L.A. in my Bones
Fifty years ago, my romance with Los Angeles began following four years of teaching in Nebraska and its long gray winter months of snow and ice. Eager for sunshine and a new chapter in life, my friend Pat Fennell, sister Kim and I packed our belongings into a 24-foot U-Haul truck and headed west until our caravan reached Santa Monica and the very edge of the Pacific Ocean. Kim moved in with our sister Molly who introduced us to Helen—her 60-year-old artist friend and neighbor. Helen’s warm and inclusive family that included her partner Alfredo, his seven children, and her five children embraced us and expanded our horizons. For a decade, not once did the thought of leaving L.A. for life in the Midwest ever cross my mind.
I loved L.A. and that incredible chapter in my life—one that soon included Kit, his children Hayden and Heidi, Pat and Gary, and my cats Tiggy and Muffie. Over the next decade, we lived at the Cottage in Beverly Glen Canyon, were married in the backyard and became a forever family. Last week, L.A.’s apocalyptic fires brought early memories of L.A. alive again. Santa Ana desert winds blew unmercifully for days across West L.A., Malibu and the Pacific Ocean, at times reaching up to 100 miles per hour. L.A.’s winter rains normally arrive between November and March, but by January, it had not rained since last summer. When hurricane force hot Santa Ana winds arrived last week, they rapidly engulfed entire communities and hillsides from the Pacific Palisades to the Malibu coast before threatening other areas across the city.
Fires have long been a part of the reality of L.A.’s dry climate and geography. Life there is a delicate balance of perpetual sunshine and winter months that too often bring little rain. By January, fire conditions had grown dangerously high. Bone dry brush, native grasses and highly flammable chaparral vegetation literally exploded, sending fiery embers into the hot winds that erased entire neighborhoods and historic landmarks.
During my L.A. chapter, I put down roots that are still a part of my bones. Kit taught geography at nearby UCLA, Hayden and Heidi attended public schools in West L.A. and both graduated from University High whose biggest rival in athletics was Palisades High School that is now gone, along with almost all of the homes and businesses in the community. Pat and I taught at Audubon JHS across town, carpooling on the L.A. Freeway for much of that decade. Our friend Sheila, a fellow teacher there, still lives in the same West L.A. apartment she has rented for decades, always accompanied by a rescue cat or two. Pat and Gary live in the house he grew up in near Beverly Hills, not far from Beverly Glen Canyon that was once our shared home.
Chomsri—a student who lived with me while I was a Peace Corps teacher in Thailand in the late 1960s—married and moved to L.A. with her husband Sidney about the time Pat and I arrived from Nebraska. Over the years Chomsri and I have traveled to Kenya, Istanbul, and Manhattan and talk about revisiting Thailand where our friendship began in an earlier chapter of our lives.
Suzanne and Don, neighbors in the Glen that was our shared world near UCLA, will forever be a part of my L.A. memories. Suzanne tended a vegetable garden, taught cooking classes, painted, and began baking focaccia bread with rosemary that grew wild on their steep backyard hillside. She wrote and illustrated two cookbooks. Eventually, she and Don opened a bakery that sold her incredible loaves of artisan breads to grocery stores all over L.A. and Orange County. They now live in a small town in SW France on the Mediterranean and keep a lovely apartment in Rome as well. Our friendship continues to this day with regular email exchanges about food and the meaning of life that remain as vibrant and essential now as they were fifty years ago.
Fifty years ago, Pat, Kim and I made our life-changing journey to L.A. on a wing and a prayer, without jobs or a place to unpack our U-Haul truck. And though work with National Geographic took Kit and me to D.C. in 1985, part of me remained behind. Over the decades, friends who still live there have kept me updated on the city’s growth and growing pains. Over the years, I’ve gone with them while visiting L.A. to the Huntington Gardens in Pasadena as well as to the Getty Villa in Malibu and Getty Museum above the 405 Freeway—as well as to many of the iconic landscapes and landmarks recently erased by the fires.
It is almost impossible to capture in words how these devastating fires have changed the landscape of the city my friends and family knew all those decades ago. The apocalyptic scope of the disaster is too enormous to describe. But L.A. will always have a place in my heart that fires cannot erase. As I write this morning from Nevada City 425 miles north of L.A., friends continue to deal with active fires and shifting Santa Ana winds. And though much has been lost, memories from our shared halcyon days there will forever remain deeply ingrained in our bones.
