As LA burns, I looked for hope. From Sierra Madre to Pasadena, here's where I found it. | Opinion
I pray for everyone I know and don't know. I guess I consider myself spiritual but not religious – though after today, I can't quite tell the difference.
I started up Mount Wilson Trail on Thursday afternoon. I was trying to see whether a monastery had survived the Eaton Fire and I had taken a wrong turn. Two fire trucks were parked at the trailhead – one from Morongo Valley, a small town in Southern California's high desert – though I didn’t see the firemen.
As I write this, the Eaton Fire, first reported Tuesday about 6 p.m. at Altadena Drive and Midwick Drive, is at 3% containment and has burned more than 13,956 acres.
According to CalFire incident update, “Numerous firefighting air tankers from throughout the state are flying fire suppression missions as conditions allow,” with 79 engines, two water tenders, eight dozers, nine hand crews and 1,527 total personnel as of Thursday evening.
This is just one of the many fires burning in Los Angeles.
A ravine beside the trail smoldered – splotches of orange fire retardant verged into patches of white ash; burned shrub limbs remained, shiny and black.
I could smell smoke – both immediate, nearby smoke and faraway smoke that had become our city’s air, our sun, now a yolky orange haze.
On another day, this 6-mile trailhead would take you straight up to Mount Wilson, a 5,710-foot peak in the San Gabriel Mountains – and the Mount Wilson Observatory, an astronomical observatory that houses some very important telescopes and was conceived and founded in 1904 by American astrophysicist George Ellery Hale, who is famous for his discovery of magnetic fields and sunspots.
Mount Wilson also has transmitting towers for numerous news stations based in LA – NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox – all of which we’ve been watching for the past several days.
I grew up in Pasadena. Many of my friends have lost their homes.
I grew up in Pasadena and came back to help my parents evacuate if need be – so far, they have not been evacuated.
Many of my good friends have lost their homes. Here are some texts from my friends:
“Her house (whole street) burned.”
“Everything is gone.”
“House is definitely gone.”
Earlier that afternoon, I had been walking around Altadena and found myself with a few people staring at what I soon learned was the 100-year-old Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center on Altadena Drive.
I remember going to a classmate’s bar mitzvah here years ago, but in its wreckage, I couldn’t piece together that this was that place somewhere in my memory.
“They managed to get the Torah scrolls out and that was it,” said Laurence Harris, husband of Cantor Ruth Berman Harris, who has been the temple’s cantor since 2011.
Apparently, all 20 Torah scrolls – including one that survived the Holocaust – were saved.
“It’s been an amazing place for life cycle events,” Harris said of the temple. He explained his wife was hunting for a place to have services this week.
The temple is a combination of 10 other local synagogues that no longer exist. Just Sunday, they held a commemoration to install an original plaque from the Sierra Madre Temple Foundation. The Pasadena center hosts 26 bar mitzvahs a year and also has a K-7 school with 150 children enrolled.
Patrick Wright, husband of Rabbi Jill Gold Wright, said numerous irreplaceable artifacts had been destroyed – Saturday morning prayer books; two libraries full of books; memorial boards – all gone.
We stood on the sidewalk and watched a group of firemen from California’s Central Valley huddled beside their two trucks.
Duane Shiers, task force leader of the Tulare County mixed strike force team, said his group included firefighters from Visalia, Tulare County, Porterville and one from Shaver Lake.
Shiers explained to me how they were deployed to Los Angeles to help, that they arrived at 1 a.m. Thursday, slept for four hours and were sent here to put out the fire. They used a deck gun to lob water up and over the structure as it was still too dangerous for them to enter the site. The walls were leaning and sagging, he pointed out.
I learned that a deck gun, which is usually mounted on a rig and hard-piped to an onboard pump, can shoot water over 30 feet to keep a safe distance. A deluge gun can discharge 7,500 liters (2,000 gallons) per minute or more.
In this instance, the deck gun had really helped.
In Sierra Madre, I sought answers
I asked Shiers where home base was in LA, and he answered that the Rose Bowl is serving as a logistical support center for the firefighters. I drove by the Rose Bowl earlier that day and saw firetrucks and teams from all over neatly organized in the parking lot.
I drove farther east to Sierra Madre, a quaint, bohemian town just east of Altadena where some of my coolest elementary school art teachers lived. I parked my car in the town square where three locals sat chatting.
I introduced myself and showed them my press pass. They asked me if I could find out and report back if a retreat center had survived; if the homes on north Carter Avenue had survived. They said there were rumors and misinformation.
“We need you,” one lady said – something I hadn’t ever heard someone say to a journalist, at least not in this day and age.
I snaked my way up through barricades past the 1890 Richardson House/Lizzie’s Trail Inn Museums on Mira Monte Avenue that was intact and stopped, accidentally at the Mount Wilson trailhead, where this column began.
Lizzie’s Trail Inn is the Sierra Madre Historical Preservation Society’s mountain history museum. As they note online:
“Beginning about 1890, a lunch stand stood at the foot of the Mount Wilson Trail serving hikers and packers on the way up or down the popular trail. … Operated by Lizzie McElwain from 1925 to 1935, ‘Lizzie's Trail Inn’ became famous throughout the region for its unchanging menu of fried chicken and ravioli (and ‘distilled spirits’ during prohibition).”
Continuing west on Carter Avenue, the northernmost east-west street before the mountains, I made it up to Sunnyside Avenue, where I could see the Mater Dolorosa Passionist Retreat Center, somewhat intact.
Since 1924, the Passionists and the Mater Dolorosa Retreat League have sponsored days of prayer and other spiritual programs.
Fire emergency alerts are confusing
An emergency alert blared just as I made it to the monastery’s entrance – I was ready to turn around, then, a short time later, a second alert blared: “LACoOEM: Disregard last EVACUATION WARNING. It was for Kenneth Fire Only. AlertLA.org for more information.”
The day before, as I sat with my sister and mom at my parents’ house, my mom’s phone received one alert while my sister's and my phone sat silent. We were told to get ready to evacuate numerous times throughout the day, one phone saying one thing, another phone saying another. Granted, the magnitude of the many burning fires is no doubt a logistical nightmare – but in my experience, the alerts have been very confusing.
Though I had never seen what the monastery looked like before, to me, the main yellow Spanish-style building stood miraculously intact.
About 60 people had been in residence at the time of evacuation, and all made it out safely, according to a Wednesday update by Father Febin Barose, the retreat center director and director of ministry: “We found the garage, apartment, and hermitage fully burned down. The Seven Sorrows Garden, St. Paul of the Cross fountain, and stations of the cross have fire damage.”
A pond was covered in ash – it looked like a blackened ice rink. There was an outdoor amphitheater with curved cement rows of empty seats sat against the blue sky as the white smoke moved south.
One burned black cactus stood beside a bright green cactus, somehow untouched. I watched as rabbits ate monastery grass, completely unafraid. Up the hill, I saw a pack of deer and two bucks, quietly eating the leaves of a bush. When I tried to take a photo, the leader of the pack stared me down, assessing if I was a danger before ignoring me and moving back to grazing.
I took some photos and hurried back to the town square to let the people know the monastery was intact, but by now, the people were gone. I had given them my card but in haste, had forgotten to take their number down. Rookie reporting mistake.
Maybe they’ll read this and maybe they’ll now know the monastery was saved.
As I write this, the wind in Pasadena has not kicked back up – the calmness of the air is both hopeful and unsettling. I pray for everyone I know and don’t know. I guess I consider myself spiritual but not religious – though after today, I can’t quite tell the difference.
Nicky Loomis is opinion editor for The Desert Sun in Palm Springs, California, where this column originally appeared.