Return Of The Exile
To Homelessness & Back In A Single Month
It’s February 7, 2025. 8:02 AM. I’m sitting in my outdoor office on Alexia’s front porch. Exactly one month ago, I was waking from a fitful sleep in my 1992 Holiday Rambler Aluma-Lite motorhome. The power was out. The wheeled aluminum fuselage where I’d lived for a decade was rocking side to side and ringing with the sounds of airborne twigs and dust.
I could hear the slender nylon guy-lines straining, that held a super-duty tarp in place over the vintage coach. Slapping against the roof, as gusts of up to a hundred miles an hour whipped across and under the big tarp, as if it was a ship’s sail that had been installed horizontally rather than vertically.
Groping for my phone that morning, I checked to see what was happening in Pacific Palisades. The news was horrific. ‘Oh my God’, I thought. ‘What will become of all these people? Where will they go? How will they rebuild their lives?’
I couldn’t have known then, what I would learn in the following four weeks. A month that - looking back - feels like a year.
Today we’re at the tail-end of the first decent rain of the 24-25 season. In L.A., we traditionally applaud the first good rain of the season. How, as the clouds break up over the wet streets, the whole place feels washed clean of its sins and sorrows. Baptized anew.
Instead, as I plan yet another walk through the ghost-town that once held my life inside its own … I can only imagine gutters running with ash, and storm-drains choked with the burnt remains of twenty-thousand walls, and the lives they contained.
I have happy news for you today. And that makes me sad.
Yesterday on the local radio news, I heard that Pasadena’s Convention Center will soon be ending its run as refugee camp. The search is on for a new space to house the many human beings who still have no better option than a cot in an impromptu dormitory.
I too am organizing my things for another move. But mine - unlike those soon to be uprooted again - is not fraught with even more uncertainty. According to The Pasadena Star News, 272 of my fellow Altadenans have no place at all to go.
Imagine what this fellow has been through. The insult heaped upon his injury. His home gone, along with everything that he might not even have known was so precious until it was gone. The vulnerability. The grinding boredom. The near-total lack of privacy.
My own 30-day journey has been almost infinitely kinder. And a week ago, just after my last post here, I found a great motorhome, at a very reasonable price. My new ‘Hobo Dojo’ now sits safe and comfortable on a good friend’s property in Highland Park. Ready to be hooked into city-water, and shore-power, and to provide me with all the comforts of home. A temporary berth, to be sure, but one that should get me through the winter. I’ll move in this weekend.
In the course of a single month I was cast rudely into homelessness and then caught and pulled back again. And now I’m feeling more than a little of what we call ‘survivor’s guilt’.
I don’t like to impute magical forces to my own good fortune. I’m not one to think that I deserve special dispensations from the gods. I usually assume that my luck is just as dumb, on the upside, as it is on the downside. But I have to admit that - if I was a religious man - I’d be tempted to think that the 2005 Fleetwood Jamboree that I now own, was sent to me by God or by his California equivalent - which we just call ‘The Universe’.
The story is so unlikely, that if it wasn’t me telling it, I’d assume it to be fiction of the Hallmark Special variety. But here goes.
In my last post I told you how I’d found a great Class-C out in Corona, and that - with the impartial help of my friend John - I’d decided not to dump $31K on it. I told you about our later trip to Northridge where we found another cheaper one with a good floorplan and features, that was just too damn beat-up.
But just after I’d sent my last Substack post into the ether where it found many of you, I saw another one listed. In Pasadena; a ten-minute drive from where I sit writing this. Frankly, the few pictures posted were not impressive.
The ad was not really written with much gusto. No hype whatsoever. Just a terse description; way less enthusiastic than the one in Northridge. BUT … as I said in my last missive, I was engaged in a process, and I was required to search until I got results.
I texted the guy - Jeff - and he gave me an address and said come ahead. Googling the location, I saw that it was on Kinneloa Mesa, a plateau in northeast Pasadena that had itself been burned back in 1993. My cousin Pam and her family had settled up there, and so, after that fire had missed them, and the area had re-opened, I’d driven my young family up the winding Kinneloa Mesa Road, to survey the damage. Almost 200 buildings destroyed. A form of devastation that I assumed we’d never see up-close again.
But last Thursday, I took Orange Grove Avenue east to Altadena Drive, and turned north. Soon I saw many burned homes to my right, and realized that this was where the Eaton fire began.
I turned from Altadena Drive, to New York Avenue, and then onto Eaton Canyon Road. As I passed the burned-out husk of a church at the base of the hill, I realized that a month ago, as my neighbors and I were eating fried rice at their table and deciding whether or not to evacuate, we’d watched this very church burning. On television. We’d watched as a reporter tried to get her mind around the fact that other structures were also lighting up to the south of her. Here is the clip.
Now 30 days later, I drove around that gutted church and up the hill where three decades earlier so many homes had burned.
I drove up the hill, past Pam and Mike’s place, beyond this year’s ashes, surveying what the mesa looked like so many years after it had burned. If you didn’t know, you wouldn’t know. I pulled onto the small side-street and there was the motorhome. Up a steep drive, parked with her rear wheels up on bright-yellow plastic chocks to level her out. And there was Jeff, waiting for me.
We shook hands, and I noticed that his black T-shirt bore the insignia of Sacramento Police Department, along with block-letters reading BOMB SQUAD. Okay …
Jeff looked me over with the same skepticism he undoubtedly read in my own eyes. But he showed me the coach, still covered in ash from the fire that - this time - had luckily started down-wind of Kinneloa Mesa.
The Jamboree I’d come to look at was owned by Jeff’s parents. And as he showed me around, and realized that I wasn’t a looky-loo there to waste his time, we sort of bonded. And he told me a story. You see, the big gracious house in front of which sat the RV, had been built in 1994, on the blackened foundations of another. Yes, the house that Jeff grew up in, had burned to the ground that night.
His parents were business people and insured to the teeth. So they built this lovely home in place of the modest 50’s ranch-house that fire had claimed. And now here was that boy, all grown up, a police sergeant in Sacramento. In town to sell the motor-home his mom and dad - now both in a care home - had lovingly maintained and used. Perhaps to this stranger named Dave, who’d lost his home in another fire.
I told him that I wanted my buddy John’s opinion, and that we’d be back next day for a test drive. In the interim, Jeff hosed all of the ashes from the outside, and rounded up everything in the garage related to the motorhome, to give to me when we swapped cashier’s check for pink-slip.
By the time the deal was final, Jeff and John and I were laughing and telling stories of our youths, and generally acting like we’d been friends for years. Jeff gave us a tour of his folks’ home, even rummaging through a small box containing the few recognizable objects from that earlier inferno. Among them was this melted Waterford Crystal drinking glass. While in its molten state, a roofing nail had fallen from above to imbed itself forever.
A couple of days later, over in Highland Park in my new parking spot, Alexia and I went through all of the drawers and cupboards and closets. Through the linens and towels and appliances. And tableware, and cookware. And every imaginable thing I’ll need to move in and function.
If I told you that, snug in a box in the back of the bedroom closet, we found a set of four Waterford drinking-glasses identical to the melted one, you’d be sure that I’m embellishing an already unlikely story.
So I won’t tell you. But if you visit, I’ll serve you a drink in one of them.
Thanks for reading. Thanks so much to those of you who donated to my GoFundMe, or upgraded to a paid subscription. Know that I’m grateful to you all.
This might be the last installment of The Wildfire Chronicles for a time. Another sort of conflagration is burning through our institutions as we speak, and I feel that I ought not indulge myself like this any longer.
Be well. Stay calm. Lend a hand where you can. And remember that beneath our surfaces, we’re all brothers and sisters. Even when values conflict and our politics becomes a poorly-written reality show.
It isn’t the end of the world. I promise you.
I'm so happy for you, Dave. You've been through a harrowing experience, as have many, but thankfully yours has resolved well. I'd tell you not to feel guilty for your good-fortune, but that's a decision only you can make. Anyway, being the kind of guy you are, I'm sure you will come up with an idea or two to ease the burden for some who are still awaiting their good fortune...maybe with a music gathering, maybe with a helping hand.
So glad how this turned out for you, Dave. HEy, you put your heart on your sleeve, your mind in the uppermost branches, and you lay it all out to us with soulful and sometimes jaunty music. You have bottled all this that many of us cannot say but need to, for many years. We've drunk your life-potion, gladly, eagerly. You must understand how you have reached others. Well, buddy, this is your payback, don'tcha know! So awesome, so well deserved, my friend.