One morning this past March, my cousin Frances drove me up to Altadena to view the remains of the home she lost in the Eaton Fire. How the fire started and how it progressed is a matter of science; perhaps, after the investigation is complete, the logic of this disaster will come clear. But looping through my cousin’s old neighborhood, it all felt distressingly random. Some blocks had been spared, houses still standing, trees leafy and flowers in bloom. Others were a hopscotch of devastation. Huge trucks rumbled along the streets. Workers in safety vests loaded debris. An occasional burnt-out car the color of dried blood crouched in new grass.
When we came to Frances’s corner, she parked at the curb. We sat for a while and stared. It was hard to take in. Her pretty Spanish-style ranch had occupied its half-acre lot for a hundred years, and the fire reduced it to a few partial walls and a chimney. I’d known this, but seeing it hurt. So many memories: family dinners, dancing while doing dishes, smoking joints on the front porch, shrieking with laughter at the resurrection of triumphs or embarrassments long forgotten. Our children had been small here, and then teenagers, and then, miraculously, adults. Our parents had been elders, and then elderly. Now only Frances’s mother remained.
“Tell me,” I said.
***
On the evening of January 7, 2025, Frances returned home after an outing with friends at around 6:00 p.m. Just after 6:30, she and her husband Dennis, who’d spent the day working in the yard, received the first fire warning on their phones, a heads-up from L.A. County’s Office of Emergency Management. They went out onto their back deck. A stiff wind shook the treetops. Black smoke plumed a mile or so away. Flames crept down the mountainside, which seemed odd, because fires usually ran uphill. But they weren’t worried. In their foothill neighborhood, periodic fire warnings were no reason to panic.
At 8:00 p.m., they got a second alert.
This prompted a leisurely walk through the house. They asked each other, “What would we save?” Frances took down a few photographs in the hallway: a black-and-white portrait of her father at his first communion, circa 1927, and a picture of her daughter in cap and gown at high school graduation. In the living room she collected her sister’s paintings. In the bedroom she stashed some jewelry in a bag.
At 10:00 p.m., they received the mandatory order to evacuate. Dennis loaded the truck with belongings. Frances grabbed paperwork from a drawer: the house deed, old tax returns, random envelopes, a binder filled with notices and receipts, an antique Bible with details about her ex-husband’s family tree. Dennis stowed his favorite surfboard in the back of the truck, along with the boogie board he’d built for Frances. He called their two dogs.
It was a ten-minute drive west to her 104-year-old mother’s house in La Cañada. From there they could see fire burning on a hillside behind NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It looked far enough away that they thought they might sleep, but the Santa Anas were now gusting at over 100 mph, and the sound of branches thrashing, of unknown items being knocked over and dragged, kept them awake and agitated. They decided—irrationally, in retrospect—to return to the Altadena house. Maybe, they thought, in their own bed they could rest for a couple of hours.
Once home, Frances crawled under the covers and instantly fell asleep. Dennis stayed up to keep an eye on the fire. Just before midnight he shook her awake. “Frances! We have to go. We have to go now.”
Outside, a black mass billowed, moving swiftly over roofs and through yards as if sentient, a malevolent force with a devouring orange center. A groaning came from everywhere and nowhere. Embers darted like fireflies. Sparks landed in treetops, on the deck, on the neighbor’s roof.
They raced back to Frances’s mother’s house. Within the hour, Emergency Management issued an evacuation order for La Cañada, and the three of them decamped to the Pasadena Convention Center. There were more than 1000 people there, sitting on cots or the floor, or standing in groups. Tables held water bottles and snacks. The news, displayed on a large screen, showed a reporter positioned in front of a house, shouting over the wind as he detailed the fire’s movement down the hillside; several homes had already been destroyed. As he spoke, Frances realized with horror that the house he stood in front of was hers.
***
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
“Yeah.” Frances sighed. “Shall we?”
We climbed out of her truck. The morning was warm, the sky a celestial blue, the light saturated with that piercing springtime clarity. The air smelled fresh, with only a whiff of smoke and a taste of ash at the back of the throat.
I followed Frances down the driveway—lined with grapefruit and orange trees, all charred—to an electric iron gate. The motor’s housing slumped, melted by the fire’s heat. Frances leaned into the gate and shoved. We climbed a short tiled threshold, its red Saltillos, themselves forged in fire, undamaged. Then we entered what had once been her kitchen. The house’s footprint lay exposed, but without walls, relationships between rooms were lost. We walked the foundation, the piles of rubble baffling, flecked with shards and twisted pipe.
At the front of the house, we looked down what had once been the hallway toward what had once been the master bath. With a grim laugh Frances said, “I always hated that you could see the bathroom from the front door.”
She and Dennis had hired a guy with a metal detector to sweep the debris, but there’d been little worth saving. He did, however, find a small melted lump of gold. A gold heart stuck out from one end. Frances recognized this as a charm bracelet she’d lost years ago. She thought she might hang the heart on a necklace.
Working our way back to the kitchen, I saw things my eye had passed over before. The blade of a shovel. A sliding stack of broken dinner plates. A blackened coffee cup rested on a boxlike chunk of metal. A larger chunk, the color of storm clouds, was split down the middle. It looked like the back half of a canoe.
“That’s the refrigerator,” Frances said.
The edge of a barred stainless-steel shelf protruded from its depths, trapped by a tangle of rubbish. I thought of ladders, and shields, and sieves.
“It all happened so fast,” Frances said. “And now I have no home.”
***
Toward the end of our fire tour, we drove past the late physicist Richard Feynman’s former home, which had also burned. In the 1980s, Feynman had lived just three blocks away; Frances and her first husband used to see him out walking the neighborhood. I’d always been curious about the hidden world and its unsolvable mysteries and had once made my way through some of Feynman’s more accessible writings, but I was mainly interested in him because of a coincidence: in 1989, my second husband and I bought our house in Boulder, Colorado, from his younger sister Joan.
Our move to Colorado was not normal: We were running from my ex-husband, who’d threatened, credibly and repeatedly, to kill us. Virtually overnight we pulled my two daughters out of school, quit our jobs, and cut ties with friends and family. On the drive east out of California, we chose our new names—DIY witness protection. We landed in Boulder with almost nothing. The realtor who traded us rent for painting a condo showed us houses for sale. We liked an old Craftsman on University Hill but knew we couldn’t buy it. No bank would ever give us a loan; we didn’t exist. And then Joan Feynman agreed to carry the note, forgoing proof of who we actually were. Because of her we found a refuge, a home.
But I was—and am—a diehard Californian, and I always wanted to go back. I grew up in Los Angeles, the adopted only child of a bookkeeper and a newspaperman. My parents were transplanted New Yorkers, the offspring of Irish immigrants who’d left their families behind to move west after the Second World War.
In a letter written in 1956 to Frances’s parents—Uncle Frank and Aunt Sally—Daddy urged them to come to Los Angeles too.
I can’t see how you can miss. The weather is perfect, housing is plentiful and there are jobs. You will have to sell most of your belongings, but these things are replaceable. I’m sure Sally would like it here and your children will someday bless you.
Which indeed they did. Uncle Frank and Aunt Sally bought the house in La Cañada where my aunt still lives. Frank worked as director of public information at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, explaining moon landings to reporters and the Viking missions to Mars, while Sally raised their three daughters, entertained newsmen from all over the world, and perfected her golf swing.
I should probably clarify here that Frances isn’t really my cousin. Her father, Frank, was Daddy’s lifelong best friend, and in Mom’s meticulous photo albums, the family figured prominently. Mom had older collections, as well, leather books filled with sepia-toned snapshots of her six siblings and my grandmother in New York. There were fewer photos of Daddy’s clan; scarcity made them more valuable. Because I was adopted, getting photographs down from a shelf in the den was a quasi-religious ritual. I’d study the faces of all these people and will myself into their world. In this way I exorcised the unknowns of my birth and created an alternate ancestry.
After Gil and I married, Mom gave me her albums for safekeeping. I was thrilled. Later, in a rage during the early stages of our divorce, he burned every last one.
At the time, I was visiting Mom at the beach, the relief of briefly escaping my marriage’s last gasp, and the joy of seeing my daughters play in the ocean, tempered by anxiety. On the phone Gil begged me to come home. He promised he’d moved out for good and would leave me in peace.
It was late when the girls and I returned, the apartment quiet and dark. Gil had kept his promise and stayed away. But the living room smelled of fire, and ashes in the fireplace were still warm.
I imagine him kneeling on the brick hearth, albums stacked by his side. He twists newsprint for kindling. The fire smolders then flares. The flames flicker blue and orange and gold, dancingly hot as he flips through Mom’s albums, freeing each photograph from the little black corners that hold it in place on the page. The pale squares that remain heighten the shock of absence; they float above my mother’s lonely script: date, place, names. Burning chemicals in the paper turn the edges of the fire green. Heat reddens Gil’s face and his hands.
How long did it take? Did time stretch, slowed by his savoring? Or did he gather everything up and, with a single celebratory swing, pitch it all into the flames? Both versions are equally vivid to me. Both feel as if they were my experiences, and not his.
Photographs are just pieces of paper, and in the scheme of things—physical danger, loss of freedom, loss of life—they are unimportant. I know this. But the destruction he wrought in so many ways has exerted such a powerful force in my life, and for thirty-five years I have grieved.
***
In 2025, the vernal equinox fell on March 20, one day before I visited Altadena with Frances. The Eaton and Palisades fires were still in the news daily, but I’d seen a report online that increased solar activity around that date meant that the Aurora might be visible well south of where it usually appeared, though I doubted it would make it to Los Angeles.
Our planet is surrounded by a geomagnetic field that shields us from the harmful effects of solar winds and cosmic radiation. Sun storms begin when the magnetic fields on the sun’s surface, stretched and contorted by rotation, snap and then reconnect, generating the energy of a billion hydrogen bombs and sending billions of tons of plasma and other solar material billowing away, expanding as they sweep through space carrying those intense magnetic fields. When they run into Earth’s protective bubble, storms can trigger in our upper atmosphere, producing the Aurora Borealis at the North Pole, and the Aurora Australis in the South.
Like her famous brother, Joan Feynman was also a physicist, and over a sixty-year career studied solar activity, the sun’s influence on Earth, and the behavior of high-energy particles in space. But she is best known for her work on the physics of the Aurora. At Lamont Observatory in the 1960s and ’70s, Dr. Feynman, along with scientists from MIT, and using data collected from satellite nuclear-arms monitoring, demonstrated that Auroras occur when solar winds impinge directly on Earth’s magnetic field. That pressure point is the catalyst for a light show.
My favorite of the myths about the Aurora Borealis comes from Finnish folklore and features the fire fox, revontulet—also the Finnish word for the Northern Lights. The fire fox is a creature with a blazing tail, prized by hunters but never captured, though in winter it can sometimes be seen running through the snow, rubbing its fur against tree trunks and setting branches on fire, its tail flinging icy crystals into the sky.
Destruction, creation—the universe requires both. And sometimes, if we’re very lucky, the aftermath is poetry.
The cause of the Eaton Fire is still under investigation, but video evidence suggests that during historically high winds on the evening of January 7, 2025, an idle Southern California Edison tower line—a “zombie” out of commission for more than fifty years—reenergized, an electric charge jumping into it from an arcing high-voltage line. The image this puts in my head feels akin to “reconnection,” that lightning moment that follows the snap of twisting magnetic fields on the sun, which sets solar winds racing toward Earth.
Picture that initial spark in Eaton Canyon. A tiny golden light lands in dry chaparral. It sits for a moment before igniting a twig or a branch or a blade of brown grass. The baby fire jumps from this first fuel source onto another, and another, sizzling along, swallowing up brush parched from recent drought. It runs straight up into the trees. The Santa Anas carry off showers of sparks, seeding fire into more trees. Bears and bobcats, foxes, mule deer, raccoons—the animals sniff the air. Snakes uncoil, lizards and mice scurry, birds desert the trees. Panic in the canyon grows. Engulfing smoke, unbearable heat; it hurts to breathe. The fire is loud, too, a series of explosions followed by a thermal gale that sounds like a freight train.
The smoke billows, so thick that helicopters and small planes can’t make it in to fight the flames, or even to see what is happening.
Time-lapsed satellite video shows the Palisades Fire at 10:45 a.m., a hot red ball with an orange center sitting right on the coast. A wedge of smoke shoots out over the Pacific Ocean. At around 7:00 p.m., a fist-shaped flicker pops up forty miles northeast, in the San Gabriel foothills. A bright flare, then a gray veil streaks westward, pushed by winds until it edges up against the smoke from the Palisades. These images are entrancing, until you remember the unutterable loss.
On L.A.’s west side, twelve people died. Nineteen more perished in Altadena, all residents of a Black middle-class neighborhood west of Lake Street. The Eaton Fire consumed schools and churches, community parks and cultural centers, barber shops, bookstores, a mosque, a synagogue. The Bunny Museum, The Little Red Hen coffee shop, Fox’s Restaurant, Altadena Hardware. Western novelist Zane Gray’s estate burned, and McNally House, a twenty-two room Queen Anne extravaganza. In total more than nine thousand homes burned, among them Richard Feynman’s. And Frances’s.
That warm day in March, after we’d exhausted our capacity to absorb tragedy, she drove us back to her rented studio in Old Town, Pasadena. The condo comprised a tidy living area with a kitchen along one wall, and an alcove bedroom. I expected them to be depressed by the lack of space, by the loss of items you don’t know you need until you need them, assuming they’ll always be there. But Frances and Dennis seemed, if not content, accepting.
“We’re learning,” Frances said, “what we can live without.”
“What do you miss most?” I asked.
“My photos. Thank God for Facebook.”
For years, whenever Frances stumbled upon the odd snapshot of my parents, or of me, she passed it on. It’s hard to describe how thrilling it was to reencounter a self thought lost forever.
I wish I could return this gift.
Absence feels like a wound, because the things we surround ourselves with have meaning, our photos, yes, but everyday objects as well: a box filled with collected seashells, a wrench that fits just right in the hand, an old dictionary that taught the child you once were the correct spelling of “enough.” The places we inhabit, believing them ours, are a part of our identity. These connections prove that we’ve lived, that we’ve had a past worth remembering. They imply hope for the future, a promise of continuity. And when disaster strikes and wipes it all away, how do you begin again?
It took me years to find the silver lining in my ex-husband’s destruction, to understand how that loss was a catalyst that made it easier for me to let go, to purposefully destroy my past and become someone else.
Among the random items Frances packed when she and Dennis were escaping the fire was a card that my mother sent Frances’s parents for their forty-fifth anniversary.
That age brings wisdom may have some basis in fact, as we have finally been forced to live only for today. It’s all we can remember!
I teared up when I read this, so vivid was Mom’s voice.
I asked if I could see the remains of Frances’s charm bracelet. I wanted to hold that lump of gold in my palm. Frances looked for it, to no avail. She threw up her hands. “I seem to have lost it again.”
