Not Everything Can Be Rebuilt
When my family woke up last Thursday, we learned that our friend Arthur Simoneau was missing.
The day before, when the Palisades Fire was heading toward the neighborhood where I grew up and where he still lived, my mom had texted his ex-wife, Jill, to ask if she knew where he was—he’d stayed behind to defend our road from fire before. Jill thought he was out of town, at a hot spring. But the next morning, she called to tell us that he’d raced back to his house, and no one had heard from him since. She asked if my father and I could head out from our place nearby to look for him.
My old neighborhood began because my Dad and Arthur, separately, looked at the hills above Malibu and thought, I should build a house up there. They each bought land in a stretch of Topanga Canyon so sparsely populated that the path from the main road to their parcels was unpaved, running through a hillside of sumac, sagebrush, and toyon that produced red berries in the winter. Each lot had a panoramic view of the ocean and coastline. City water and power did not quite reach our road, so throughout the late ’80s and early ’90s, Arthur and Dad made the spot habitable, jerry-rigging a well, generators, solar panels, and an unofficial connection to a neighbor’s utilities.
Fires might have been more of a worry up in the hills, but settling there didn’t seem much riskier than building a house in earthquake-prone Southern California to begin with. Fire was a part of life, and they upheld the codes, putting in driveways large enough for a firetruck and regularly clearing the brush around their lots. In Topanga Canyon, a clique formed around Arson Watch, a volunteer organization whose members cruise around in logoed jackets, looking for signs of emerging fires.
When we went to search for Arthur last week, Dad took his Arson Watch jacket with him. We were both hoping this 25-year-old piece of nylon could get us through closed roads and into our old neighborhood. But the officers we met weren’t buying that my 78-year-old father, with his faded jacket, needed to pass by barricades to a still-smoldering area. We returned home hours later, worried and exhausted, and then an evacuation warning for our area came through on our phones. As we packed the car, Jill called again, to tell us that Arthur was dead.
My first memory is of Arthur, and in it, he looks the same as he did when I saw him last month. We’re standing on my lawn at my third-birthday party, next to the rosebush that Mom was always trying to make happen but that the deer always ate. He asks me how old I am, and when I tell him, he staggers.“No way, dude!” he says, feigning disbelief. “You’re so old!” He’s in a T-shirt, a ponytail, and (as he always was, no matter how formal the occasion) flip-flops. Backpacking at 9,000 feet of elevation, chasing a bear away while camping—flip-flops, because they were easy to slip off and didn’t collect burs as easily as sneakers.
He and Jill spent years constructing their three-story brick rectangle, painted olive green, with fragrant pepper trees along the front walkway. Arthur wanted to build a house with his own two hands, as his grandfather had done. (A bonus: He could design the garage door to fit his car with his prized hang-gliding gear strapped to the roof.) A football field away, across a small canyon, Dad and a construction crew built what he’d thought would be his bachelor pad. After he met my mom, she went with him to Mexico to buy the tiles that she laid in the floors and walls.
Back then, the only other dwelling on our road was a geodesic dome about a half a mile away, occupied by a gay couple who drove a DeLorean and held a support group for gay Filipino men with custody issues. Later on, a germophobic epidemiologist took over the Dome House, as we called it, figuring its remote location would help him avoid contagion. Peculiarity was a neighborhood prerequisite. When Jill and Arthur saw people touring properties who they thought would make annoying neighbors, they would walk around outside naked to scare them off.
A fire came through the canyon in 1993, and Dad and Arthur stayed behind with utility hoses and nearly 20,000 gallons of water to extinguish spot fires that erupted around their newly finished houses. Somehow, everybody and their homes stayed intact, minus a few warped windows.
My parents had kids first, then Arthur and Jill had Andre, who became my first and best childhood friend. Eventually our road got paved, more families moved close by, and we had a neighborhood. We called it simply “the hill” to differentiate it from “town”—Malibu. Our parents would trade off taking us to school, past an abandoned fire truck incinerated in the ’93 fire. My parents helped raise Andre; Andre’s parents helped raise my brother and me. I only just learned that Dad and Arthur had cleared a path between our two homes so that Arthur could run a phone line from his house to ours. I’d always thought it was so Andre and I could get to each other’s houses faster.
Arthur was our neighborhood’s unofficial scoutmaster. We were free to be as weird as we wished, but he would nip any selfishness or malice in the bud with a stern “Not cool, dude.” He’d help us wriggle under the chain-link fence next to a No Trespassing sign so we could soak in hot springs in Ojai, and strap pillows around our behinds with duct tape to teach us to rollerblade. He turned a wild garter snake, then another, into pets, Snakey and Snakey 2, who would roam freely in the living room; he’d lecture us extensively on gun safety before showing us how to shoot .22s and stash our guns in the brush if we saw any sheriff’s helicopters. He let us believe we were running wild, keeping us safe the entire time. When I woke up the morning after my dad had a heart attack, having slept through the ambulance lights that brought Arthur to our house, I wondered not about what might be wrong, but about what adventure he would take us on that day.
Our houses never really got finished. My brother’s bedroom was intended to be a walk-in closet, mine a breakfast nook, and neither had doors. Andre’s bedroom, meanwhile, had a surplus: a Door to Nowhere overlooking the driveway. Arthur had always meant to build a staircase there. The land, too, would allow us only so much normalcy. When my parents got us a trampoline, the Santa Ana winds blew it down the hillside, where it landed at a 45-degree angle against a tree and began its second life as our slide. We went through fires, blackouts, mudslides, rockslides, and windstorms. But we had the sense that tolerating these dangers made this life possible—one where you could see the Pacific Ocean from the kitchen and, from your bedroom at night, watch coyotes trot across the yard, backlit by the glow of Los Angeles. My family moved away when I started high school, only because we had to downsize, and other families left too. Eventually, Arthur was the only person from those years who still lived on the road.
Before my father and I tried to reach the old road, we called the man who had bought our house on the hill. He told us what we didn’t want to hear: It had burned down. He thanked my father for building such a lovely home. Dad immediately thought of the nautilus fossil he’d placed in the center of the fireplace, made of rocks he’d collected along the canyon to the house. He wondered out loud if it had survived. On Monday, we finally did make it through the charred canyon, past deflated cacti, and up to the hills. We’d point to the piles of debris: I can’t tell if that used to be so-and-so’s house. When we saw the hills with nothing on them, I tried to superimpose what I knew of the land on what I saw, and I couldn’t. The sumac, sagebrush, and toyon were pulverized. We were on a new, blackened planet that happened to have the same topography as the place where I was raised.
Standing in what I think used to be our living room, I could not tell if a crumbling piece of metal was a washing machine or the 1920s Roper stove that we’d sold with the house. But I did find the nautilus, resting on top of some of the rocks Dad had collected. I thought about Arthur: He would have known how long it would take for the sumac to grow back.
So many people here are staring down losses like these. At least 10 of my friends’ childhood homes burned. If I drive down the coast right now, I can see hundreds of flattened houses where people I’ve never met were raised. All around Los Angeles, histories are vanishing. When we first found out that Arthur was missing, the fires’ official death count included just a few people; it has since risen to 25.
Dad and I drove away, and as we turned on a road where Arthur would lead us on bicycle rides, Dad gently mentioned that we’d found only one nautilus. He had actually placed two in the fireplace, and the one he loved the most was still missing. I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten. Yes, there were two.