This piece was originally published in Dispatch, a British magazine for long-form storytelling.
The first thing you notice, before the blackened palm stumps and fenced-off lots, before the empty quiet of a neighborhood that still hasn’t quite returned to itself, is the bunny.
Or rather, what used to be a bunny.
It stands defiantly over the ruins of The Bunny Museum, as if to attention. This strange local wonder once held the Guinness World Record for the largest collection of rabbit-related items in one location, a labyrinthine warren containing more than 40,000 specimens. Today, its scorched remains are ringed by temporary fencing. Its sole survivor is charred down one flank; an American flag pokes forlornly out of the other.
Beyond it are more empty lots, dozens of them, their foundations scraped clean. It looks less like a Californian suburb than the blank starting map of RollerCoaster Tycoon, a world waiting to be built.
Only here, the world was built. And then, overnight, it wasn’t.
A year ago today, a fire ripped through Altadena.
It’s probably not the fire you’re thinking of. Not the Palisades inferno that dominated the news cycle for weeks because it licked at the edges of multimillion-dollar cliff-top estates. Not the one that produced spectacular aerial footage for television editors and panicked quotes from residents with recognizable surnames.
This was the other fire, the Eaton fire, which despite killing more people and destroying more homes than the Palisades fire, feels like it’s playing second fiddle. The second-most destructive wildfire in California’s recorded history, it burned with such speed and strangeness that even lifelong Angelenos struggled to understand what they were seeing.
