The Palisades Fire

Dear Friends,

Like everyone else who follows local news, I learned about the Palisades fire mid-day Tuesday. I was especially interested because the fire started in the Palisades Highlands, where my wife and I had lived for 23 years before our move to Santa Barbara. We had lived at other residences in the Palisades since the ‘60s. I have many friends who live in the Palisades, so I followed the story of the fire closely, and with growing alarm. I texted friends in the evacuation zone seeking reassurance that they were safe. All were, but now nearly all of them are homeless.

Three of the houses I lived in over the years in the Palisades are gone. And so is the entire community. Although I’ve lost nothing material in this fire, I’m grieving. For somehow the disappearance of all the physical structures in the Palisades that store my memories of the place—the Gelson’s supermarket where I shopped and got friendly with a butcher, the Starbucks I regularly frequented in an historic Spanish buiding on Sunset, the Recreation Center where I coached my sons’ baseball and basketball teams, the restaurants where my wife and I dined with friends, the park where I hiked and guided nature walks—the loss of these locations jeopardizes my memories of them, turning them into ghosts, so that a psychic loss seems to be occurring, as though an important part of my past has been erased. I can only imagine the grief of those whose homes and all their contents have become ashes. A terrible diminishment has taken place.

We tend to take community for granted. In a community, everyone is connected through friends, neighbors, teachers, doctors and nurses, shopkeepers, gardeners, policemen and policewomen, and, yes, fire fighters, in a network of relationships. All of these relationships require livable physical spaces to survive and flourish. Can there be community in any meaningful sense in the absence of these physical spaces?

Perhaps only a new community, a community of the grieving.

Our townhome complex in the Palisades Highlands destroyed in the fire.

Arthur Hoyle