The view northeast from the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles looking toward the Eaton Fire on Wednesday morning. (Andrew Romano/Yahoo News)
Even after this week’s fires subside, life will never be the same for many Angelenos. They have lost their homes, their businesses, their neighborhoods. At least six families — a tragic number that will likely grow in the days ahead — have lost their loved ones.
Some of these grieving Angelenos are my friends. Too many. My heart breaks for them.
For the rest of us — the lucky ones — life these last few days has been more surreal than anything else.
Here in Silver Lake, the northeastern L.A. neighborhood where I live with my wife and two young children, we watched apprehensively from our windows Tuesday night as the Eaton Fire spread like a flaming scar across the Pasadena foothills, 15 miles away.
We mostly feared for my septuagenarian parents. They live just 2.5 miles from Eaton Canyon, on the edge of the mandatory evacuation zone. We eventually convinced them to come spend the night at our place. My wife’s colleague came too, with her cockapoo, after her power failed in Pasadena. I slept on the couch with our cat.
I held my breath overnight as the Santa Anas pummeled a cracked old window that I had patched with packing tape. I could see the glass bending with every gust.
The next morning there was no sunrise — just a cloud of black smoke blanketing the horizon. I dropped the kids at school and told them to get masks from the office. An hour later, the principal emailed; school had been canceled. I picked up the kids and turned on the TV. My wife and I tried to work.
Around that time, a friend who had fled the Eaton Fire told me his daughter’s school was gone — burned to the ground. My brother-in-law drove to Encinitas, near San Diego, to keep the smoke from triggering his boys’ asthma. My parents returned home and hoped for the best.
So far they are safe. There is no immediate danger in Silver Lake, either. But intersections are cordoned off, clogging the adjacent blocks with detoured traffic. There are downed wires, downed trees, damaged transformers — crews at work.
As of Thursday afternoon, the power is still out for nearly 200,000 L.A. County residents. Last night, another family of four — another one of my wife’s colleagues — sheltered with us because ours was still on.
They’re here now. The kids are making a fort. My wife and her coworker are leading a Zoom meeting in the living room. The husbands are writing on laptops with AirPods in.
“What’s for lunch?” the kids ask.
Outside, the sky is a color I don’t recognize: pale gray with a faint pink glow. Scraps of ash are falling like snow.
