FIRE SEASON

Returning to a devastated community.

- BY DANA GOODYEAR

The Palisades Fire destroyed the author's house, along with thousands of others. Can these neighborhoods rebuild? Or has California exhausted its ability to live with natural disasters?

I grew up moving, so often that I sometimes lost count: New Jersey, Ohio, London, Maryland, Missouri, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Hong Kong by the time I was eighteen. When I left New York to join my soon-to-be husband, Billy, in Los Angeles, at the beginning of 2005, it occurred to me that I had never lived anywhere longer than seven years.

In L.A., the pattern held—from one neighborhood to another, until I started to think I had an internal atomic clock. Then, in 2019, Billy and I landed with our two children, aged seven and nine, on a breezy bluff between the Pacific Ocean and the Santa Monica Mountains.

Technically a neighborhood of Los Angeles, Pacific Palisades stood apart, an extra ten minutes’ drive from civilization, on the last stretch of Sunset Boulevard before it plunges to the sea. In a forgetful, self-erasing city like Los Angeles, the Palisades prized its history and its sense of place.

The town was founded in the nineteen-twenties by a community of utopia-minded Methodists. An old map indicates what the early residents thought of their chosen site, with regions marked as the Land of Milk and Honey and the Garden of the Gods. The threat of fire—the dark side of those mountains and the wind—was seemingly ignored. The community's pitch for growth was “Bring the children here.”