At 10:30 am on Tuesday, I was sitting on the couch ordering a new Taylor Swift vinyl when my mom (very nonchalantly) came downstairs and told me to pack a bag. Obviously I was like, “Why?” And she said, “Look outside.”
I started packing (more than one bag sorry I needed all of my Taylor stuff), and then my mom called me on the phone, and I asked her “Why are you calling me? Aren’t you here in our house packing a bag for yourself and my brothers?”
And she was like “No, I went to pick your youngest brother up.” My brother, James, goes to school at Calvary Christian, which is on the other side of the canyon and on a one way road to our house (in the Palisades highlands). She told me to pack bags for my brother, and then go into our safe and take everything, toss it into the duffel bag on her bed, and grab her laptop.
Then my dad called me from Orange County, where he had taken my other brother (Liam) for an orthodontist appointment. I was freaking out at this point, and he asked me to go into his office and pack all of his papers, checks, laptops, iPad, etc… I had seven huge duffel bags and my mom called me and told me “they might not let me back into the Highlands, get into our housekeeper’s car and tell her to leave”. I immediately threw all of the bags in her car, and as we were getting ready to go my mom pulled up with not only my little brother but my other brother’s best friend. My mom told us to go.
We left our house and somewhat went through the canyon, (but barely because there was a fire creeping down the mountain on both sides). My mom then called and said that she left a few minutes after us, and that she also had our neighbor’s kids. She was in her car a few hundred feet behind us, but she was technically still in the canyon, while the fire was approaching from both sides.
My mom told my brother and the other boys (Wyatt, 13; Zane, 15; Miles, 13) to get out of their car and run to the car I was in (the housekeeper’s car), but at that point there was an issue. I forgot to mention that this one road in and out of the Canyon was blocked, and we were stuck. No cars were moving. Both our car and my mom’s car were on the wrong side of the road. Other cars had driven up on the curb, and at this point, the streets looked like a zoo. Like a parking lot.
The boys got to our car and shoved themselves in, but then my mom approached us and told us that we had to get out and run. So we had now abandoned both cars on Palisades Drive. The firetrucks could not get in because all the lanes were blocked, and the firemen were not letting anyone out. The boys got out and ran away without carrying anything, even though I told them to help me. My housekeeper ended up staying behind with her car. I grabbed five of the seven extremely heavy duffels and started basically limping down the road.
My mom had taken the dog and one or two bags and ran with the boys. I barely got to the end of the road and I was now at Sunset. I yelled at the boys to come over and help me. We walked a bit up the road and we spotted my aunt parked there. She said my cousin and my uncle stayed behind because the canyon was blocked, and she was waiting for them just in case. She was out of danger, we gave her all our bags and walked a mile to one of the boys’ houses. We got to his house and were there for about 5 minutes before we realized the fire was moving too fast and we had to go again. We quickly grabbed a few items without thinking too much about their house and we loaded four boys, two dogs, two adults, and myself into one truck, as well as a safe and more bags. We drove down a backroad to the Bel Air Bay Club, where my brother’s school had been evacuated. They were about two miles from their school, and they had to walk every student who wasn’t picked up in time including the preschoolers all the way down Sunset and PCH.
We got there, and Zane and Wyatt’s mom was there helping with the preschoolers. We left them there. Instead of taking the parents, we took two teachers. We were driving on PCH toward Santa Monica when we saw a random guy on the road and offered him a ride. He jumped in the bed of the truck and we headed to Santa Monica.
We made it to Montana and dropped off the teachers and we headed to a restaurant. Miles’ mom had left and driven to University High School to pick up Miles’ younger twin brothers because they had been evacuated there from Paul Revere Middle School.
Pause in the story and rewind to when we were first evacuated: my grandma lived at the top of the mountain, the same mountain that we took to evacuate to a different neighborhood (A few streets above Delphi Trent). When we got the evacuation order, my mom told my grandma to evacuate, too. My grandma didn’t take much because she didn’t think too much of it. Unbeknownst to her, leaving behind all my mom and aunt’s childhood photos, photo albums, four Hermes Birkin bags, 56 Chanel bags, a $10,000 dress she wore to my mom’s wedding, and much more would all be gone. She left with her dog and a bag of clothes.
She decided to evacuate to the village, a few streets away from Pali High where my other grandma lives. We got to the restaurant in Montana and I called my grandmas and told them the village was starting to get evacuated too, and they needed to leave. After some persuasion, they left.
We were at the restaurant and both my grandmas arrived with their dogs. We ate some good food and began to book hotels. My dad got an Airbnb for my family and my cousin’s family. Then, my dad, my mom, James (9), Liam (13), Joanie (13), Mason (17), their mom, their dad, and I, went to the Airbnb on San Vicente and met the Baffa family there.
We got into the Airbnb and turned on the news, and I decided to phone in and give an interview to Fox 11. I had a phone interview. Then the Baffa mom went to get us CPK for dinner, and when all the parents got back we were alerted that we had to evacuate again. We went to the Pierside Hotel.
That was just day 1.
Edited by Yasmine Santini
