‘A Little Old Lady from Altadena' (with apologies to the Beachboys)
Monday, 27 January 2025
| Gordon Preece
How do we cope with the physical and emotional enormity of the Hiroshima-like scenes of the LA fires? Let me try to shrink it down to human and personal size through an older friend’s story of losing her home. My family lived in Pasadena at Fuller Seminary during my PhD studies from 1990 to 1992. We often went to next door Altadena for soccer, picnics, martial arts and even walked in the now notorious Eaton Canyon which has bestowed its name on the devastating fire. Before we went to Pasadena in 1990 we'd visited in October 1980, but the human designed car pollution was so pervasive we didn't even know there were beautiful San Gabriel Mountains looming, invisible above.
But a fellow Australian student, on hearing we were coming, kindly sent a wonderful postcard of the stunning snow-covered San Gabriels. We couldn't believe it. Nature and landscape is ambiguous, awe-inspiring in more than one way, beautiful one day, bullying and deadly the next, when nature turns nasty.
The Eaton Canyon or Altadena fire has killed 16, the bulk of LA victims so far, and destroyed over 7,000 dwellings. Many Fuller faculty, employees and students have tragically lost homes and accommodation. Australian former Fuller Prof. Robert Banks’ ‘Cabin on the Mount’, home of an exciting experiment in communal living with students, is probably gone. Many people have understandably lost hope along with their home. Just as they'd lost their insurance (fortunately not our friend’s), with a whole industry no longer able or willing to accommodate such high risks. No more public risk, it's all privatised; user and 'loser', in Trumpian terms, pays. Yet ironically the same Mexicans Trump defames, criminalises and deports, whom I saw waiting for day labour on the way to my kids’ largely Hispanic school, have offered to help fight the fires.
We, as Australians, cannot say 'we know how you feel', living at such a distance. Though as a nation we do know the threat of high heat (40 degrees in Melbourne today) and fire and loss of home and life. And I've read warnings from Prof. David Bowman from the University of Tasmania in The Conversation about similarities between many Australian urban contexts, even perhaps our Tasmanian blue gums in LA, and the current California city fires. These links make the effects of climate change come closer in reality and felt imagination. Six degrees of separation indeed.
We need such conversations fostered further and faster to link us to our far neighbours – we’d even rented many of their critical fire-bombing planes for our summer, as they felt safe in winter. No more. Fire season is less selective and predictable now – here as well as there.
And our global, neighbourly connections and universal obligations are now often limited to our nearest neighbours. They need imaginative stimulation as Tim Winton's monumental Juice provides with its glimpse of a dark future for his 6 grandchildren through which he views life today. I also have 6, and have the same lens, without novelistic imagination.
So again, how do we cope emotionally with the enormity of all this, let alone of the similar Hiroshima-like flattening of Gaza and the rise of anti-Semitism at home, which seemed so far from multicultural Australia until it lit up our neighbour's synagogue or child-care centre (at Maroubra the suburb next door to my former Sydney parish).
Let me give two personal examples, both from our time in Pasadena, (which I'm coincidentally revisiting this September to present a paper at a Fuller Public Theology conference), of how I try to cope through analogous and smaller-scale experiences.
First our own smaller but significant fire: At Fuller my wife Susan and I were community managers in a three storey-apartment block, with 100 international students. In January 1992 I was away lecturing for Fuller in the first Protestant seminary in St. Petersburg, just after the coup against Yeltsin failed and Yeltsin handed over power to Putin. Back home in Pasadena the three-story house next door caught alight and kindly shared itself with the top-floor of our apartment block, damaging three units but threatening many more.
Susan knocked on every door warning people to get out and meet in the courtyard safe-place where we'd met before and in drills, for the serious earthquake we also had. It shed much of the stucco our buildings were made of, possibly quite inflammable also. The kids were kindly minded by firefighters and police in a car full of heavy artillery. My time in Russia, largely incommunicado, was cut short. But my relative inability to help or be a 'hero' first responder was more than made up for by Susan's organisational skills and the aptly-named Koinonia and wider Fuller community who provided wrap-around prayer and care to our family, each other and those especially who'd lost their temporary homes. As I now read and watch media reports about the ongoing recent fires, and especially from Fuller, I'm heartened to see them again serving their own and the wider community, particularly through their renowned School of Psychology, offering its counselling resources to the traumatised.
Second, fast forward 23 years to offer a small slither of the effects of the Eaton Fire through the now homeless mother of our daughter's best, black American friend, whom she recently visited, now in San Francisco. Both daughters have provided their homes for their Mom, replete with first granddaughters at each, welcome distractions from the disaster that’s befallen her. I'll call the mother, our friend also, 'a little old lady from Pasadena' (from a Beach Boys song) for privacy.
This little old lady, now in her mid 70s, a single Mum after divorce, and a strong activist, had only become a home owner in her 60s after decades of scrimping and saving. She’d previously felt less than middle-class due to that. Our friend stayed with us, like her daughter had earlier, in Melbourne on her first-ever overseas holiday. And she returned the favour, proudly and kindly, in her small but comfy home in Altadena. But after only fifteen years or so her home is now ash.
What to say? What to do? 'Weep with those who weep, rejoice with those who rejoice' comes to mind. After a long emotional call with our daughter, with the heavy weight of our friend’s and her family's tragedy, climate change looming big and a new president who denies it and makes political capital out of the fires, blaming fire-fighters, it's easy to despair.
But the big and perfect is often the enemy of the good and finite. Our daughter, having consulted with a close and wise friend who'd nearly lost the farm in the Gippsland fires five years ago, said 'one thing you can do is go through your photos and send any with their family in them, as they've probably lost their photos. So we did that and found a good crop of memories, mainly of our friend's daughter's time playing in Koinonia with us, at family celebrations, at school and soccer with our daughter.
The other thing our daughter did was to start a GoFundMe Page, to which we contributed, agreeing a figure in Australian dollars and then realising it was in US dollars and the Aussie dollar was just below 60c. But the US amount was probably what we should have put in in the first place! Five days ago, after only about five days, our and others’ little loaves and fishes had multiplied to US$26,000 and is still growing.
We recently saw a photo of our ‘little old lady from Pasadena’ smiling while nursing her new, second grandchild. We rejoice with her, as we weep with her for her lost home. The God of the resurrection habitually and retroactively restores life from ashes. God energises us in the Spirit, to act in communal Koinonia-like ways with and for our little old ladies and men.
Gordon Preece is Director of Ethos and Chair of Melbourne Anglican Social Responsibilities Committee.
Images provided by author:
San Gabriels and Eaton Canyon postcard.
Our Koinonia flat and burnt neighbours’ house.
Preece family and now homeless friend and daughter.
Our friends’ flattened house.