At 3:26 on Wednesday morning, January 8, 2025, I woke to an alarm. An alarm warning us to evacuate our home. I was sleeping fitfully and the warning was no surprise. Seventy mile an hour winds had whipped us for hours, and a wildfire was burning the nearby mountains when we went to bed. We had prepared to evacuate the night before, had put irreplaceable items like journals and photo albums near the door and had packed some clothes. Now with the power out, we gathered a few more belongings by the light of flashlights and drove away. We didn’t know if we would have a home to return to.
I was groggy and hungry and my first thought was to find an all-night restaurant. We headed to an IHOP five miles away—away from the fire. We stumbled into the restaurant, grim in the pre-dawn hours, and saw a few other evacuees who had already been seated. We traded news, stories and worries. Soon more evacuees arrived, and the kitchen and the poor waitress, expecting only the usual nightly crowd, were soon overwhelmed. The wind continued to blow; the warning to evacuate our neighborhood became an order; and new warning areas extended to within a few blocks of the restaurant. The fire whipped through the community of Altadena immediately east of our neighborhood in La Cañada. We planned our next move.
Friends in West Hollywood had an extra room, but loathe to wake them so early in the morning we called our son who had a small apartment in Sherman Oaks. Once he recovered from the surprise of the early-morning call, he welcomed us in. There we watched news reports detailing the destruction of homes and businesses in Altadena and worried that the fire would reach our neighborhood. Details were scarce, and I soon became saturated with what news there was. I tried to refocus, but mostly just dozed off, uncertain whether our house remained standing.
Late in the afternoon, we left our son’s apartment for our friends in West Hollywood, leaving with him some of the boxes we had packed and one of our cars. The winds seemed to have eased a bit, but continued to rattle windows and blow down branches as we drove over the Hollywood Hills.
We had no sooner lugged suitcases into our friend’s condominium and begun to help with dinner than a neighbor of theirs called – she could see flames from her apartment balcony. A new fire had started just two miles away and soon evacuation warnings were extended toward our new location. Now our hosts started to gather belongings in case we all had to evacuate. Soon, another fire started just two miles from our son’s apartment. The two new fires were quickly brought under control, and we settled down to dinner, but for a time we felt as though we were running out of places to escape.
Thursday morning, we woke to official briefings on the status of the fire. Large parts of Altadena had been destroyed, but there was no immediate danger to our neighborhood. The winds had calmed for at least a while and the fire was no longer headed in our direction, though it had started to work its way up the nearby mountains.
Still, I was anxious and restless. Even if the fire had not reached our neighborhood, I did not know if heavy winds or smoke had damaged our home. I wanted to get back and see the neighborhood, visit our house. We knew we would not stay – evacuation orders were still in place – but some neighbors who had remained in their houses assured us that we could safely visit. At a minimum, the continued lack of power meant food was thawing in our freezer and we wanted to salvage what we could.
The neighborhood was unusually quiet, though a few other neighbors were visiting their homes to clean up downed branches and, like us, salvage some food. The outside air carried the smell of smoke, though it was not as bad as we had experienced in earlier fires. The smoke had also penetrated our house and remained noticeable indoors, but it had not damaged any of our furnishings. Downed branches littered our yard, but nothing had damaged the house.
We visited our home again over the next several days as conditions improved and even spent one night there after power was restored. We remained wary, though, as dangerous winds were forecast to return. The fire still smoldered in Altadena and burned actively at various spots in the nearby mountains. With high-wind warnings in place Monday night, we evacuated again. As we prepared to leave, the neighborhood swarmed with activity. Helicopters circled. A jumbo jet flew just hundreds of feet over our house and dropped fire retardant on the hill behind us. Bulldozers and water tankers parked nearby. Firefighters patrolled our cul-de-sac looking for dangerous conditions. We spent another tense night with our friends in West Hollywood.
This time the extreme winds did not reach our neighborhood. Altadena and La Cañada sit in an area that is normally sheltered from Santa Ana winds, and the earlier extreme winds were an unusual exception. Two days after our second evacuation, convinced the immediate danger was past, we finally brought all our belongings back home, though we were slow to put them away. Conditions remained dryer than ever and we knew high winds could return. Finally, some ten days later, we had our first real rain in over six months, and we let ourselves relax.
The fire destroyed or damaged over ten thousand structures in Altadena, some as little as a mile and a half from our home. Over a dozen of our friends lost their homes; others whose homes remain standing have been displaced for months until repairs can be made and their neighborhoods detoxified. Another destructive fire in Pacific Palisades, 20 miles to our west, damaged or destroyed another eight thousand structures. My wife grew up there, and though the neighborhood she lived in survived, the neighborly downtown area she visited every day as a child was gone.
We think our homes are permanent. We may move to a new home, but we do so always with at least a little regret. We leave with tendrils of memory and connections behind. We may intend to return and, even if we know we never will, a part of us always longs to go back. My first home was outside Boston, Massachusetts, and our family left it when I was barely six years old. Fifty-six years and a half-dozen homes later, as I finished a cross-country bicycle ride, I went out of my way to ride by that house. I sent my siblings a picture of me in front of the house with the caption “Hey Mom, I’m home!”
Generations may pass, and still we long to return. My grandfather grew up in a house in Nova Scotia that was built by his grandfather in the early 19th century. My grandfather left that home when he was only seventeen and built his life in Minnesota. His childhood home was eventually sold out of the family, but a few years ago, 120 years after my grandfather left, my brother bought the house, and my siblings and I gathered there recently to walk the halls my grandfather walked as a child, to sleep in rooms where he dreamed at night.
When I drove away from our home in the early morning of January 8, I left a home I longed to return to, but I knew I might never be able to revisit. I realized then that our home was not permanent; I was just a visitor. This time, I returned, but many friends could not. I was no longer sure that I would always be able to return.
And in the weeks that followed, even as I have settled back into my home, I have come to understand that we are always only visitors in our homes. We may stay many years, even generations. But we all leave each of our homes – voluntarily or involuntarily, sooner or later. And some we can never revisit. One of the houses I called home – a quaint 19th century cottage we lived in when our children were infants – has been torn down, replaced with a bland suburban tract home. My wife’s childhood neighborhood survived the recent fire, but her home was long gone, torn down to expand a neighbor’s back yard when her parents sold the house some thirty years ago. My grandfather’s childhood home in Nova Scotia so far survives, but the nearby home of his great-grandfather, John Patterson, which stood for 200 years, crumbled shortly after I visited it in 1982.
The author Pico Iyer’s home was destroyed by fire over 30 years ago. Iyer reflected that for many “home has really less to do with a piece of soil, than you could say, with a piece of soul.” And there I find comfort. We imbue our homes with our souls; they provide a locus for memories and the values those memories embody and grow. We long to revisit our old homes because they give shape and substance to our memories and values.
But in the end, after providing temporary shelter and comfort, after providing a place to grow our souls, our homes are only symbols of what happened there. We carry what we learned, who we became, the essence that lies behind the symbol, wherever we go. That essence survives when we leave our homes behind, and even when they crumble. We will always make new homes when we must and, when we do, we will continue to hold fast to our soul. We will take it out into the world, into the work we do, into the friends we enrich, into the families we love. And into our new homes, wherever they may be.
Your commentary is a loving and sobering tribute to the power of place.