Fires Spark Memories, Grief

Once upon a time, we lived in a trailer park in Pacific Palisades

The Palisades fire burning along Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu on Wednesday. (Screen shot of photo by Wally Skalij/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

With massive fires raging all over Southern California, where we have lived for the past 4 1/2 decades, our eyes have been glued to the TV screen. Writing about food just didn’t seem all that important compared to the magnitude of the tragedy that’s been unfolding only a few miles from our house. Also, our very first home, a funky little trailer in a mobile home park, was demolished in the blaze. Watching in disbelief as it and the town it was in went up in flames sparked memories of happier times.

It’s unfortunate that we’ve become accustomed to fires in California, even as they’ve grown more frequent and destructive in recent years. And yet massive, catastrophic, wind-driven infernos like the one we saw sweep through the posh, close-knit community of Pacific Palisades on Tuesday night and tear through several other cherished towns and regions of greater Los Angeles are something we have never seen in the 45 years we’ve lived here.

Aerial view of a neighborhood in the cliffside community of Pacific Palisades destroyed in the fire that started on Jan. 7. (Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)

We’ve heard all the explanations—those devil Santa Ana winds that occur every year around this time, plus almost zero rain since last May and tinder-dry landscape, providing the perfect conditions for an uncontrollable fire storm—or a seeming endless succession of them such as we’re witnessing. Could climate change be a factor? It seems obvious to me, though others would undoubtedly argue the point.

But explanations (and a fair amount of finger pointing!) don’t do much to quell the shock and grief we are feeling as we learn about beloved landmarks, restaurants, hiking trails, houses of worship, not to mention whole neighborhoods reduced to ash, people who died because they didn’t or couldn’t escape in time, and friends and family in peril, forced to evacuate, some losing homes filled with lifetimes of memories.

We are among the lucky ones living several beach towns south of this fire and miles away from the others. We’ve been advised to mask up when outside because of the bad air, but so far, we’re still in our homes, with the power on, watching the news in horror, hoping for a break in the weather and containment of the fires, thinking of ways to help.

“Palisades Bowl,” an acrylic painting by David Ashwell. It looks very much like the delightful park where we made our home for a while in the early ‘80s.

Even though we’re safe (for now anyway🤞), for my husband Jeff and me, this feels particularly personal: our very first home fell victim to the flames. We lived there for four years in the early ‘80s in a tan, single-wide trailer in the Palisades Bowl Mobile Estates on the Pacific Coast Highway (PCH) that we had purchased for $25,000 with a car loan, paying $200 a month on the loan and another $200 to rent a space in the park.

The park was at the bottom of a sandy cliff below some of the ritziest ocean-view homes in Pacific Palisades, just a few miles south of Malibu. We delighted in telling everyone that we lived in such an upscale town and watching their eyebrows go up. Little did they know that we were embarking on journalism jobs at small-town papers that paid a penny a word.

The trailer (often called a “coach”) had a single pink bedroom where I remember listening to the sound of rain drumming on the metal roof, feeling like a sardine in a tin can. Ironically, in those days, there was too much rain—as opposed to now when there’s none at all! Friends and family worried that we might be washed out to sea or buried beneath tumbling, waterlogged cliffs.

Our trailer in the Palisades Bowl across from Will Rogers State Beach. The car was an Oldsmobile purchased for $400 and christened “Hunk o’ Junk.” True to its name, it died one day in the Sepulveda Pass.

From the bedroom, you moved into a small utility area, then to a a tiny galley kitchen painted bright red and white and a dining area with gaudy, flame-colored curtains, a laminated restaurant-style table and vinyl booth, and finally a living room with a sagging brown cloth couch and a maroon and silver barber chair that Jeff had lugged from San Francisco and that now sits in his office in the garage.

We had bought the trailer in 1980 after returning from a monthlong odyssey around the American West—the trip that cemented our unlikely relationship and spurred a lifelong passion for the road. (You can read all about it in Jeff’s recent post here.)

Admiring my handsome hubby in the kitchen of our little trailer at the Palisades Bowl (circa 1980).

The best tomatoes I ever grew came from the tiny garden next to our trailer.

Jeff’s brother Jez Graham posing in front of our trailer.

Just kids.

Buying the mobile home was Jeff’s idea. He was a huge fan of The Rockford Files, a ‘70s TV detective series whose main character, Jim Rockford, a private eye played by James Garner, lived in a trailer in a deserted parking lot in Paradise Cove near the ocean.

Actor James Garner as Jim Rockford outside his beachside trailer. (Photo from The Official James Garner Fan Page)

No such solitary trailer existed, yet in Pacific Palisades, there happened to be three mobile home parks next to each other in a primo location directly across from the beach, quite the anomaly among such parks, which usually show up next to busy highways or in undesirable parts of town. The Palisades Bowl, the one in the middle, first built as a Methodist camp in the 1890s, had been turned unto a mobile home park in the 1960s. The homes ranged from modest Airstreams and trailers such as ours to roomy triple-wide constructions that hardly rated the designation “mobile.”

Palisades Bowl before the fire. (photo via Biggs Asset Property Management)

For us, living there was like being on vacation. There was a clubhouse and next to it a rectangular pool with a hot tub where we used to soak in the evening while gazing up through the palm trees at the moon. In those days we were “the kids,” decades younger than most of the residents, including some delightful characters.

There was Herman Grainer, who everyone called “Midge.” He took a daily constitutional every morning along the beach in his shorts and flip-flops, with his basketball of a tummy keeping time with every step. He loved to tell stories about almost beating up John Travolta, whom he called John Ravolta, at a bar. Midge was about 5 feet tall, so it was a comic image.

There was Ivy, a stylish woman with perfectly coiffed white hair, bright blue eyes and a British accent. She always threw a Fourth of July party on her deck, which had the park’s best view of the Pacific. She’d dress in red, white and blue with dangly American flag earrings. We’d drink champagne, munch on tea sandwiches and light sparklers after sunset.

Each evening after work, Jeff and I would dash across the PCH, outracing the cars to get to the beach and dip our toes in the waves, search for shells and draw hearts in the sand as the sun sank into the sea. We were a bit like newlyweds, though it took us a couple of years to tie the knot.

On Tuesday night all 172 of those mobile homes burned to the ground. Atop the cliffs in the Palisades, the pictures that flashed across the TV screen looked like a fiery caudron had spilled across the landscape, with wind-driven sparks igniting everything in their path.

Not only our mobile home park, but the one next to it, the equally charming Tahitian Terrace, went up in flames. Although residences and spaces in these parks have become a lot more pricy than when we lived there, many are home to folks of modest means, often seniors on fixed incomes who purchased them long ago and found a close and caring community, as we did. In losing their homes, they lost the daily connection to dear friends who had become their family

Now the entire town has been nearly wiped out, along with its beloved commercial area referred to as “the village.” Among the casualties: two supermarkets, including our favorite, Gelson’s, with its perfectly polished fruit and excellent bakery, the elementary school and high school, the library, the neighborhood Starbucks, many fine restaurants and retail shops, the charming streets where a great hometown farmers markets took place every Sunday. We’d visit after hiking along the popular Temescal Canyon Trail, often to a pretty waterfall (when there was water!), and even higher to see fabulous views of the ocean and city. The trail, presumably burned to a crisp, is closed until further notice.

On the Temescal Canyon Trail (Credit: AllTrailsUser), now closed.

The same inferno—now called the Palisades Fire—has continued to burn toward Malibu and gobbled up more landmark restaurants and businesses, along with multimillion-dollar mansions by the sea. Fire, we’re reminded, is indiscriminate. It wipes out the wealthy, the poor and those in the middle.

You might ask, why did we ever leave our little mobile home in such an idyllic community? We had decided we wanted a kid, and the park had a no-child rule. (It would have been a rather tight squeeze anyway!) But we have nothing but the fondest memories of our four years living there. For years afterwards, we wished we’d been able to hold onto our beloved coach.

Although we didn’t lose anything material, many, many people did, not only in Pacific Palisades and Malibu but in several other communities. And fires are continuing to spread despite the best efforts of our firefighters. If you would like to help, you can find a list of some organizations accepting donations HERE.

And that’s it for now. See you next time.

Ruth

Postscript: After I published this piece, my husband Jeff wrote his version about of our time in the trailer park, chapter 6 of his ongoing memoir about his remarkable life. Click here to read it.

A black-and-white picture of an Airstream that was across from ours at the Palisades Bowl. Taken by my aunt, Gerda Mathan it hangs in the bedroom of our current home.