A Burn Scar at the Edge of the Continent
A love letter to life in the Palisades.
Lots of people dream of living in Los Angeles. I moved there kicking and screaming. In 2021, my partner, K, was offered a job at a start-up with an in-person requirement. We’d fled pandemic-era San Francisco less than a year prior, landing in Asheville, where we were renting a craftsman owned by portrait artist once convicted of practicing psychiatry without a license.
For many reasons, I did not want to leave. Trial by virus had knitted our Asheville community together. I knew no one in LA. The size of it — I grew up in New Hampshire — intimidated me. At the time I worked in international development, and so the entertainment industry seemed like it had little to offer me personally. I feared living trapped in the middle of a concrete grid endless in every direction but the sea. Mostly, I’d never had the time to consider myself to be the type of person who could live in LA. Even though I’d built my understanding of just who could entirely on stereotypes.
So we found middle ground. We’d move somewhere that offered escape into wilderness, which in Los Angeles is restricted to one of the neighborhoods which hug the mountains. From our short term rental in Hollywood, we chanced upon the exactly one open apartment in the Pacific Palisades — the couple living there needed to break their lease — where K had once lived many years before. And so we moved into a 50’s-era complex with an avocado tree in the backyard a mile up the street from where Sunset meets the ocean.
Within a few weeks, I’d started to fall into a complicated kind of love.
***
The common image of the Palisades is one of affluence (median home price $4.2M), whiteness (81% to LA’s 29%) and fame (an incomplete celebrity list here). Its exclusivity extends to its geography. The town is carved out from both canyon and mountain, the latter which forms a barrier from the smog that gathers in the basin to the east. It is a long drive from most anywhere else in the city, and so it is less appreciated, because less utilized, as a place with some of the most spectacular nature access in the country.
More than half of the town by area is designated protected land. Topanga State Park wraps around its western half on three sides – 13,000 acres of chaparral and sandstone cliffs throughout the Santa Monica Mountains. It is the largest city park in America, and part of an even larger system called the Big Wild, a 20,000 acre wilderness, accessible only by bike or foot, that stretches north into the San Fernando Valley, west to Malibu, and east, past the Getty, all the way to the 405. To the south, where the continent ends, is the beach.
The Santa Monica Mountains are modest in height, but they are steep. Some residential roads exceed 15% grade. Trails can hit 25%. Temescal Peak, at 2,126 the highest point in the park, is just over four miles from the coastline. You can run between the two entirely on public land.
The first mile, the only one open to cars, follows Temescal Canyon Park for a mile. On the right you pass a playground, which because built on a slope, offers a view that is half canyon, half Pacific. On its left it passes Pali High, the platonic ideal of an American high schoo, its open-air classrooms surrounding a courtyard and the filming location for everything from Carrie to an Olivia Rodrigo music video.
A few hundred feet after crossing Sunset Boulevard, the trail drops downhill. Traffic sounds fade, replaced — if there’s been rain— by the lapping of the creek that carved the canyon. On warm days, the water is the threshold past which the fragrance of sagebrush and mugwort become prominent. Herbaceous, astringent, medicinal, there was something in it that reminded me, absurdly, of baking Creepy Crawlers as a child
Temescal Canyon has — at least for Los Angeles — deep history. In the 1920s, the Chautauqua assemblies gathered here to host lectures and musical performances, and the small camp they built — some cabins, a dance hall, a store — remain in use to this day. The assembles are of course different now, and by and large there are a few types. The stereotypical LA hiker carries a coffee cup and wears yoga pants. There are the tow-headed kids and their moms dressed in the beige linen uniform of Topanga-core. There are the microdosers, the meditators, the inevitable VIP taking a a very important call over noise-cancelling headphones. But LA is too big, diffuse, and weird to really capture the variety on any day.
From here, the ridge trail climbs steeply out of the canyon, six hundred feet up in the first mile, through a series of sandy switchbacks before turning a sharp corner. The sage brush thins out. Turn, and there, suddenly, stretches the entire basin. Part of the attraction here is to be outside and above the city, and yet still within it. Daily life in Los Angeles takes constant effort — it is engulfing, beguiling, a city-state more than city. But 1,000 feet up in the Palisades gives it enough distance to render it approachable, dwarfed, as it appears, by the immense arc carved by Santa Monica bay.
Another mile or so up, the trail levels out as it approaches a sandstone formation known as Skull Rock, one of the few named rock formations I’ve ever seen that requires little imagination to see. It was just past here on, the morning of January 7, that the Palisades Fire ignited. For day hikers this is usually the final destination in a loop that goes back through Tesmescal Canyon. But you continue on, to an area frequented almost entirely by locals.
The view extends out on both sides: the steep hills in Topanga to the West, the rest of the city to the east. The Hollywood sign appears as a smudge of white across the hills. Most days there are few people out here. Some days there are none. It’s trafficked little enough that you can catch rattlesnakes warming themselves mid-trail. Once, in thick fog, I turned a corner on a pack of five coyotes. This high up the drama of the city feels small. On days when the marine layer stretches over the beach towns, here it remains sunny. The knowledge that such an escape existed less than an hour’s walk from my door is what made the city feel sustainable.
And yet you live with constant reminders that it may not be. In the time I lived here, just past the group of homes carved deepest into the mountains, the hills appeared charred and denuded. In May of 2021, an arsonist set fire to brush off the trail that circumnavigates Santa Ynez canyon — home to one of the few waterfalls in Southern California, namesake of the reservoir now infamous for being out of operation.
The blaze immolated 1,200 acres before firefighters contained it. Absent any moisture — 2021 was a drought year — it loomed for over a year a black scar, dead and unchanging, until the rains finally fell, hard, in winter of 2022. That February, oatgrass, foxtail brome, chamise, and fire-poppies finally began to poke through the darkened soil, though only in patches. With sufficient moisture, chaparral recovers quickly, unless, of course, it burns again.
You continue on, winding in between the base of smaller peaks, until one appears in the distance, recognizable for a pole that sometimes carries an American flag. Temescal Peak is high enough that it affords a 360 degree view: north down into the valley, south all the way to Catalina Island. In the dozens of times I ran here, I saw other people only a handful, and so it took on a personal quality: it was my spot.
I never expected to fall so hard for this the physicality of this place. Los Angeles is a place known for making art, not being among beauty. I have lived in several remarkable cities — San Francisco chief among them — and traveled through many more, but none has stayed with me with the vibrancy like the Palisades. San Francisco’s pallette is a chiaroscuro of sun and fog, blue and grey and yellow. Asheville is ten thousand shades of green. I scroll my photos from LA — I took over 10,000 in two years here — and am struck above all by its range: by its density of views, nearly all of which encompass mountain and sea; by a century’s worth of some of the country’s most innovative architecture, much of it now lost; by an environment in which nearly anything can grow, fruit, and flower.
***
The social life, on the other hand, required some adaptation.
Los Angeles is more famous for beautiful people than beautiful views.Until you live here it’s difficult to grasp exactly what this means. I assumed it was simply the place where some beautiful people end up, but this is wrong. Beauty goes so far here as to create a distribution shift in attractiveness. Take the normal curve in America and move it right a standard deviation, and now you are in Los Angeles.
It is the most socially perplexing place I’ve ever lived — and that includes other countries. As in San Francisco, the currency of Los Angeles is attention, but while the Bay optimizes for screen time, LA measures success by how many heads you turn in a room. Combined with the city’s wealth, the dynamics alter people’s behavior in emergent ways. It is a city full of insane people, in the best and worst ways, a confluence of creative brilliance and pathological self-absorption. As a result it is never, ever boring.
Larry David and I had an awkward moment in a bathroom. Anza once stepped on Jennifer Garner’s shoes. While in line at Erewhon, Kate Hudson walked in wearing a black dress. We made eye contact, she smiled at me (I assume my mouth was agape), and twenty years of hard-fought self-composure dropped down through my stomach and out my knees, which buckled. It was all happening. In Los Angeles it always was.
Yet I always felt at some remove from the Palisades, socially. Part of this was undeniably class. In a zip code where the median home price exceeds $4M there is an inevitable social gradient between the average person and the couple in the 2BR apartment. When I first moved I worked in international development, and the cultural capital I derived from that and a PhD meant little to nothing. But I found it, somehow, a valuable experience: it forced me to develop deeper curiosity in others; it also revealed some of the personality distortions of wealth.
Once you get used to the sceneyness of it all, though, it is undeniably a charming place to live. It’s small and dense enough that many kids can walk home from school. It goes all out for the Fourth of July, feeling then more than any other time like the former home of Ronald Reagan it once was. It’s where Clara and I first met, and where Asterisk was in some sense born.
The heart of the town — physically, not spiritually — is the Palisades Village, the outdoor mall built by Rick Caruso, billionaire developer and former mayoral candidate. Designed to look like a classic American main street, the village is more often described as ersatz, stepfordy, or sterile. LED screens in the parking garage advertise upcoming movies. It has VIP parking, and above the shops — Brunello Cucinelli, Diptyque, Saint Laurent — there are luxury apartments. Locals call it Carusoville. It is almost always playing Frank Sinatra.
It’s easy to ridicule, yet somehow hard to avoid. I went there multiple times a week —to yoga, for coffee, because Anza loved getting recognition. Most especially I loved the Erewhon. Around 2022 the grocery store exploded in popularity, fueled by TikToks both adulatory and exasperated. In this it is a metaphor for the Palisades itself: shockingly expensive and still worth every cent. So what if half the products they carry come labeled with nutrition misinformation. I have never found a grocery store with better produce. I’ve never loved a coconut cake so much.
It has a small town feel for LA, but it still retains an air of exclusivity, a hesitancy to be warm outside of your immediate neighborhood. That changed, though, when the drought finally broke in 2022. I remember, in the middle of that first rain, passing a runner who had stopped to stretch his hands out to the sky. “It’s raining!” he said to me. “It’s raining!” I said back, like we were passing the peace.
Until it rains, you can’t fully appreciate the way that the aridity of Los Angeles bears down you in ways small and large. Small, in that you unconsciously accustom to the constant brittleness of your skin and throat. Large, in that somewhere deep within your nervous system, there is a sense that the threat of fire continues to grow.
Over the following weeks the grass turned from straw to pale green, the plants stood up straighter, and everyone seemed happier. Moisture was all anyone could speak about. A man’s flesh is his own; the water belongs to the tribe.
***
This winter, there has been no rain.
I was in the middle of a bike when I first saw news of the fire. I’d opened up Strava, of all places, to check a map, and saw a video, posted by a fellow cyclist, of flames writhing down the ridge a hundred meters behind his house. I kept riding. I tried to put it out of mind.
In December, the Franklin Fire ripped through 4,000 acres of Malibu, destroyed 20 structures, and taunted Pepperdine students sheltering in the library. I’d posted about it, fearful and sentimental — I spent as much time on my bike in Malibu as I did in the Palisades, and it was painful to watch I place I knew so intimately go up in flames. But after the fact I felt embarrassed: the fires had nothing to do with me other than my memory, it seemed attention-seeking, and my reaction appeared, in retrospect, overblown. I hoped, naively, the Palisades might be the same.
It wasn’t until I was home and saw the wind forecast that I realized possible scale of the catastrophe that lay ahead. Before I moved to Los Angeles, my knowledge of the Santa Anas drew entirely from this scene in the Holiday, in which Jack Black sweetly removes a piece of dust that the wind has carried into Kate Winslet’s eye. “Legend has it,” he tells her, “that when the Santa Anas blow, all bets are off.”
It’s an absurd scene. There is nothing romantic about the Santa Anas, and I never heard anyone romanticize them that way. Even when they do not bring fire, they carry into the city an undeniable aura of disquiet. The air crackles. Asthma exacerbates. Humidity drops as low as 10%, sometimes even lower. Skin chaps, lips split, the grass grows increasingly desiccated.
On the day the fires began, humidity at the Malibu weather station dropped from 93% to 27% in three hours. Santa Anas take moisture wherever it can, and that morning it took it with extraordinary swiftness. No conversation about these fires can even begin without an acknowledgement of that severity. “What you’re talking about here is probably less than 1% of all the fires that we respond to in Southern California,” the Chief of the Orange County Fire Authority told the LA Times. “You could have put a 10-lane freeway in front of that fire and it would not have slowed it one bit.”
In most of the reckonings published, it remains the factor most absent.
Before we’d reached even 1% containment, blame was put on California’s failure to carry out prescribed burns, despite there being no evidence that prescribed burns are effective at preventing fires in chapparal. Yes, we need to burn more at substantial scale throughout the state to prevent future fires, and yes, regulations have made this all but impossible to do. If the Palisades fire is the impetus for change statewide, all the better. But we should not delude ourselves into thinking such a policy would have been the difference in the Palisades. The fire started, as best as we can tell, in an area which already burned on New Years Day. While it subsequently spread along a ridge of chaparral, by and large its predominant fuel source was entirely man-made: our homes.
Rick Caruso kicked off his 2026 mayoral campaign by blaming the lack of water in the hydrants squarely on Karen Bass. But the reality is that no municipal water system anywhere in the country is designed to handle the load — 400% of normal — asked of the scores of engines tapped into every hydrant available. We could of course prepare better for this, so long as we are willing to invest in the cost of designing and installing an entirely new municipal water system.
Right now the most egregious failures appear to be the lack of operationality at the Santa Ynez Reservoir, and the inadequate response in both the hours immediately after ignition and the days that followed. But while this may have spared some houses, it would not have stopped the fire in its tracks, and would not have prevented more than a fraction of the destruction. It is an outrage clear that a lack of water availability led to the burning of homes after the main fire had passed, but the catastrophe writ largewas not caused by lack of water.
In the long list of conceivable failures, the fact that a lesbian directs the Los Angeles Fire Department surely ranks dead last in importance. I am glad that VCs and founders feel they’re finally able to speak their minds, if only because it reveals those who have nothing valuable to say.
Disaster serves as a collective Rorschach. It reveals, in the blame we place, the stories we tell ourselves about power, responsibility, and control. Glaringly few in the days that followed were nuanced efforts at truth-seeking.1 The truth is that if there is fault, it is collective fault, beginning with those in the 1920s with the audacity to carve a town out of a fire-prone hillside. There are many lessons to be taken from this — chief among them better ways to build fire-resistant housing, and why in a place of such wealth, we chose not to harden our homes in the first place. But it is hard not to see in the finger pointing a way to displace our anxiety that — despite everything which in an ideal world could and should have been done — we may still live at the mercy of the gods and the catastrophic winds they conjure.
***
In 2023, K’s start-up folded and she went remote. Almost since we had moved in, we had been considering moving apartments. The floors in our complex leaked every sound louder than a mumble. We lived above two young girls parented by a single father prone to rages — at them, and with everyone else in his orbit. Now, geographically untethered, it forced the question of whether to stay in the city at all.
At the end of our street sat an empty lot. Years ago, heavy rains had caused a slide and destroyed the house built there. Now it was home to an Indian Laurel Fig that gave shade to a wooden bench which looked out over the bluffs, across the Palisades Bowl, a mobile home paradise a literal stone’s throw from the beach, and beyond that to the ocean and Palos Verdes. On Google Maps, locals had named it The View, and like all views it was a popular place to think. It was there one day we made the decision to move back to the Bay.
It’s not that we had to. We loved so much of the city after all. But in spite of everything, the hassle of everyday life — the price, the traffic, the lack of safety — had started to grind us down. The apparent ease of Los Angeles life is an illusion, and we couldn’t deny that we’d grown to feel constantly on the edge.
And yet — I question that decision all the time. At least once a month one of us turns to the other and groans about our longing for something that can only be had in LA: to walk down to the beach at the close of the day and lay in warm sand; to order a stupid $21 smoothie from Erewhon; to go to a party where people are fun, free, don’t talk about AI; the summer camp atmosphere; the aliveness and never, ever, boringness of it all. The city worked its way under my skin and into my bones in such a way that I pang for it less with my heart than with my body.
It seems in some ways preposterous that in the wake of such destruction, the predominant question has not been “Will we rebuild?” but “How can we make rebuilding easier?” Why, when we know with certainty, that five, or ten, or fifty years from now, the winds will blow with ferocity and meet the right spark once again? If I had never lived there, I would be asking the same question. But I have, and so I understand. What else is Los Angeles, but the place where you risk it all to live the dream?
But it will be years before that dream can take form again, even in the faintest way. A few days after the fires began, a first responder friend attached to the Palisades sent us a video as he drove through our neighborhood loop. Barely anything recognizable remained: a few chimneys, charred trees, a car, torched, stripped entirely of color. In some places, the fire burned hot enough to melt steel shingles. So altered had it become that it took a minute to figure out where he was filming. And then we saw the bench, somehow, miraculously, untouched. In the background, the shapes remained as we knew them: the slope of the bluffs, the spine of the jetties, the Santa Monica pier and the arc of the bay. Everything else had become ash.
Incredible piece to read and ponder, love your photos. I live between LA and the U.K. so it’s fascinating to compare cultures, but LA does have a special sparkle and magic that I haven’t experienced in other cities.
LA is all about risk and dreams, in a mad, fun, creative way. Saying that, it’s pretty insane (from a British perspective) why people would knowingly create (and buy!) a home in a high-risk area for fires, something I was thinking about just last month as I walked along the beach in Malibu. Is there that much of a disconnection from environmental reality?
This is so beautifully-written and moving, Jake