Distress Signal

WHAT THE L.A. FIRES REVEAL ABOUT AMERICA'S BLEAK CLIMATE FUTURE

- BY JUSTIN WORLAND, LESLIE DICKSTEIN

LOOKING BACK, MY ELEMENTARY-school experience felt almost bucolic. My classmates and I ran around Saint Mark’s School’s 5½-acre campus carefree. With classrooms opening to the outdoors, we sat outside for lunch in the shadow of the San Gabriel Mountains and feared being sent to the administration building, a two-story house converted into offices. The smell of burning forest was a recognizable, if not frequent, occurrence. Teachers would cancel recess, lunch was moved inside from the patio—an annoyance no more ominous than a rainy day.

When I visited in February, just a month after the Eaton Fire had ripped through the town of Altadena, Calif., the campus had been transformed. For the most part, the buildings were gone. A chimney from the old house remained standing. A stairwell that once led from the ground floor of the “Art Barn” to offices upstairs had become a stairwell from nowhere to nowhere. And somehow amid the rubble sat the same blue and yellow tables where I hung out nearly three decades prior.

In September, I visited Saint Mark’s again. The campus had been cleared of debris—the result of a cleanup effort that the state touts as the fastest in history—and the site now looks like a giant dirt patch, waiting for construction to begin. In the interim, the school relocated to a corner of a high school two miles southeast. It’s at once a hopeful and devastating site. Modular trailers have been placed on the edge of campus. Children are playing on a hastily constructed play set. Amid the faculty walking around, I spot a few familiar faces who greet me with hugs and nostalgia. And the blue and yellow tables have been moved to a patio at the center of campus. “When we opened this facility, the kids cried; they were like, ‘Those are our tables,’” Jennifer Tolbert, the head of school, told me as we walked on the new campus.