AFTER THE FIRE: PAPER AND ASH

"The first thing you think of when you see your home engulfed in flames is, My world and future have changed," Robert J. Lang, one of the world's foremost origami artists and theorists, said recently.

- Oren Peleg

He was sitting in a small hotel room in Arcadia, California. The week prior, the house where he lived with his wife, Diane, had burned down when the Eaton Fire erupted and swept through Altadena, outside Los Angeles, with incredible speed, levelling entire neighborhoods. Robert's studio, a separate property where he kept decades of his professional origami work all highly flammablealong with research and personal artifacts, was also reduced to ash.

Diane walked in with their two dogs, Casey and Scout, who hopped onto the mattress and lay down. Diane, with no other place to sit in the room, joined them. "Two people offered their back yards for them to wander around in," she said. "So, we were just in a back yard."

The Langs had gone to sleep on a Monday night in their own bed. By Tuesday night, they were sleeping in their cars, with their many pets-the two dogs, two desert tortoises (Sal and Rhody), a Russian tortoise (Ivan), a snake (Sandy), and a tarantula (Nicki)and the few things they could grab as they fled the inferno. The snake, tortoises, and tarantula were now being taken care of at the San Dimas Canyon Nature Center, rather than staying at the hotel. "Just to make my life simpler," Diane, who works with the Eaton Canyon Nature Center, said.