sometime around 3:30 or 4am, I felt my entire insides light up, hot, feverish almost, like my heart had caught fire and was filling the rest of my body with bright flames. “My house is burning down right now,” I heard myself say quietly into the dark bedroom, and I knew without a doubt that it was true. Exhausted, I finally fell asleep for about an hour. When I woke up, I searched desperately for updates. I texted all our neighbors. Looked for news stories. My husband woke up and we decided to make a plan. “Worst case scenario,” we said to each other, “the house is gone and what do we do? What are the next steps?” We fumbled through some ideas. Call insurance. Call the county. Call our families. Ask my friend how long we could stay with her. Go buy underwear, which I had somehow forgotten to bring for us. Around 10am we got a text from our neighbor whose brother drove up to our street and photographed each of our houses, now leveled, still smoldering, with small fires visible in the background. When the photo of our house finally came through to my phone, I stopped breathing. All that was left was the frame of the front entry, the wall where the dining room window had been. An uncanny nightmare, a distortion of reality beyond what I could process. We had both held out hope that somehow, miraculously, our house had been one of the few to survive. I exhaled.
What does it mean to make a life?
I made a life out of the things I loved. Things the people I loved gave to me. Everyone now tells me those were only things, but they were my things and some of them used to belong to people who are now dead and I will never get those people or their things back again. Kiwi’s cedar chest. Photos of my beloved Shay. Jason's aunt Marie-Reine's needlepoints of snowy northern Maine. His grandfather’s suitcase filled with mementos. The copy of my college honors thesis with my late mentor, the poet Jake Adam York’s notes all in the margins. The Sam’s Liquor Mart shirt Johanna gave me. Dead peoples’ things turned to an inch-thick layer of ash in an instant. Among the ashes, also: pictures of Jason's dad dancing as a kid Trinidad which would have served as his and our children’s only connection to a patrilineal history. Stuffed animals we held for over 30 years and then sealed away in closets until they were needed again.
I made a life inside of me, an embryo that never actually ignited into being, just its infrastructure grew—a placenta, a yolk sack, but no one to live in it. A home with no resident. And then, four days later, its parents, two residents with no home.
I made a life with my husband, the most gentle and loving person I’ve ever known. And that life, that is the only life I have left now.
Except that isn’t true.
Because after the fire a flood of people came rushing in around us. Beloveds from across the country, from across time, some transcending heartbreak and hard feelings, some who have always been there steadily keeping us afloat with their friendship and love. Slowly they are helping us to build our life back. Sending us necessities and things of comfort. Clippings of plants, homemade tea and granola, books, shoes, handwritten cards. Things we will use to build our new life, our next life, while we try and figure out what it means to become untethered by fire. While we try to find our roots in the ash.
I don't have the words to tell you how much this meant. Bless you.
Beautiful, Ali. Thinking of you so much lately...thank you for sharing.