Greetings from Altadena
Clinging to God's providence in the aftermath of the Eaton Fire with open-eyed gratitude
Search me, God, and know my heart;
test me and know my anxious thoughts.
See if there is any offensive way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting.
Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.
We live in Altadena. Perhaps you've seen our town on the news. It's not been a good week. For our family, it all started Tuesday night around 6:30 pm.
We had just finished eating dinner. I had been out for a meeting that afternoon, braving the gusty conditions as I traveled to a friend's house in nearby La Cañada Flintridge. After returning home we had the street taco trays we had gotten the day before at Costco, a perennial favorite for our family. Those dishes are still sitting dirty in our sink. At least we still have a sink.
Shortly after dinner we wrapped up and got the kids ready for bed. Tubbies, teeth, and jammies, the normal routine. That's when the texts and calls started to come in.
"Fire in Eaton Canyon."
"How are the Brakes doing up in Altadena? We've heard there's a fire up in the hills."
"Fire is spreading quick. Get a few things ready in case you need to evacuate."
A friend called and invited us over to their house for the night. “Why not,” we figured. “Better safe than sorry.” We hadn't gotten the kids to bed yet, and we might as well get a few miles further west out of the potential of harm’s way and a mid-morning evacuation order. Surely the fire couldn't reach that far?
I grabbed our suitcases from the attic to pack a few things. I ran down the list of my normal overnight packing list, throwing a pair of jeans and a few t-shirts into a bag along with some socks and underwear while Abbey got the kids’ stuff ready. Gotta remember a favorite buddy or two.
"Josh, make sure to grab any important documents, just in case," our landlady warned. Despite being convinced that this would be a simple one-night stay, I had that nagging feeling in the back of my head. Just to be safe, I emptied the safe and grabbed identification documents and birth certificates.
After we loaded up the bags, I started to pack the car. It was really windy throughout the day and I had encouraged Abbey and the kids to stay home because of the gusts. We thought about driving all together, but in what turned out to be another fortunate decision, I decided to drive separately in the Highlander alongside the van, mostly to throw a few extra items in without needing to pack the van too carefully. I threw in a few cans of Poppi, and grabbed two Topo Chicos, a bag of coffee beans, and a hand grinder. Might as well have a few of the comforts of home for a little unexpected overnight stay, right?
Off we went to La Cañada with Abbey in the lead. I followed a few moments behind. We arrived and I unloaded the cars, setting up the kids' air mattresses, brushing their teeth, and reading a few chapters of Mr. Popper's Penguins on the couch. We prayed together as we do every night before bed. I reminded them that God was in control of the storm, making a reference to Jesus calming the wind and waves. I guess I didn’t give quite enough context because #1 missed the reference and thought I was talking about Jonah.
We put them to bed, the wind howling around the house and branches banging against each other and the house. "Just a bad case of the Santa Anas," I told Abbey. “Not so different than every year around this time of year.”
In retrospect, it wasn't the first miracle of the night. It's funny, because I don't even remember hearing the crash. There must have been one, but the winds either masked it or made me think it was just one of many, somehow-normalized loud sounds of the night. I noticed it when I walked out to the van to grab something I had forgotten. I don't even remember what I was going out there for.
I just remember looking up. "Oh my. That's a big tree." There, on top of the trellised walkway between the house and the driveway, was a sycamore tree from the neighbor's yard. A few minutes later, I turned to see the glow of my friends' flashlights piercing through the darkness of the blustery night, coming to inspect the damage. "There's a tree down across the road," Dave said. "Little did you know you were jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire!" Little did we know indeed. "Sleep well!" said Liz. I carefully shuffled our bags from the front side of the house from under the tree on the roof, did my nightly ritual of two sets of twenty-five pushups, journaled at the dining room table, and went to bed, trying as best I could to ignore the storm all around.
A few hours later, I woke to Abbey shaking me awake. Not so easy to jostle me to consciousness, but she managed. "There's someone banging at the door!" she said. "Nah, just a branch against the side of the house," I said, turning over to go back to bed. Then a few seconds later, again, a knock-knock-knock on the side of the house repeated. Out of bed I rolled, popping up to see what sort of strange branch with a sense of rhythm was outside.
I checked my watch. 4 am. That strange branch was Liz, back again with Dave. I went outside, a shiver traveling down my spine in the frigid early morning mountain air. (Listen, I'm a Californian now, so anything below 50 ˚F is cold) I could see the fire in the distance through the trees over her shoulder. "The fire's creeping up to the other side of the Arroyo," Liz said. "It's moving fast. We should leave."
Leave. Sounds like a good idea. Only one issue. Remember the tree across the road? Yeah, that tree is a problem. The road is a dead end, so there are not too many options. It's either over or through, there's no around.
"I'll be out in a minute," I said, running inside to grab my beloved Costco logo sweatshirt to help keep me from shaking from the combined influence of the cold and my adrenaline which was starting to kick in. In normal circumstances I wouldn't wear that white, treasured sweatshirt anywhere near the potential of dirt. No time to think about that right now.
After telling Abbey to start getting herself and the kids ready to go, out I went, clothed in quite the comedic outfit. White Costco sweatshirt, pajama pants, and my signature orange crocs. (Yes, the crocs made the short list too.) I ducked under the sycamore tree, which looked bigger every time I looked at it, and jogged down the road and around the corner to see what was in my path.
It turned the corner to find Dave and Liz there with a somewhat portly neighbor from down the street. The headlights of his parked car illuminated the tree stretched across the road. They were doing their best to push the large limbs out of the way. It wasn't easy going, but luckily, the branches weren't so large or so stuck that they couldn't be moved. Eventually, we got the pathway cleared enough for a car to fit through over a bed of pine branches littering the pavement. I ran back to pull the Highlander through, parked it at the end of the road, and hustled back to help get the kids and our belongings in the van.
After quickly throwing our stuff into suitcases for the second time that night, I shuttled them to the van, once again hoping that the sycamore tree wouldn't collapse on my head while I ran back and forth under it. Then, after carrying the bleary-eyed kids into the car, I ran in for a few last things, stuffed the back full, shut the trunk, and hopped in to drive us through the branches. After picking up the Highlander, I drove it to the Gelson's at the bottom of the hill and left it in the parking lot, figuring that given the one massive tree already down, having it in a commercial lot would be a higher probability play for future retreival than leaving it in the parking lot of the house with more trees threatening.
"Where should we go?" Abbey asked. We'd already made a number of quick decisions over the course of the past few hours, but it was time for another one. "Away from here." I answered. After grabbing a photo of the mountains above our home in Altadena engulfed in flames from Foothill Boulevard, we hopped on the freeway.
Knowing the Palisades fire was burning to our West, the only logical options were to head south or east. We started south, figuring that Orange County was as good a destination as any. Then we got a call from a friend, offering for us to come and stay with their family out in the Redlands. "Good idea," I said, pulling off the 134 freeway to do a U-turn, hopping back on and heading on the 134 eastbound toward the 210 and the Inland Empire.
Passing through our beautiful hometown of Pasadena was eerie. Seeing the mountains on fire was not an altogether new experience for us. A few years ago we saw the hills above Hollywood engulfed in flames, clearly visible from the 134 freeway heading toward Glendale. More recently, the hills to our east above Monrovia had also had their share of fire. In retrospect, it's not surprising that we would be next. Unfortunately, unlike those fires which mostly started and stayed in the mountains, this fire would not.
As we passed through Pasadena, you could smell the smoke. It was funny because the air in La Cañada was clear of even a hint of smoke. The winds were whipping so quickly from the north that they were pushing the smoke to the south so that it didn't even get close to where we were. Now we were in it.
We drove through the smoke for a while until the worst of it finally started to clear somewhere east of Monrovia. It was a route I can drive with my eyes closed since I take the 210 freeway westbound to Harvey Mudd in Claremont almost every day. Third lane from the right is the best, by the way. It's the one with the fewest patched potholes. Smoothest ride by far.
We kept going eastbound, feeling the gusts of wind pushing us around. Then we started to see the next odd attraction of the night. First one. Then another. Then three in a row. 18-wheelers, tipped on their sides on the shoulder of the freeway. By the end of the trip, I counted at least a dozen. I made sure to give any of them still upright on the freeway doing 65 mph a wide berth as I passed them on the upwind side.
By the time we made it out to Redlands, the sun was beginning to peek over the horizon. Only then would the damage of the night become apparent. Most of Altadena had been evacuated by this point, leaving only a smattering of firefighting crews and law enforcement along with those foolhardy enough (like my neighbor) to stick it out in dangerous conditions.
We parked and began to exchange stories with our friends who had left earlier that night. The fire had started practically right outside their front window, just across Altadena Dr. in Eaton Canyon. The firefighting crews mostly held the line along Altadena Dr. The west side of the street remained mostly intact. The east side was anything but.
The status of our side of town was still unknown. I was glued to my phone, repeatedly refreshing various sources of information on the web desperate for a glimpse of how our neighborhood was faring. I discovered that even in 2025, I can still drain my entire iPhone battery in a day. We left and went out to breakfast, absent-mindedly ordering pancakes, eggs, and waffles while the kids squirmed in their seats after a disrupted night of sleep. #3 was feeling especially restless, so I roamed the mostly empty restaurant with her, trying to keep her from running into a table or slipping while simultaneously scouring Twitter for any news from our neighborhood.
Then I found it. A video taken heading south on Fair Oaks Avenue from Altadena Dr. just about a half mile south as the crow flies from our house. Not exactly our neighborhood, but pretty darn close. It is a stretch of road that I know well since it's the main corridor we take to get down from Altadena to the freeway. I look down this stretch of road every day. Most days, several times.
I watched the video over and over, trying to get freeze frames clear enough to pick out the street signs. I would have used the houses as landmarks, but there weren't any. It looked like a scene out of the apocalypse. All of them, house by house, burned to the ground with nothing left besides their chimneys. Absolute destruction and devastation.
We wrapped up breakfast and headed back to the car. I held it together until we loaded the kids up. Then #2 asked me "When can we go home, dad?" I came unglued.
Y'all should know something about me. Crying ain't my thing. But you can ask Abbey. In that moment, I lost it. That video broke me. It said everything I needed to know. The house, our belongings, everything besides what we had shuttled out last night—gone. I was sure of it.
We drove back to our friends' house and I tried to steel myself to the new reality. The most important things, of course, I had with me. Our family was out safe. The rest of it was just stuff. Just. But of course, it's easy to say "just stuff." It's much harder when that stuff is your stuff.
The rest of the day seemed like a blur. I had been texting back with my neighbors, each of us desperate for information about the houses. We were in the dark. Nobody knew anything.
Then, at 7:30 pm on Wednesday night, a glimmer of hope. My next-door neighbor texted me. The house two doors down was gone along with all three houses across the street. But our house and the houses on either side of ours were intact. Our neighbor had gone back in the middle of the night and along with his father and a friend had managed to put out a fire chewing away at the retaining wall in his backyard. Hairbrained or heroic. Honestly it was both. But armed with a generator, a sump pump, and the swimming pool of the house directly behind his, he had cobbled together a ragtag firefighting machine.
As more video continued to pour in from the surrounding area on Thursday it was clear that the fires were still burning. We weren't out of the woods yet, but the worst of the winds seemed to have passed. At this point, I still didn't really believe the house was standing until my neighbor sent me a video of our street at 10:30 on Thursday morning. All the houses on our little cul-de-sac were burned to the ground except three. The house of our elderly neighbor across the road who had lived in the area for countless decades. Gone. The house of the young couple across the street awaiting their first baby who was due to arrive any day. Gone. The house of the family on the end of the street with the boy who we would play with in the street every so often. Gone. All of it, burned to the ground.
Open-eyed Gratitude
Life is fragile. When I wrote to you all just a week ago, I was sitting at my kitchen table getting ready to ramp up for the new semester. The most stressful thing I was dealing with was a pile of emails and tasks I needed to wrap up to get ready for classes.
This week, I'm sitting on the couch at our Airbnb 30 miles east of our home and wondering where we'll be at the start of February. What a week.
In the wake of this week's disaster, a friend shared a sermon with me, preached by a fellow Altadenan displaced due to the fire. He shared the lessons that he has learned about living in the midst of hardship. In his case, not only was he displaced by the fire, but his wife's cancer returned this fall—Stage IV, inoperable.
He makes the case for what he calls open-eyed gratitude: giving thanks for God's blessings while not shying away from being honest with God about our anger and pain. Suffering like this shows us what it really looks like to trust God. That trust is rarely pure. Mostly it’s full of a lot of questions and doubts.
Open-eyed gratitude is not pollyannaish. God is not a monarch on high that demands that we only approach him with a smile on our face and a sunny attitude. He knows us. He is big enough to hold not only our thankfulness but our anger too. Walking with God through pain doesn't require that we ignore or downplay the bad things that have happened to us or our friends. God can handle our anger.
We just finished celebrating Christmas. A core aspect of the Christian celebration of Christmas is the recognition of Jesus's incarnation—God's descent to earth in human form. We dwell on the idea of Jesus as Emmanuel which means "God with us."
This "withness" is my hope. That somehow, in ways mysterious and indescribable, God is present with me. That this last week was full of signs of his protection and care, alongside the pain and suffering from the real loss that we and our neighbors are experiencing.
My prayers this week are full of gratitude and lament. Gratitude for the gifts and blessings he has given and angry lament at the loss that has already occured and will continue to accumulate over the weeks and months to come.
I don't know why it all happened. I'm angry that it did. But He is with me. I see His hand at work.
So I'll continue to pray and weep and love my neighbor. May the Lord have mercy on Los Angeles and draw us nearer to himself.
Want to help?
We are so thankful that our house is still standing, but when (or if) we’ll be able to return to our home is a big question mark right now with lots of financial unknowns in the weeks and months to come.
We appreciate all the caring texts, emails, and calls that have come in over the last week. If you are so inclined, here are a few ways to materially help our family of five.
Blessed are those who mourn,
for they will be comforted.
Suddenly King Nebuchadnezzar jumped up in amazement and asked his advisers, “Did we not throw three men, firmly bound, into the fire?”
“Certainly, O king,” they replied.
“Look!” he exclaimed. “I see four men, unbound and unharmed, walking around in the fire—and the fourth looks like a son of the gods!”
So thankful you're safe – and so sorry for your experience, and that of your community. Thank you for sharing your experience so openly.
I love the concept of open-eyed gratitude. 🙏Quite the neighbor you have to homebrew the fire fighter setup :)
Glad you are physically safe and big respect for sharing your journey in making sense of this.
Also, A+ Dadding!!