Op-Ed | The Californian writer, author of the bestseller 'The Hazards of Good Fortune,' writes about the first five days of anguish during which his house in Mandeville Canyon, where he lives with his wife, was surrounded by flames.
Parts of Los Angeles are still smoldering as I write these words. We evacuated our house in Mandeville Canyon one week ago, on Tuesday, January 7th. Several friends texted or called and invited us to stay with them. My wife and I temporarily moved in with our daughter who lives a few miles away in a part of the city that was not on fire.
This is not the first time we’ve been evacuated because of a fire so we packed very little, a change of clothes, a couple of books, our computers. The last time this happened we were home the following day.
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https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2025/01/21/seth-greenland-writer-los-angeles-fires-are-like-an-elemental-test-during-which-we-are-asked-what-it-is-we-truly-value_6737253_23.html
Mandeville Canyon is close to Pacific Palisades. The Palisades, as it’s called, is where we shop for food and get our car washed. We go to the cinema there. It’s where our kids played sports when they were young. On July 4th, there are spectacular fireworks and a famous parade. We used to watch our son march in it. All of this is to say, it feels like our hometown.
It’s a place of great beauty, framed by gorgeous green mountains that plunge precipitously down to the Pacific Ocean. The hillsides are stippled with magnificent homes inhabited by luminaries like Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg. And there’s history as well. Henry Miller lived there. It’s where Thomas Mann and Lion Feuchtwanger settled after fleeing Europe during the Second World War. Today, the German Consulate operates Mann’s home as a cultural center. I attended a program there a few weeks ago.
By Wednesday, the neighborhood no longer existed
I almost never watch the news on television. But since we left our home, the TV has hardly been off. As we watched reports of the Pacific Palisades fire that evening, something jarring occurred. Another fire, nearly as big, erupted across the city in Altadena. It was dubbed the Eaton Fire. Then the Hurst fire in the San Fernando Valley barely a few miles north burst onstage. We worried for our friends who lived near these fires but we were focused on Pacific Palisades because not only did many of our friends live there, it was much closer to our house. A sense of apocalypse…