Today, with great sadness, I am thinking about Pacific Palisades.

After my father told my family we were moving from Bakersfield to Los Angeles, he unfolded a big map, laid it out on the kitchen table and the house hunt began.

I studied it carefully and chose Pacific Palisades as our next destination.

My parents agreed and so, yes, I know Pacific Palisades well. I walked to and from school, church along its “alphabet streets”, worked in its little shops, babysat for its inhabitants.

I rode the bus down Chautauqua Boulevard through Rustic Canyon to various jobs and classes in Santa Monica and at UCLA.

Grace Newman, one of my lead characters in The Dark Side of Hunger Mountain, has a townhouse in Pacific Palisades and several scenes take place there and at various locations scattered about Los Angeles’ Westside.

And now, the Westside is burning and Pacific Palisades is gone, like so many other California towns.

In Chapter 3, Jackson Armstrong, explains during a panel discussion at UCLA:

“From 2014 through 2017, California fires burned 1.5 million acres, cost $1.5 billion to fight. In 2018, Butte County’s Camp Fire racked up a $17 billion-dollar bill, incinerated 19,000 structures and 85 residents in Paradise.” He read from a list, “Bagdad, Blue River, Canyondam, Concow, Detroit, Doyle, Elkhorn, Gates, Greenville, Grizzly Flats, Idanha, Keswick, Los Alamos, Lyons, Magalia, Maiden, Mill City, Paradise, Phoenix, Pulga, Ruth, Talent—all consumed by wildfire. Only one town made it into the press and only because the media liked its name: Paradise.”

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Obliterated by fire, Pacific Palisades joins this list.

While The Powers That Be will blame this calamity on climate change, criminal negligence is at the top of my list.

Chapter 3 includes this heated exchange:

Jackson leaned into the microphone. “Policies ban fireplaces and wood from our homes while torching our forests,” he said. “California’s 2020 wildfire season wiped out two decades of greenhouse gas reductions and wildfires in North American and Eurasian forests released almost two billion tons of CO2 in 2021, twice as much as global aviation—including all those private planes going to all those greenie meetings.”

Someone hissed. Paula Karmin shook her head. “Paula would you like to comment?” asked Grace.

“I would,” said Paula. “Fire is nature’s way of managing forests and we can proudly say that, in California, we have the greatest prohibitions and restrictions on fire and timber harvests of any state.” She listed several laws and concluded with, “The tragedies in Paradise and Lahaina illustrate the importance of maintaining firebreaks, defensible space around houses.”

Jackson batted back, “Not just around houses,” he said. “How about around entire towns? Most of the state? Big Government and Big Green try to blame it all on climate change, but that’s just cover for bad policy that ties up every attempt to manage landscapes in the courts. It’s criminally negligent land management.”

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In remembrance of Pacific Palisades, I’ve removed all paywalls from my novel which explores the impact of land management policies on US towns.

I chose to tell this very real story using fiction and hope you’ll read The Dark Side of Hunger Mountain. Please share it with others, far and wide.

Thank you.

T.H. PLATT