Los Angeles was dying. Most of the world was changing—changing rapidly, involuntarily, blundering through vast climate change. —Octavia E. Butler 
(Note from the archives)

These winds were different. 

Shuddering, whistling, howling: Hurricane-force gusts, 60, 70, 80 miles per hour. They kicked up—fierce—early morning, January 6. They wailed like a ghost train, lost control. They rattled and hissed. Kept me from sleep. They didn’t let up. 

An Angeleno, born and raised, I know all too well to be prepared for nature's unexpected—especially the extremes. But those roaring winds that raked across Southern California and the quick, ravenous fires that tore across the rugged landscape were distinct. An altogether different terror, opening a new uneasy chapter in our relationship with nature here in Southern California. The Eaton Fire, which destroyed 9,418 structures (6,000 homes) and spread 14,000 acres across the San Gabriel Valley, is now being categorized as the most expensive natural disaster in US history, unseating New Orleans’s devastating Hurricane Katrina. 

I live in Northwest Pasadena, a chockablock mix of urban and wild, backyard chickens and auto body shops, bobcats and blue-light smoke shops. I’ve been here for more than 20 years. Longer than anywhere else I have lived in LA County. Our neighborhood, considered part of the San Gabriel Mountains’ foothill community, is a designation that I think about only when the heaviest rains (finally) arrive, or when the temperature dips near freezing in the winter.

My connection to this place, from the very beginning, was its reward of wilderness, the beauty that you can walk out the door and sink right into: Giant deodars and cypress trees, abundant sycamores and oaks. A fantasy of gardens. And while I hadn’t outright chosen the San Gabriel Valley as my new home, when I landed, little by little I came to know what was behind its charm: its unity.

My personal Pasadena/Altadena story starts with my friend Darryl. I’d moved to Pasadena while I was still working full time in downtown Los Angeles. I was seldom home. I didn’t realize that I might need an intervention to help make my neighborhood my own. It was Darryl who walked me through the places he thought, as a reporter, I should know about. Darryl is a musician, a gardener, an outdoorsman and history buff. He is a born storyteller. 

When it came to situating me, his lessons started with suggestions via text messages: photos of hiking spots, hidden vistas, wild flora and gentle fauna. I learned about Owen Brown’s grave (abolitionist John Brown’s son up in the San Gabriels above us) and the eerie cultish stories swirling around Devil’s Gate Dam. 

Later, he took me on a walking tour through Northwest “Afro Dena” as he has designated it. He pointed out the places where many musicians and artists lived, and talked about a little strip on North Lake Avenue, where there was a store that featured African arts and crafts and incense. Closer to home, he walked me past Funky Junk Farms, a time-machine wonderland of vintage trucks, cars, RVs that were rentable as film or TV props or, for the right price, could be one’s own. As we strolled, we yielded to majestic well-groomed horses who trotted onto the main road exiting a hidden row of stables set back from the street. Our day ended and I peeled off to the weekly farmers' market at Loma Alta Park. I purchased a fragrant bouquet of flowers in hues of lavender, lilac, and violet, along with a bag of juicy winter tangerines—the vendor tossing a few extra in my shopping bag, like Louisiana lagniappe. I was beginning to understand how a new place quietly inhabits you.

The history of this tight, proud population surrounding me, embracing me—made up of multigenerational families who organized and worked around racially restrictive housing covenants to claim and secure their land—was being discovered by the rest of the world, just as the community itself was being erased. 

On Tuesday, January 7, I reschedule an appointment with my mechanic, who had just the day before diagnosed my car with a “weak starter.” Absorbing the headlines, I’m now more worried about the wind thrusts and the reports of fallen trees and arcing power lines. Early this morning, the City of Pasadena posted a warning on its socials: “If Possible, Please Stay Home...” Much, much later in the day, as the winds gather more strength, I scroll through my socials and find Darryl filming outside his home, the camera turned on him. The Eaton Fire had started not too long before. Already, to his left, within frame, the fire blazes, leaps, more immediate and legible than felt possible.

Three miles away, watching his commentary, I feel both far away and yet too close. I can smell it though. More acrid than campfire. Outside my windows, I hear sirens scream and the sounds of clanging metal, the smack-crash of blade-sharp palm fronds falling from many feet above. I am attempting to will it silent. My whole being is focused on quieting the wind—the world. If I have a purpose, some set of tasks to perform, I tell myself, I won’t be as afraid.   

A neighbor texts me around 7 p.m. to say that we should expect our power to go out; a notice she received from the city tells her so. I already have been charging devices in the event that might happen. For added precaution, I plug in another back-up battery. Minutes later though, she calls. Her voice is even, yet something tense coils beneath it. “It looks like we should be getting ready to evacuate.”

I haven’t received any notices from the city or the county by text or phone. In the past, we’ve received texts alerting “foothill communities” of any pressing or immediate danger. My first veteran’s response is, “Well, we never usually have to evacuate.” She sends me a screenshot of a map—yellow/orange/red designations. I’m not sure what I’m looking at, but I would, in short time, become well-versed with the Watch Duty wildfire app and how it fills gaps transmitting life-saving information. I check in with other nearby friends: No one has evacuated yet. Everyone was “waiting,” “watching,” “praying.” 

To be safe, I’ve already decided, I will not go to bed tonight.

Though I was here for the big 2011 windstorm that leveled hundred-year-old trees and crushed traffic lights, nothing truly prepared me for the terrifying power of these winds, nor for the heat and appetite of this fast-moving fire. Nothing, save for a young hometown meteorologist.

A few years ago, I began following the Altadena Climate and Weather page on Facebook, hosted by Edgar McGregor, an earnest twentysomething climate scientist who fed us tantalizing tidbits about our Altadena/Pasadena microclimates and what to expect in our global-warming challenged times. I’d joined primarily due to our extended droughts and the increasingly hotter summers. I'd send screenshots of his predictions and assessments to friends to help explain what we were experiencing outside our doors. Members, in summer, would post photos of their outdoor thermometers, or in winter, videos of graupel collecting on their just-mowed lawn. I love the neighborhood-y, over-the-fence-chat feel of the page, as well as McGregor’s relationship to place and his climate concerns, which opened up a space to have frank discussions about the realities and consequences of our warming earth. His video series, documenting his Eaton Canyon trash pick-ups, detailing what he’d gathered on and off the hiking trail, made me hopeful. This was the enthusiastic ambassador we needed. I knew McGregor was going to be the person to escort and educate us into our climate future. But as it turns out, he did even more, that night—he saved hundreds of lives.

Though passionate, McGregor tends to veer away from hyperbole. On January 5 he updated his status: “Again, my fear here is less of the wind and more of the fire danger. Yes, there will be dozens upon dozens of trees lost in Altadena. A few people are going to have their roofs caved in by falling trees.... There will be plenty of power outages ... but it's the fire danger.” When he began posting about his January 7 predictions using language such as “potentially damaging,” “mountain wave,” “fourth strongest event in 50 years,” I took his warnings seriously. 

As the day progressed and the winds revealed their full force, he updated the group while he made his own preparations. By 7:17 p.m., McGregor, obscured in shadow, the fire dark yet enormous behind him, sounds the alarm: “As you can see a fire is erupting in Eaton Canyon.... This is imminent. Do not wait for an evacuation notice. If you think you should leave. Get Out. Get Out.” It was the clearest, most emphatic warning I received amid this entire ordeal.

When I next check Darryl’s feed, he’s still standing sentinel, but the fire is now so, so close, tapping, it seems, on his shoulder. Shock rises and corkscrews inside me. He’s promising all of us who are tuned in that he’s going to leave. It’s the first time I feel real fear. 

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The evening bends and blurs. A sharp knock on my front door and there are my neighbors to the north. One tells me that he was in the supermarket parking lot and the fire was zipping across the mountain, “close close.” He’s out of breath, as if he’s run the entire distance there-to-here. While both brothers were masked against the smoke, I could read the message in their eyes: “We are leaving. You should too.”

I’ve walked the edge in Southern California: I’ve lived through freak rainstorms, earthquakes, wild Santa Anas—but never have I had to evacuate. Over time, though, by osmosis, I’ve memorized the lists—important papers, irreplaceable photos, cash, passport, medication. I toss bare essentials into a tote bag. My neighbor to the south and I construct a plan: We will leave together when we get the order. That order does not come. Sometime in the small hours between Tuesday and Wednesday, I make out a garbled voice over static-y loudspeaker, its message indiscernible, but repeating. The vehicle does not turn down our street, but something tells me that this must be the warning. Our one official warning. It’s 4:30 a.m. We pack our cars; she wrangles her sweet dog. I hold my breath, hoping that my weak starter will turn over. Miraculously, it does. 

In the driveway, I look toward the silhouette of the mountains, through a hazy scrim of smoke, and I can see the dark glow of flames lacing the earth. The air is heavy with ash; it has its own texture, and it is bitter. The wind, now growling, tosses a dried Christmas tree trailing tinsel down the street. Another gust upends a neighbor's ADU worksite’s porta-potty. I back out, turn east, then south. The traffic lights is out. I don’t have the courage to look back. 

Octavia Butler understood—saw firsthand—what was occurring with our climate. She saw what mistakes, miscalculations, and arrogant avoidance might impact the future. She would take no pleasure in “being right,” “winning” the bet. We all lose, she knew. She wanted us to see it for ourselves. She wanted us to change our ways and approaches, to course correct. 

Photo by Lynell George

As the hours wear away and the threat of wind and fire diminish, the anguish is profound. I sit in a makeshift “office” set up in the back of a friend's sunroom and scroll through the online news reports confirming that the Eaton Fire took 17 lives, all of them people in West Altadena—a historically multiethnic enclave where Black home ownership, specifically, exceeds 80 percent (Darryl’s “Afro Dena”). The history of this tight, proud, population surrounding me, embracing me—made up of multigenerational families who organized and worked around racially restrictive housing covenants to claim and secure their land—was being discovered by the rest of the world, just as the community itself was being erased. 

Our order has yet to be lifted, but I learn from another northwest resident that our street has eluded the worst. Flying embers had made their way to our north-facing intersection; a fast-reacting neighbor, who’d not budged from his smoky, ash-filled home, put the flames out. Another conflagration, which burst out on an adjacent street, was quickly doused with a garden hose. 

A few days later, we’re downgraded, classified as an Evacuation Warning zone for another few days—the water, we’re cautioned, is not usable for any purpose, not even if we boil it. I venture back to assess: Lots of ash, lots of general wind-blown debris, lots of branches and leaves. I popped in on neighbors and was able to offer help with clean-ups, and pick up and deliver food and water to some people in need. But the check-in walk I had hoped to take, the one I have taken for years, was still off limits behind the stretch of caution tape and weapon-wielding National Guards. 

The bulk of my ritual morning walk takes me into and through Altadena. I’ve grown attached to, even fallen in love with particular front-yard gardens or the tumble-down splendor of a worn-down California Craftsman. I cross Santa Rosa/Christmas Tree Lane with its fragrant deodar cedars. There are certain streets with their striking arched canopy that look like something magical out of a children’s watercolor pictorial storybook. If you walk too fast, you’ll miss the little gnome and fairy “forests” spreading out at the roots of old trees. 

I’ve watched, firsthand, an evolution: Big swaths of rolling, bright-green lawns transformed into intricately landscaped drought-tolerant native-plant gardens. There’s the huge azure-blue “unicorn” statue paused mid-canter next to bountiful tangerine trees, and a street over, a low-slung midcentury-modern cabinlike home with a matching red front and garage doors that feature a whimsical Swiss cheese/porthole pattern of circles. I began to identify the landmarks that mattered to me. All of these, I had decided, make up my territory, my northwest. (I know now, based on burn maps and anecdotes, that some of these spots did not survive the blaze.)

Among the unwavering Cassandras, perhaps the northwest’s most famous figure is the late great thinker, writer, and futurist Octavia E. Butler. Predictably, her name began swirling about just as the fires started to rage. This unusual January Santa Ana condition’s timing proved uncanny. It arrived just as 2024 ceded to 2025—the first years opening Butler’s Parable series. Those novels, Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, published respectively in 1993 and 1996, are set in a barely habitable, climate- and politically challenged future that closely resembles our now. 

Butler saw the potential of this day coming, decades ago. It’s not just evident in the novels, but she wrote about her climate concerns in essays and in her journals, and in her notes for speeches. She talked about it in interviews and kept copious files of newspaper clippings. Evidence of this exists in her papers, now archived at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. Since this cataclysmic event, which so hauntingly mirrors her narratives, people marvel: How did she know? How did she get it so right? Was she an oracle? The answers rest in the paper trail: She was a tireless researcher—a “news junkie”—in her own words.

In Octavia Butler's World, Anything Is Possible

Read Lynell George’s tribute to Octavia Butler and her classic novel Kindred.

She was also a nature lover and focused observer who spent much of her early life, on foot, walking through the same Pasadena/Altadena neighborhoods as I do, the ones that are smoldering now. Octavia Butler understood—saw firsthand—what was occurring with our climate. She saw what mistakes, miscalculations, and arrogant avoidance might impact the future. She would take no pleasure in “being right,” “winning” the bet. We all lose, she knew. She wanted us to see it for ourselves. She wanted us to change our ways and approaches, to course correct. 

In a 2000 letter, she wrote of the Parables that she’d set out to address and treat climate—and climate change—as “almost a character.” It had history and shape. “It affects people’s health ... the price of food ... the availability of potable water.... I wanted to write a story in which all these things and others have gone from being problems and possibilities to being outright disasters.” 

Even still, what Butler also wanted to thread in was hope: “I wanted to write a story in which, in spite of all the trouble, someone [her young protagonist Lauren Olamina] tries to push the human species into focusing its great energies on a positive and potentially useful goal.” 

Talk to anyone here in Altadena. Time has both stopped and leaped forward. 

Photo by Lynell George

Talk to anyone here in Altadena. Time has both stopped and leaped forward. I’ve lost track of tenses. I struggle for precise language—"surreal” no longer seems adequate; neither does “heartbreak.”

For so many, waiting and hoping, from outside their neighborhoods—it's like being out of body, suspended. 

Until they can see it with their own eyes, they hit replay on drone footage, or pause the TikTok drive-by videos, trying to make out streets that no longer bear signage or hold landmarks. Roofs caught fire; palm trees transformed into flaming torches. The stories of lost loved ones. One New Orleans friend, familiar with the stages and contours of disaster, called, terrified by what was on her television screen: “Y'all gotta hurricane. But it's fire, not water.” 

What is it to live in territory that invariably brushes up against disaster? Wild wind, earthquakes, fires, and floods. There are rules of thumb we have taken as infallible. As one Facebook friend posted, sharing a newspaper item about the fire’s speed and intensity and the grievous evacuation order glitches, this all rewrites knowns, the accepted presumptions: “I grew up believing even if you didn't have the views, the flats were safe from fires.” That, clearly, is no longer true. We’ve crossed into a new and striking relationship with place.

The guideposts we once lived by are being rewritten as fire blazes through one tract and then the next. We take precautions and then the precautions fail us. Then there are the surprises we confront—unfathomable, life-changing ones, that leave us reaching for words. I am thinking about the elders in Altadena who already so long ago cut ties with the past, left so much behind to start anew—here. 

That close-knitness is what made Altadena feel unique and set apart from so many places in ever-evolving (and rapidly gentrifying) Southern California. 

Midweek, week two, all evacuation orders lifted: Darryl turns the camera on himself, then pauses, makes a tight pan, to allow us a glimpse of his property. I take in a breath, astonished. Except for the house’s facade, the lot’s flattened, full of husks of cooled embers and debris. 

What I’m most struck by in his video—and this says much, given the severity and totality of damage—is the moment he walks us into what was his backyard. This was the backdrop for many of his videos, the conversational reels where he showed off his grilling skills, his vegetable gardens, his trees—peach, avocado. The garden beds were alive with produce—tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, and the crown jewel collard greens that he’d propagated from a cutting from his late-mother’s plant. This is where, if it is possible, it gets most painful: That country/city vibe, that genealogical family tree, the branch of the story we are entrusted with—severed. Here was a family history that is sunk deep into that nurtured earth. Rooted. Even to those who didn't grow up here: It was a kindergarten school friend who set up a GoFundMe to support Darryl's recovery. That close-knitness is what made Altadena feel unique and set apart from so many places in ever-evolving (and rapidly gentrifying) Southern California. It felt capable of holding a copious store of histories and memories; over time it had become the very definition of “for safe keeping.”

Whatever transpires, going forward, Darryl’s voice will always be my Altadena, its narrator. It will forever be part of my experience of Altadena. What Altadena will be, become, post January 2025, is something that hovers far off in the future. It has already worried me, as I have picked up water and PPE for friends and talked with residents who are looking at their own timelines thinking that, perhaps, they are at a stage in life that rebuilding is not in the cards for them. Like my Louisiana friends and family who have survived savage, climate-change-fueled hurricanes, who have come to the other side of it and decided that time may be up on that city’s story for them. They love it, but left it. 

This question though: Where now? What’s next for us? What’s safe?

This, I feel to the bone.

Where now? What’s next for us? What’s safe?

On the Sunday before the last of the evacuation orders had been lifted, masked up, I attempted a walk. My hope: to try to find my bearings in this changed landscape. The air is still heavy with smoke, filled with a toxic fine ash, the mountains etched with raw burn scars. The smaller neighborhood roads were still cordoned off by caution tape and blockades; larger intersections and even full neighborhoods are sealed off by armed National Guardsmen and Humvees. 

To my surprise, I’m able to push beyond the border where Pasadena cedes to Altadena on Lake Avenue. A few blocks farther, I encounter an official checkpoint, a quartet of armed National Guardsmen, on watch at a street corner. I talk my way in and through: “Resident. Evacuated. Just returning.” The guard who briefly interrogates me says, “A proud Pasadena boy too.”

Northbound, almost immediately, I spot the remnant of the facade of my old beautician’s building, burned stucco, shards of glass and brick strewn across the sidewalk, the wrought iron of the faux “widow’s walk” twisted. In front of another indiscernible structure, I happen upon what has become a talisman of this disaster, burned pages of books—one appears religious in nature; another deals with trigonometry. I walk farther to make out what is left of an old-school mom-and-pop pizza joint I've long hoped to try. There are corners that are not recognizable. Buildings that have collapsed onto themselves. That strip of businesses I so identify with Darryl—it is, as I feared, gone too. 

For the first time, a sting of grief comes. Cuts through the shock. It lands, sharp and sure. I’d been trying to stave it off, but it's all welling up, catching up as I see things up close. 

Heading back to the flats, I take in a series of homemade signs affixed to power poles, store windows, bus benches: “Thank you, First Responders,” “Altadena Strong,” “626-NOT-4-SALE.” Gratitude and resistance.

As I wait for a traffic light, a young man with a fresh fade haircut and sunshine smile dashes across the empty expanse of Lake Avenue balancing a Styrofoam plate. “Breakfast?” He shows off the ample portions: a hefty burrito, home fries, and a generous scoop of fresh fruit. “I’m good,” I say through my mask. “But thank you. So kind.”

Undeterred: “Coffee? Juice? Water?” he presses.

I shake my head. 

“If you change your mind...”

He points across the avenue to a folding table he’s set up on a sidewalk. It’s long, communal. Places set. Ready.

“We will be right here... Not going anywhere... “

In his declaration, I hear something more. A promise.  

That glimmer of hopefulness that Octavia Butler seeded in the chaos of the Parables is rooted in adaptability. Change was inescapable; it could be destructive, it could be leveling, but to go forward, constructively, together, meant moving with grace and compassion. 

In this transitional moment, between the past and the yet-to-be written, there’s a pledge we can make to ourselves. Despite the ruin—whether one chooses to hold fast or pull up roots—we can, in the middle moment, minister to one another. 

That glimmer of hopefulness that Octavia Butler seeded in the chaos of the Parables is rooted in adaptability. Change was inescapable; it could be destructive, it could be leveling, but to go forward, constructively, together, meant moving with grace and compassion. 

In those sleepless, dark, early hours of the morning after—January 8—I clicked on Edgar McGregor’s update. Reading it aloud to my evacuation hosts, I couldn't help but to think about Butler's projections and prescriptions. Not just her pragmatism, but her heart. His words for us could as well be hers: “As you may by now realize, an absolutely cataclysmic event has struck at the heart of our community,” he writes. “When dawn breaks this morning, the scenes in Altadena will be heart-breaking.… People are going to have had their lives changed forever. I ask … you … in this moment of this absolute … bottom of our lives … to be there for one another … to show compassion, understanding, and love.” 

A story—a life—as we knew it, is, irrefutably, over. Brutally so, for so many. We can’t go back to what was. The next steps, no doubt, are unclear, but we can strive, within this rupture, to locate our best selves, as we attempt—together—to navigate, and shape, the new now.