California Fires

My first 24 hours

The studio

We knew the winds were going to be bad. We read it in an email from our 3 year old’s pre-school. They were having kids stay home the next day because they anticipated long power outages. My wife Mandy and I discussed our plans for the night. I’d sleep on the floor of our two boys’ room and she’d stay up with our 12 week old baby girl, Lou. That way we’d be available to them and to also get a sense of how cold their rooms were getting through the night. Probably a little overkill, but we had yet to navigate a power outage with a newborn. But we didn’t need to be concerned about that. We never got around to sleeping in our house that night.

Around 7:30, hanging out in the playroom after bath, right before reading some books to my two older sons (we’ve been in a big Creepy Carrots phase…IYKYK), Mandy walked in and said Griffin had called her and that the Eaton fire was getting close and we needed to pack up and leave that very moment. She kept her cool for the sake of not scaring the kids. I could tell by her tone that there was no room for debate or questions and it was time to move. I tried to channel my best Roberto Benigni and make it exciting for the already pajama’d boys - “GUESS WHAT? We’re going on a drive!!!!”

“Yayyy!” They both shouted, not quite sure why.

“Where are we going?” asked my older son, Gus. I couldn’t come up with anything, being distracted by all the implications of what was happening, not to mention that I had no idea myself. I just told them we were going on a night time drive for fun. That seemed to suffice.

Right as we were walking out, the power finally went off. We were expecting it around 4 or 5pm. This was around 7:30 or 7:40pm as far as I can remember. As much as the total darkness added to the intensity of the moment, looking back, it seems as though the delayed planned power outages from SoCal Edison may have been directly responsible for the fire. But that’s a different story for someone else to tell.

Mandy packed up baby Lou in her car and I was in charge of getting the boys in mine. After feeling like the wind was gonna knock us over as I carried them to the car in the garage, I strapped them in their seats, tried my best to reassure them that we were about to go have a fun adventure and then went back to help Mandy wrangle the animals. After getting all three cats in an extra large carrier, and helping her get our dog Marshmallow in her front seat, we were ready to go. We didn’t get anything else. There was a giant, ominous red cloud to the east that looked like it was 2 blocks away (although at that time it was still probably a mile off), so between our extreme sense of urgency contradictorily mixed with that strange confidence that I imagine anyone in an evacuation feels a hint of (i.e. “well, I’m sure I’ll be back home tomorrow”), we just started leaving once we had the kids and animals packed up.

I had to figure out how to manually open the garage, which turned out to be much harder with the cars still inside it. I can only imagine what my kids were thinking watching me climb on top of our SUV to pull a little red rope in all sorts of directions. After that I called our guy that helped install our electronic gates to walk me through how to get them to open manually as well. I know it sounds like it’s not that big of a deal, but when you’re not making any headway for 5 minutes and your getting thrown around by the wind and there’s a giant red ball in the sky that looks like it’s staring directly at you, it was pretty harrowing. I finally got the instructions I was receiving to make sense in my befuddled brain and got the gate open and headed to a friend’s empty house in Sherman Oaks that they had kindly offered up.

The kids were all exhausted so we were able to get them to sleep quick. From there we both started downloading the Watch Duty app (like everyone else in California that night) to get a better sense of what was going on. Our pocket of Altadena still wasn’t under mandatory evacuation so we thought we were just playing it extra safe and would check back in in the morning. I remember lying down to sleep thinking about how I hadn’t powered down everything the studio the way I was supposed to. Since there was now a power outage, would the power coming back on short something in there? I texted a few friends to make sure something like that couldn’t start a studio fire. Ha. Ha. Ha.

Considering the circumstances and the fact that there were 5 of us in one bedroom, we actually all got a little sleep and started waking up around 5:30. I was seeing that our area was finally in the official evacuation zone but I was still staying positive. We just lived too deep in the neighborhood for the fire to reach us. It would have to blow through so many houses to get to us. Then our family group chat started blowing up with anecdotes from neighbors who were seeing houses on fire through their Ring cameras (I don’t know how that’s possible with the power outages, but maybe some people were on generators). It started feeling closer and closer to our houses based on the limited updates we were getting. That’s when my neighbor who lives behind our house called crying saying, “They’re all gone.” Her tenant had snuck back into the area and said that our whole street had been wiped out. According to her, he had confirmed that our house was completely gone as well. I cried with her and told her how sorry I was and then went inside to deliver the news to Mandy. We cried for a while and held each other while letting this new reality sink in. We soon had a second confirmation from a neighbor that our property was indeed gone.

But to take our first step forward and to keep slogging along as parents, we did what most people would do in that moment - we went to Target. It was the first of what must have been 6 or 7 trips there within the following 3 days. We addressed our immediate needs in regards to food and baby gear and chargers and whatnot. The memory from that moment that will really stick me is when we were going up and down the toys aisle…To back up a little - we had tried to gently explain to Gus what we were told happened to our house. He didn’t break down, and we stayed positive about our house coming back someday, but we told him all the same. So once we were in the toys and books aisles at Target I started looking for his favorite stuff…some cars toys, some dinasour stuff, construction vehicles, Where The Wild Things Are, just a few of the classics…and each time he’d say, “But Dad, we have that already” and I’d have to gently try to re-explain our situation. He would look off and say “Ok” and I’d tear up all over again. People always say children are resilient, but between that moment and everything else we witnessed from him and his siblings over these last two weeks, it’s clear that that phrase is not just some cliche, it’s a universal truth.

So we got back in the car and started heading back to the house we had slept in. We were slowly learning the severe magnitude of the fire. At this point we were just trying to connect with people, make sure friends and family were safe and ok. Which led me to reach out to Wylie Gelber. Here’s the our first exchange:

So I left him alone and then he called about 30 minutes later. He said, “Bro, your studio is a 3 story fire. Your garage/guest room is completely gone. But your house is still standing.”

I figured he had just driven by and got the wrong angle. I assured him that it wasn’t true, that the house was gone. I had it confirmed twice.

Then he said, “I’m standing on your front porch. Your house is HERE! It looks basically untouched. But the fire studio in back is so big that I imagine it’ll engulf your house any minute. So I’m gonna go in and get whatever you need out of there. Is it cool if I throw a rock through your glass kitchen door?”

Considering that 30 seconds beforehand I was under the impression that the house didn’t exist anymore, I told him that a rock through a glass door was fine but also made it clear that nothing in there was worth risking his safety over. He said he was going to stay safe at all times, threw the rock, unlocked the door and was inside. I told him where my passport was, where certain important family documents were, and told him where Mandy’s heirloom jewelry was. I also knew that my acoustic Gibson J-45 was in the house. It was given to me by Blake Mills when I turned 18 and has always been the greatest guitar in my life. I told Wylie it was downstairs in the basement. He later told me that getting stuff from upstairs wasn’t too concerning for him because he could see the studio fire out the window at all times. But going down into the basement for the guitar felt a little sketchy. Using his iPhone flashlight, he grabbed my guitar case and booked it as fast as he could.

I wasn’t on the phone with him through this whole experience because service was spotty. But while I was and even once our connection was lost, I was really sobbing. Crying much harder than I had up until that point. And I wasn’t crying because our house was standing (based on how he described the area, it didn’t seem like it had much time left anyway). I was crying because I felt very loved by my friend Wylie Gelber. And I knew I loved him just as much (although I am not claiming that I would’ve had his wherewithal or courage in that moment had the tables been turned). It was overwhelming. Gus came up to me once we parked telling me not to be sad and I told him I was actually crying because I was happy.

I was able to go back to Altadena a few hours later with our nanny Celina (who is way more than a nanny and absolute family to us) and lo and behold, our house was there. The studio fire had burned down to embers at this point and never ended up touching the main house. I was able to get inside and get the essentials we should’ve left with because I knew we wouldn’t be back as a family for a long while. Even though the house wasn’t going to end up burning down, Wylie forever gets all the credit for being the hero.

After leaving our home, we drove around the neighborhood for a little while. I confirmed that my parent’s house was gone. I wanted to get up to Griffin’s but he lived in northern Altadena and the closer I got to the mountains, the more severe everything got. There were no more miraculous survivals like our house. Everything was gone for blocks and blocks and blocks. And when we saw that the wooden telephone poles were all still on fire and teetering, we had to turn around and leave. I wasn’t able to make it to Griff’s but we confirmed soon after that it was in fact gone. So was Wylie’s…

From here our story gets typical and relatively boring. We’ve been floating from house to house thanks to a combo of several friends’ generosity and Airbnb and we plan to land in something more stable or semi-permanent soon while we figure out next steps. It’s obviously been extremely hard (hopefully the hardest thing we’ll ever have to navigate) and incredibly stressful but we’re managing. Considering what some people are going through, I don’t want to complain too much. We’re going to be ok.

Driving back to Altadena in the subsequent days to see the house and neighborhood, my impressions have really hit both ends of the spectrum. On one hand, I see so much motivation and determination. So many people who refuse to give up on the community. And I stand with them. Granted, my situation is very different from a lot of people (because everyone’s is), but if I can help keep the community alive in any way, I have to fight for it. On the other hand, the carnage can’t be over-exaggerated. It truly feels like a bomb went off. A lot of particulars have to come together for this place to have a chance. It’s daunting and terrifying and after driving down certain streets, it feels downright impossible. But for now, I don’t know any other path. I’m heartened to read about other communities, Santa Rosa back in 2017 in particular, that are able to come out on the other side of a moment like this. But the scale of what just happened in LA, the combination of fires in the Palisades and Eaton Canyon on the same day, it’s obviously unprecedented. I’ve just never seen a community love their town so much. And I would’ve even said that BEFORE the fire. So that’s what I hold onto. I think Altadena has got a real chance at overcoming this. And right now, that’s all we need.

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I’m going to attach a song I wrote a couple years ago called California Fires. This was written soon after the last big Malibu fire. Played on a 1947 Martin 000-18 acoustic that I lost in the studio. I expect I’ll be changing the lyrics in the near future so I figured I’d share this early version. For this post, everyone can listen. Paywall be damned.