I awoke at about 4AM on Wednesday, January 8th, to feel my house shaking while the wind roared around the eaves. I’ve lived in this house for nearly sixty years, and heard and felt the Santa Ana winds countless times; but this was beyond my experience. The whole house was shaking and swaying constantly, as though we were experiencing an earthquake, and it went on and on.

Before I continue: my family and suffered what can best be described as mild inconvenience compared to those in Los Angeles who have lost their homes, their belongings, their knick-knacks and heirlooms, and all sense of security. There are many people in a very bad way here in Los Angeles, and many ways to help. Please do!

Our power had gone off at 10:15 PM, come back briefly around midnight, and then gone off again, so I woke to a house that was cold and dark. Power would not be restored until the afternoon of Friday the 10th.

The Eaton Fire had started at 6:18 PM the night before. We live in the foothills about fifteen miles west of Eaton Canyon, so my first thought was to check on its progress.

Fifteen miles is a long way for a fire to travel along the foothills, in my experience; there was a fire on the slope of Mt. Lukens when I was a boy that dropped ash on our house, and then there was the Station Fire in 2010, during which the “hot shots” did a back burn up the slope of Mt. Lukens to stop the fire coming the other way. In both of those earlier fires the flames were visible from the street in front of my house. In both of those earlier fires most of the burn was in the Angeles National Forest; structure damage was limited.

The Eaton Fire was different from the get go. Altadena was already burning. By 6 AM our neighborhood was under an evacuation warning: get ready to leave at any time. I woke the rest of the family, and we started packing.

At 8 AM our phones started to blare, and we were told that our area was now under an evacuation order: it was time to go. We got in our cars and drove to a rendezvous point: the Krispy Kreme in Burbank. It’s a place we are all familiar with, and a place to get some coffee before deciding what to do.

As it turns out, the phone alert was mistaken—our neighborhood was never subject to more than a warning. This same error happened several times. But by 8 AM, wireless coverage had deteriorated considerably. We couldn’t send or receive texts, we couldn’t follow fire news on-line, the house was chilly. The erroneous alerts were scary, but we likely would have bugged out anyway.

While we had breakfast I got us reservations at a hotel in Burbank for the night. After that we spent a good bit of the day sitting in the food court at the Glendale Galleria drinking soda and compulsively following the fire news on our phones. At 3:30 we drove to the hotel, checked in. Later we had dinner, and later still went to bed, trying not to think about our family treasures and paperwork sitting in boxes in the trunk of the car in the hotel parking lot.

Each of us was coping with all of this in various ways; but you have to imagine each of us compulsively checking the Watch Duty app and various social media apps every ten to fifteen minutes throughout this time.

Meanwhile, Altadena was burning. Altadena is just a name to most of the country; to me, it’s where my grandparents lived when I was a boy, just a couple of blocks west of Eaton Canyon. We used to drive to their house for Sunday dinner each week along New York Avenue: very approximately the south edge of the burned area. I spent the night there many times.

The following day was more of the same. There’s a kind of paralysis that comes with waiting for the next shoe to drop; and it kept not dropping. This is the miracle—though it will not seem like one to those who lost their homes: by Wednesday evening, the Eaton Fire was no longer moving into new neighborhoods. Some of this is due to the actions of the fire fighters around the periphery…but if the winds—the worst winds in my memory—had continued through the day as they had through the night, far more homes would have been lost. Instead, the winds were much gentler by dawn, and had died altogether by evening. They didn’t return until early this morning, the 12th, and then not badly.

I drove up to see our house on Thursday morning; the entire valley was filled with dense smoke, like a fog. Cell service was still out, at least for our carrier. I had already made reservations for another night at the hotel.

Thursday passed much as Wednesday had, except that we were sitting in our hotel rooms rather than in public spots, and weren’t worrying about keeping our phones charged. I spent much of the time “chain-reading” a series of mystery novels: the “Lady Hardcastle” series by T.E. Kinsey. Light, funny, not particular plausible, but perfect for the occasion.

My wife and I visited our house on Friday morning; the air was much cleaner, and though power was still out, cell coverage had been restored; it was, in fact, better than I’d ever seen it. The word on-line was that SCE might not restore power until next week; but then we received word from the CV Town Council that SCE was working hard to get power back on by noon. It was somewhat later than that, but the evacuation warning was lifted later in the afternoon, and I was able to move back in late on Friday night. The rest of the family followed Saturday morning.

Net result for us? A mess to clean up, and a not very enjoyable “vacation”. But it could have been so much worse; we could have lost everything. Many did; over 7,000 structures were lost in the Eaton Fire alone.

My find Chris lost his garage; his house appears to be still standing between burned lots. He’s not sure when he will be allowed back to assess the damage. It seems from the fire maps I’ve seen that my grandparent’s old house—or whatever has replaced it—has survived, and probably the also the family home built by my uncle, also named William Duquette, a noted mid-century architect.

We are back home, but the Los Angeles Fires of 2025 are not over.

The Eaton Fire is 27% contained as I write, and Altadena remains under mandatory evacuation. The Palisades Fire, on the other side of Los Angeles, is still burning and is threatening additional neighborhoods. More wind is expected between now and Wednesday morning. Our family treasures remain in their boxes, ready to be evacuated again at need.

Thousands have lost their homes; more still may lose theirs before this is through. There are many ways to help them; Google, as they say, is your friend—and theirs.