Après moi, le déluge

I can’t tell you exactly what I was doing November 14th of 2024, but odds are good I was outside, hand-watering my garden in Altadena.

On this date a year ago, we hadn’t had any precipitation in over seven months. Not a single drop. The rich, alluvial Altadena soil of my yard was parched and silty. My native plants, hearty souls who had evolved specifically for drought, were struggling. They were ready for their big, seasonal drink, not the municipal piss I was spraying on them. My salviia Clevlandii were brown, brittle and rangy, I could practically feel their tap roots searching the dry earth beneath my feet for moisture.

The mountains were brown. The air crackled. We needed not just rain, but a biblical soaking —the kind Los Angeles is getting now and through the weekend.

We were one fucking atmospheric river away from salvation. But the rain didn’t arrive until February of 2025, a month after the whole town burned down.

I drove up to Altadena yesterday to visit my lot for the first time in a while. My neighbors were out sandbagging their properties, preparing for the deluge that was already starting to spit at us. I saw a woman my age in a blue puffer vest filling a sandbag at the fire station on Lincoln. I felt, not for the first time, empathy for those neighbors whose homes didn’t burn. They are still in survival mode, while I get to be cozy in my Eagle Rock rental.

I pulled up to my quiet, empty lot, and beheld, once again, its ruin. The once-fertile soil has been scraped and carted off, and tested for toxins. The only evidence of the life we lived here is the outdoor fireplace that yet stands, full of the firewood we loaded into it two summers ago.

Altadena is not for sissies. It is a landscape run amok with bears, gophers and coyotes. A place that burns and floods in terrifying cycles. A town without a single Trader Joe’s, and evidently, any kind of coordinated disaster response. We are survivors, and now we are going to be pioneers, building a new town in a ruined outpost of the wild west.

It started to rain, so I got back in my car and drove east on Altadena drive, past Eaton canyon, where the whole mishegas got started, (and where the Eton dam already has a recorded rainfall of 2.82” as of this writing. ) Altadena could have filled that dam with our collective tears over the past ten months, but the rain is here now and the time for crying is over. Now is the time of rebuilding, and nearly every street I drove down had a new house going up.

I took Altadena drive down to my to my favorite thrift store where I stopped in to get some dopamine. When I came out, the rain had broken for a moment, and this big, gaudy rainbow arced picturesquely over the burnt mountains and battened-down community, reminding us all that there’s no place like home.