NEVER DWELL, BUT NEVER FORGET

         This article I wrote was first published in slightly edited form in Issue 26 (March\April 2025) of Cinematography World.  Though I’m at peace with the total loss visited by the Palisades fire, it’s worth remembering a day that seems to have already disappeared from most people’s consciousness.  Still, I wish I had a camera and crew on hand to memorialize the disaster.  As horrible as it was, it was also magnificent in a very strange way.  And it’s something I’ll never see again, as long as I live…

            As these stories always seem to, January 7th began as just another day.  Up at 4:45, a four-mile run, showered, dressed, exercised\fed the dog, had breakfast and by 9AM was off to do errands.  For someone who thrives on variety and new experiences, this general routine is comforting when I’m not shooting.  I don’t sleepwalk through any of it.  Instead, I engage with my surroundings and am always aware of how lucky I am to live in the best neighborhood in Los Angeles.  Winters there often bring deep blue skies and sunlight from angles that cleanse the mental palate.  As opposed to the East Coast environment I was raised in, I find it an invigorating reminder that Southern California is a land of optimism.  Only the hardest of hearts would have denied the promise of that morning.  And man, did it deliver.

            The first hint that it wasn’t going to be in the form of an answered prayer came during my north-bound drive up the Coast Highway, from Santa Monica to my home in Pacific Palisades.  The sight of smoke emanating from the Malibu hills ahead is familiar to anyone who lives in the region, and at first, I dismissed it as residue of the recently contained flare-ups.  Domiciled in a populated section at some distance from wooded areas, I had always been arrogant in the way I felt protected from such calamity.  Even during the worst conflagrations of the past twenty-odd years I’ve lived there, there had never been a significant threat of the flames cresting the thickly forested hills bordering town.  If they did, I reasoned, the entire city would be in danger (and of course, that could never happen!).  The closest of them, maybe a mile away, stood as a reassuring bastion against the thickening smoke.  At about 10:30, when I turned into the driveway, things had escalated significantly.  If my arrogance could have taken physical form, you would have seen it rising to blend with the sun-blotting billows advancing in the direction of my block.

            To say that a massive, super-heated, red-yellow wave surging across the perimeter of the Palisades was an awesome sight would be a profound understatement.  But awesome it was, for all the wrong reasons.

            Neighbors started to fill the street.  Prior to this, I had a nodding acquaintance with most of them.  Suddenly, we were pals.  I had no idea how much they cared about me.  A sincere, “How are you? or Are you OK?” bought entry to the support network, and I quickly fell into the groove.  Though the blaze was still a good distance away, the media – in their usual, hysteria-mongering style – urged immediate evacuation.  Some took them seriously, and as I began to notice the sound of packed car trunks slamming shut, no one said goodbye.  Given the extraordinary circumstances, this was easily forgiven.  Even Jeff, my Great Dane, knew in his canine brilliance that something was awry.  From our first walk in the pre-dawn darkness, before it hit the fan, he was on-guard, hyper-vigilant and attuned to an unusual signal.  He had good reason to behave that way.  A few hours later, the hills would come alive, not with the sound of music but with the discomfiting groan of a massive heatstorm.  I wish he had such prescience about lottery numbers.

            In the house, I couldn’t help thinking, “This isn’t real.  How can this be happening?”  I have a hard head and a record of not evacuating in similar situations.  Half of that is rooted in a desire to be part of the adventure.  The other is linked to stupidity.  So, I chose to deny the facts.  With the headphones on, during the second verse of The Kinks’ Back Where We Started, I became aware of a muffled banging on the door.  Two police officers and a fireman in turn-out gear filled the entrance and read me in.  Their expressions alone told the story: Leave now!  But I couldn’t help focusing behind them as the air became diffuse with swirling smoke.  I thought of so many shows I’d photographed and how the effect defined the light in a similar way.  Then, I accepted their invitation.

            It amazes me how people in LA communities just beyond the stricken areas didn’t fathom the breadth of the catastrophe as it was unfolding.  To someone living out of state, it may as well have been happening on Mars.  For anyone overseas, it was a footprint on the moon.  But I get it.  TV and the web were incapable of conveying the speed of the fire’s progression and the unimaginable, overwhelming scale of its devastation. 

            While most Californians basked in the sun that everyone imagines we do, the Palisades simmered under a lid of biblically dark clouds.  Day-for-night, if you choose…in a vacuum of eerie quiet.  At 5PM, driving east on Sunset Boulevard, the randomness of destruction was confounding: Whole streets incinerated, while a building here-and-there remained unscathed.  Panicked calls and texts from family and friends – God love them! – became a distraction.  Rather than repeating the same weather report, I wanted to witness what was going on around me.  Aerial tankers made precision drops of water and fire retardant, perilously close to the ground.  Outbound traffic mocked the speed limit.  Some middle-aged fool with a GoPro strapped to his head whizzed toward the trouble on a skateboard.  A friend’s home was gone, then another and another…and yet, another.  I couldn’t help drawing parallels to scenes in various things I’ve photographed, but this movie was unfolding in hell.  With an overnight bag and a giant-breed co-pilot for whom this was a snow day, we slow-rolled through what was quickly becoming a ghost town.  Still, I was hopeful we’d be back by the weekend.

            You’ve no doubt seen the pictures.  What we left behind was rubble, and it proved how wrong I was.

            Pacific Palisades was frequently and inaccurately referred to in the press as an exclusive enclave.  That’s true only in small increments.  The majority of it was middle-class, but in an elevated sense.  Hard working, family-oriented, friendly and loyal.  Fourth of July parades.  5K Turkey Trots.  Christmas\Hannukah lightings.  Many cinematographers, grips, electrics and other movie artisans lived there and participated generously in the town’s life.  Sad as I was to see the demise of a place I loved, I left with a clear conscience.  For once, I’ll never feel that I missed anything or that I should’ve appreciated the gift more while I had it in hand.

            The day after my getaway, temporarily relocated a few miles away, I chatted with a young-ish, displaced Palisadian while on line in a convenience store.  I compared our experience to the fire bombings of Dresden during World War II and was met with a blank stare.  When I pivoted to Hiroshima, she broke down in tears.

            As unfortunate as that reaction was, many will be sharing the same sentiment for a very, very long time.