Commentary: Six months after the fires: ‘We have lost a lot. We never lost each other.’

On Lake Avenue, in the heart of Altadena, two things stood out as I roamed the neighborhood the other day.

There were still a few lots of uncleared rubble on the commercial strip, like frozen images from a lingering nightmare, but there was music as well — a buzz-saw symphony of new construction.

Altadena is scarred and grieving.

Altadena is healing and rebuilding.

I parked outside Altadena Community Church, which still looks like it was hit by a bomb, and watched tractors push dirt around at the nearby Bunny Museum, which has hatched a plan to return to service as what the founders have called the hoppiest place on earth.

And I called Victoria Knapp, chair of the Altadena Town Council, to tell her how much I enjoyed her essay in the Colorado Boulevard newspaper.

“We lost homes, histories, trees older than any of us, and a sense of safety that may never return quite the same,” Knapp wrote. But the spirit of Altadena will be its salvation, by her account: “We have lost a lot. We never lost each other. That is how I know that we’ll make it.”

A cross remains above the charred ruins of the Altadena Community Church, destroyed in the Eaton fire six months ago.

There’s nothing terribly significant about the six-month mark since the Eaton and Palisades fires, or any other history-book disaster. But it’s an opportunity to revisit and remember.

Sixteen thousand buildings destroyed.

Thirty lives lost.

Countless livelihoods upended.

Knapp, who lost her home and plans to rebuild, did not underplay the years of recovery ahead, but as we spoke, she dropped a few cubes of sugar into that bitter cup of coffee. Building permits are being issued, she said, foundations are being poured, and 98% of all properties have been cleared, despite the remaining outliers on Lake Avenue.

That’s all promising, and I want to believe Altadena and nearby communities damaged by the Eaton fire will bear at least some resemblance to what they were. Same for Pacific Palisades and Malibu, where I saw the same juxtaposition of destruction and rebirth on a visit a few days ago.

I watched an army of trucks and hard hats, grinding and grunting on the blank canvas of a town in ruins. On the edge of the Palisades business corridor I saw the mangled spine of a fallen staircase, lying on its side like a length of broken vertebrae. Here and there, where lots have been cleared, the backdrop was open sea.

It’s too soon to know what these distinctive, beloved communities will look like in four or five years. Insurance disputes, lawsuits and definitive causes of the Eaton and Palisades fires may take years to unravel. There’s still heated debate about lack of preparedness and the failure of warning systems. Investors hover like buzzards. Some fire victims are determined to rebuild, some won’t be able to afford to, and some are still weighing their options.

What we do know is that fire and wind will return, as they always do, keeping L.A. forever on the cusp of catastrophe. Not just in Altadena and along the western edge of the county, but everywhere. L.A. is built for drama, with the same geologic forces giving birth to beauty and risk — the San Andreas fault lies on the far side of the San Gabriels and helped create those peaks.

A worker looks over businesses, along Mariposa Street at Lake Avenue in Altadena, that were destroyed in the Eaton fire.

As I checked in with evacuees I’ve gotten to know, I took note of their unrelenting waves of grief, hope, anger, fear, disorientation.

“I cannot wrap my head around how this could happen,” said Alice Lynn, a therapist who called her Highlands neighborhood, and the broader Palisades community, “forever altered.” She’s in temporary housing during the clearance and cleanup operations.

“How does one, as I, in her mid 80s, return home and feel any sense of normalcy when all around me I will see this devastation and loss?” Lynn asked.

Her friends Joe and Arline Halper, 95 and 89, will no longer be just a short walk away. The property they owned has been scraped clean, and a “For Sale” sign stands where their front door used to. Before the fire, neither of them saw a future in a senior living community, but that’s where they are, in Playa Vista.

Swings still hang in the charred playground at Altadena Community Church, which was destroyed in the Eaton fire six months ago.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

“The loss of our home and neighborhood and community is tragic for us, but this is a very soft landing,” said Joe. They’ve made new friends, including several other Palisades evacuees, and Joe chortled when he told me his dear youthful bride has taken up pickleball.

In Altadena, where one sign expresses both a wish and a promise — “Beautiful Altadena…The Rose Will Bloom Again” — businesses are reopening, including Full Circle Thrift. I pushed through the door and Alma Ayala, the manager, told me people from near and far have donated clothing, housewares and other items to stock the store.

Some of it, Ayala believes, came from those who were keeping rescued items in storage. And as people who lost everything move back to Altadena, she suspects the items in her store will find new homes and second lives.

“This is the third time I’ve opened this store,” said Ayala.

When it opened for business in 2016. When it emerged from COVID’s death grip.

And now.

West Altadenans Steve Hofvendahl and his wife, Lili Knight, both actors, are sifting through their options. Approaching 70, they know they can replace the house they lost on West Palm, where nearly their entire block was incinerated. But they can’t bring back in their lifetimes the mini-orchard that kept them busy and produced the goods for the porch market soirees that brought their neighborhood together.

I wondered if those who have committed to rebuilding will quiver, or have flashbacks, when the first nearby wildfire sends smoke wafting across Altadena.

“I think it will be the winds,” Hofvendahl said.

His neighbor, Jonni Miller, is already working with a builder along with her husband, Anthony Ruffin, who lived on West Palm as a boy when Black families moved there because they weren’t welcome in much of L.A.

A hopeful message is left on the gates of a property in the Eaton fire zone.

Miller and Ruffin — social workers whose job is housing homeless people — are staying in temporary quarters in Glendale, but return to their property now and then. On a recent evening visit, Miller was rattled by the call of coyotes. The howling was longer and louder than she remembers, and “frightening in a way that I haven’t been frightened before.”

She said she suspects “the lack of sound-buffering from the missing homes” was a factor, adding: “I will be much more careful letting our animals out at night once we are home again.”

When I checked in with Verne and Diane Williams, 90 and 86, they said they’re still committed to rebuilding on Braeburn Road in Altadena, where they lived for half a century. But they know that’s going to take a while.

“The worry is that we won’t still be alive,” said Diane.

She handed the phone to Verne, who was itching to share an update. The architect for their new home had a connection at Sony Pictures Studios in Culver City, Verne told me. They took their blueprints there and a studio employee used some projection equipment to stage a moment of magic.

“They were able to take the architectural plan and project it … down on this gigantic floor, where I could walk the walk of what will be our new home,” Verne said. “It was the most uplifting event since what happened six months ago.”

One thing I noticed on cleared and graded properties in Altadena, across the vast, haunting cemetery of lost homes:

There are roughly as many signs that say “Altadena Not For Sale,” as there are signs that say “For Sale.”

I understand both sentiments.

The day after the fire, I met Mark Turner and his wife, Claire Wavell, at an evacuation center in Pasadena. Turner was showing their daughter May, 13, photos of their house, which had survived mostly intact on a street that was nearly obliterated.

The family has moved more than a dozen times since then, settling for now into a rental property they own in Arizona. May is enrolled in school there, and given the uncertainties about when or if Altadena will be Altadena again, they’re giving serious consideration to selling the house they dearly loved, and even more so upon learning it had survived the fire.

A sign offering “hugs and kisses” to Altadena rests in the front yard of a home that was destroyed in the Eaton fire.

“It’s very mixed. It’s heartbreaking, honestly,” said Wavell, who began processing aloud, once more, the longings of the heart, the musings of the mind, and the complexities of staying, of going, of not knowing.

Wavell has been writing poems to clear her mind of all the noise. Among them, “Return of the Wind,” “Week of a Thousand Years” and “6 Months.”

6 months today

our lives changed forever…

6 months today

that night, burned into mind

branded onto heart

Steve.Lopez@latimes.com