Erika's Fire Story, Part 2: Skull Rock

Other than the crazy wind, it was a normal Tuesday morning in Altadena, and I was down in my office trying to work when I heard the news that a fire had been sighted in Topanga State Park near Skull Rock.

Oh shit, I thought and/or possibly muttered aloud, Skull Rock.

California wildfires usually start in remote parts of the state I have never heard of or visited, but Skull Rock is a place I knew well. Like many other hike-minded Angelenos, I have trekked out to Skull Rock several times in the nearly forty years I have lived here. It is a beautiful, moderate hike and the rock is aptly-named and pretty fucking cool.

Officially, the Skull Rock trailhead starts in Temescal Gateway park where you can pay a parking fee and hike the whole 4.5 mile loop out to the rock and back, which is lovely and I highly recommend—but unofficially, if you want to get there quick, say, before the ‘shrooms hit, you can just drive up to the summit of the Palisades Highlands, park on the last street on the eastern edge of the development, and hike in via the Split Ridge fire road which gets you to the rock in a fraction of the time.

This wind could blow an ember from Skull Rock into the Highlands in a nanosecond and set the whole goddamn place on fire.

I had been thinking about the Palisades a lot lately, as I was trying to puzzle together my mother’s life, and I had just re-read her first novel, Girl of the Golden West, which takes place almost entirely in the Pacific Palisades. I was still sorting through the personal archive she had left behind when she died in 2016, and I had it all laid out on a folding Costo table next to my desk. It consisted of three old boxes stuffed with files, photos, manuscripts, correspondenc and personal writing, all in no particular order. I had gone through it all at a cursory level, and now I was doing sort her piles of ephemera into folders inside of new hanging file boxes.

But I couldn’t concentrate. The wind was slamming itself against the house, and my phone was flashing one Watch Duty alert after another. The fire was moving fast, and it was moving South/East. I felt a lump of dread form in my gullet.

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The Palisades Highlands were built in the early 1970’s, much to the dismay of local environmentalists who fought it bitterly. It’s easy to see why—the Spielbergian housing development was to be jammed, like a giant urban IUD into the virgin womb of Topanga State Park, nearly bisecting it. The town’s only egress, a long, thin, two-lane road that connected the Highlands to Sunset Boulevard 2.5 miles away, look like the IUD’s strings.

If my Uncle Tom was aware of this controversy, I imagine he didn’t give it too much thought when he bought his house on Michael Lane in the late ‘70’s.

My Uncle Tom was my mother’s older brother. He was big, jolly, red-headed, beery, and very funny man, and had three sons with my Aunt Lee, my cousins Sam, Matt and Joss. Joss was my age and the cousin I played with the most. He was hands-down, the funnest person I knew as a kid. Matt and Sam were older and cooler, and I worshipped them both from afar.

Tom, like my grandaddy, was a successful screenwriter who got his start in New York on The Dick Cavett Show, and was one of the orginal writers on Captain Kangaroo. It was on Kangaroo that collaborated with Jon Stone on a TV movie called Hey, Cinderella! which produced by Jim Henson’s Muppets, Inc. and directed by Henson himself.

This little-known program not only brought together the core creative team that went on to make Sesame Street, Hey, Cinderella! introduced the world to an as-yet unknown Kermit the Frog.

This is how Uncle Tom came to co-create and write The Electric Company, for which he won Emmys in 1973 and 1974, It was also there that he met Pam Webber, a pretty, vivacious, in-on-the-joke, script supervisor who he married in 197X (my fact-checker has quit). Together they added two more primo-level cousins to my all-male, stellar cousin-bundle: Jed and Zack.

In 1974 Tom was hired as head writer for Alice, a sit-com spun off of the Scorcese film Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, (a movie my mother adored and often quoted). Tom and Pam moved to LA and settled in the Palisades Highlands.

The Pacific Palisades has always been for a home for showbiz folk and the cultural elites of L.A. It has a innocent, Mayberrry-by-the-Sea vibe and a quaint Fourth of July parade that the Whedons and their friends never missed.

In 1962 my grandaddy took his earnings from The Andy Griffith Show (and other sit-coms) and bought a piece of undeveloped land on Tellem Drive. He build his second wife (Dorothy, a model) a super-swinging, mid-modernist, glass-and-terrazzo, fuck-pad with views straight out to the ocean.

The Palisades Highlands were conceived and built for people like Tom; upwardly-mobile, professionals and young families who aspired to that Palisades life but were priced out of the full beach dream.

I loved Tom’s house. It was a big, comfy house stuffed full of my handsome, hilarious cousins at the holidays. We made movies, ate huge meals together, sang Sondheim tunes and Christmas carols, the adults laughing and drinking endlessly.

Sometimes, when I got overwhelmed by it all, I would just walk out the front door step out front, and sit in the cool and quiet of the shaded entryway. It was planted with big glossy tropicals that I sheltered in. Periodically I would walk barefoot down to the curb where the pavement seared my feet and the air billowed with the scent of chaparral and the whir of wildlife coming from the park that surrounded us.

Uncle Tom went on to win two more Emmys, in 1990 and 1991 for The Golden Girls. It was around this time and Pam upgraded to a bigger house, on Cuesta Linda, an ever more recent development in the Highlands, closer to the summit.

I got married in that house in 1991, on the patio that overlooked the canyon that my phone was telling me was now burning. Palisades Drive was jammed with people fleeing the Highlands. They were abandoning their cars and escaping on foot.

I thought this might be the closest I would ever come to witnessing a full-blown disaster. But the day was still young.