Talking my way through the National Guard checkpoint at the intersection of Amalfi Drive and Sunset Boulevard felt like crossing the River Styx, into the underworld.
It was early March 2025. The last embers of the Palisades Fire had been out for a month. It was cold, gray and drizzling. A blue-green mist coiled around the chaparral foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains like tendrils of smoke. The air smelled of ozone and scorched chemicals. I had bronchitis and bad dreams.
I’d spent the prior day driving around Altadena in a daze. My wife and I had pilgrimaged to see our old house on Grand Oaks Avenue. By some stroke of luck it survived the Eaton Fire, which burned simultaneously with the Palisades Fire, wreathing LA in flames for 24 days. But starting just a couple blocks north of our house and stretching for miles westward, it looked like an atom bomb had detonated. Most of Altadena was gone.
That first day I made it past the checkpoint into the Pacific Palisades, I met Brayan. I was wandering on foot, absorbing the sight of mansion after mansion transformed by fire into teetering, abstract sculptures. I was chilled, wheezing through the N95 mask I’d plucked from our dusty pandemic stash. When I stopped in front of the first property on the block to be cleared, the door of an excavator swung open and a spectral figure dressed in a white hazmat suit descended through the wreckage. He approached and, pulling aside a respirator, asked, “Was this your house?”
I explained that the house wasn’t mine, and that I’d come simply to try to make sense of the unimaginable scale of devastation—to see it with my own eyes. Brayan told me that he lives in Wilmington, a close-knit, industrial community near the Port of Los Angeles. He and his wife have young twin boys. When I asked if he worried about the toll his work in the burn zone could take on his health, he replied, “No, it’s more the little things, you know?”
By the little things, he meant the psychic weight of seeing—and toiling amidst—the ruins of everything the residents of the Palisades had lost. And by extension, what we all are losing. Debris can be cleared. Houses can be rebuilt. Scars can heal over. But the lingering grief and anticipatory dread of climate disaster never really go away.
As I traversed the burn zone over the coming months, I met dozens of guys like Brayan — the workers charged with shoring up our broken world. As I heard their stories and tried to balance them against the impossible ambition of their labor, I was plagued by nagging questions: Amid ICE raids in their communities and brazen persecution of immigrants across the U.S., are we asking too much of these men in service of one of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods? What scars will they carry with them out of this damned place, back into the bright shining blue world above?
