Palisades Lost

This weekend was supposed to be an ordinary one in Pacific Palisades. Boy Scout Troop 223 was planning a weekend camp-out at Malibu Creek. The local youth baseball tryouts were scheduled at Palisades Recreation Center’s Field of Dreams. Sunday morning was a time for the farmer’s market just off Sunset Boulevard, for picking over produce and grass-fed meat while kibitzing with neighbors.

For as long as anyone here can remember, the Palisades have been a bucolic corner of Los Angeles, its houses dotting the narrow roads that meander through the canyons that are tucked between the Santa Monica Mountains and the Pacific Ocean. Those who could afford to live in those homes were drawn by its slower pace, far enough from the freeway hamster wheel to get lost in the Technicolor sunsets over the water.

Now those neighborhoods are hardly recognizable after wind-whipped fire roared through one enclave after another, leaving in its wake homes that were burned to the ground, cars that were incinerated and lives that were shattered.

“There’s nothing left,” said Darby Woods, a local real estate agent who lost her home in the fire. “It literally looks like what you see on TV in Ukraine. It looks like we’re in a war zone and there’s no reinforcements coming. It’s just decimated.”

When the wind calmed down on Thursday and attention began to turn to other areas of Los Angeles where the fires raged, residents trickled in to pockets of Pacific Palisades to see what remained of their homes — and of the lives they’d built there.

The acrid smell of smoke hung over the Palisades’ Castellammare neighborhood, up on a bluff overlooking the Pacific. A man on a motorbike was offering burritos to the hungry, and two others in vehicles were delivering water to the thirsty as firefighters scoured smoldering lots for signs of fires not yet extinguished.

A man with a shovel in hand trudged up a hill to his mother’s home, intent on retrieving her medication, family photos and shutting off any water and gas valves that remained open.

The signs of the fire’s unpredictability were inescapable.

Two doors down on Tranquillo Road, a house on the market for $5.35 million had been rendered a smoldering pile of wood, metal and stone — the agent’s sign was the only thing untouched. Nearby, trees outside a house were nothing but charred limbs, while across the street, a lemon tree with ripe fruit stood sentry at a front door.

Wandering the neighborhood looking to help was Randy Stoklos. He was born on Tranquillo, traveled the world as a beach volleyball star and bought the house next door to his parents’ place in 1989 for $630,000.

“There’s beautiful places all over the world, but this is Shangri-La,” said Mr. Stoklos, 64, who never left his home when the fires hit, waking up at 4:30 a.m. on Tuesday to fend off embers with a garden hose. “There’s clean, fresh air — you don’t need air conditioning — and the sunsets are incredible. Until recently, I never locked the door.”

Brendan Armm and his partner Sunshine Armstrong were trying to process it all. Mr. Armm, a chiropractor, had parked his Tesla on the Pacific Coast Highway and walked up to join Ms. Armstrong in saving his home and others. They also rescued a neighbor’s puppy. But when he returned to his car, it had gone up in flames, as had a condominium he owns.

“We lost a condo and a car and saved a bunch of homes and a puppy,” Mr. Armm said. “I think we’re doing OK.”

Residents in this area had long considered a disaster like this. The Woolsey fire in Malibu in 2018 had been a warning, as had California’s near perpetual drought.

And yet.

“This is a wealthy town,” Mr. Armm said. “The assumption is it’s not going to happen here. Then I hear from my partner that my home is on fire. There’s going to be a reckoning because of this shared trauma. People are going to adapt their values. How important are those expensive shoes or watch when it’s gone like this? The community is going to change.”

Just then, a vehicle pulled up and Jim McDonnell, the Los Angeles police chief, stepped out to offer his condolences to the couple. He and his officers had been touring the area. They had seen the devastation on television, but now they could feel it.

“You can’t explain this to somebody unless they see it,” the chief said, staring out at jaw-dropping views of the ocean — views that were only possible because a house that had been there two days earlier was there no longer.

There are two roads into Castellammere — one entrance to the east off Sunset Boulevard, the other to the west from the Pacific Coast Highway. When the evacuation order came on Tuesday morning, Ted Radin, 77, left the home he had bought in 1977 and made his way down to the highway. He crossed the pedestrian bridge to the beach and then turned around and studied the hillside for hours.

He saw embers land on a home, then watched as the flames spread like fingers around a jewel box until it was engulfed. Then another. And another. It felt methodical, almost inexorable. As the sun set, Mr. Radin, a retired actuary who doesn’t use email and carries a flip phone, made another risk calculation.

He would try to save his home.

And so he crossed the pedestrian bridge, walked back up the hill and readied himself with a garden hose. Mr. Radin knocked embers off his neighbor’s home across the street and then doused the palm tree that had caught a spark in his front yard before firefighters arrived about 10 p.m.

“I believe my being here made a difference,” Mr. Radin said.

He had learned Thursday morning that electricity and gas were unlikely to be restored anytime soon, so he may have to get used to cold showers. He pondered this wearing a gray T-shirt and sweatpants while sitting on the front steps of his house. The home he had rescued.