Personal Protective Equipment
Essay and photographs by Merrill Feitell
The scope of the fire was clear on the official damage map released by L.A. County, every structure represented with what looked like a little Monopoly hotel. The RED houses were destroyed, the GREEN damaged, and the BLACK were okay. But you had to see it yourself to comprehend the degree of the destruction. Spanning miles, the structures had been leveled to rubble—block after block after block—the chimneys alone left standing like tombstones.
No great surprise that the fire had sparked to the east where a scatter of houses sat nestled in the hills. On the canyon trails over there, I’d crossed paths with tarantulas, rattlesnakes, and bobcats. You had to watch out for mountain lions. Even after the canyon rose into a stately neighborhood, it wasn’t uncommon to run into a bear.
In that part of Altadena, a wildfire was imaginable—but where we lived there were sidewalks and houses arranged in a tightly packed grid. We had a liquor store on the corner; a car wash across the street. On our block, you might encounter a loose chihuahua in a sweater or the troop of stray cats we liked enough to feed but not enough to name. We could hear summer concerts at the Rosebowl from our backyard. Where we lived, it was safe.
• • • •
Everyone was hot to get back to their property, but you couldn’t get into the neighborhood until each structure was inspected. Have you gotten in yet? Without introduction, we could ask this of anyone sporting the signature quilted hoodies donated to fire survivors by J.Crew.
No. But I’m dying to get in to see what’s left of our stuff.
That’s all your house is—a pile of stuff with a cover on it, said George Carlin. If you didn’t have so much stuff you wouldn’t need a house.
We no longer had stuff, but we still needed a place to be.
We were lucky. We had a place to stay about 35-145 minutes away, depending on traffic.
Ted’s mom made us dinner every night and coffee every morning. Then we’d get in the car and drive the thirty miles to Altadena to see how close we could get to our house of stuff even though it no longer existed.
The first time we were allowed back to the property, we found it stabbed with a red sign on a stake. UNSAFE, it said. DO NOT ENTER OR OCCUPY. Then we found a small pile of fire-battered objects on what had been our front porch. An inspector must have done this, gathering these things from atop the ash. A little offering. Maybe they thought it was enough to get us to obey the sign.
Along with a few ceramic tiles, there were two figurines—part of the first gift Ted had given me, a Day of the Dead sculpture of a woman and a dog. She’d had a parasol and a leash and there was a sort of structure beneath them. It was a delicate thing; I’d broken and repaired it more than once, but there it was, safely plucked from the indistinguishable mound of rubble.
When Ted gave me the little statue, I remember him saying: What we do in life, we do in death. He’d said it awkwardly, as if it were something the storekeeper had written down for him when he made the purchase. We barely knew each other then but he’d come to visit back east and we’d walked my dog, Fergus.
• • • •
Shingle, tile, fan blade, plate—every scrap of the structure and everything it once contained was uniformly camouflaged in the intermingled debris of itself, a confetti of plaster, paint chips, rust, and glass.
Even before it was broadcast that so many hydrants had run dry, you somehow understood the incomprehensible: that your house, your block, your whole neighborhood had been left to smolder until it extinguished itself.
Our house was even further leveled than it had been when Ted sneaked back to it immediately after the fire. In the pictures he’d sent, flames were still bleeding from the gas lines and rising from bulges of wreckage. Since then, anything that might have been intact had burned until it lost all contour and color.
Standing knee-deep in that ruin, I could neither remember what we owned nor make sense of the fragments that remained. The blade hub for the ceiling fan rose like a toadstool from the mess. The melted windows of the Volvo hung like icicles. The closets were mounds the size and shape of fresh graves, the metal heads of hangers poking through like weeds.
“Think about it,” Ted said, as we stood out back in the weak winter sun. “The entire surface of the earth was on fire.”
This was obvious, of course, because all the trees and shrubs were gone, but I hadn’t thought about the clover and crabgrass and mulch all in flames—the dog’s barely-buried tennis balls, the staked solar lights, the soaker hose circling the persimmon.
It was hard to fathom.
Everything in that yard flourished. The tiny sages and lavenders grew magnificent in diameter. The rosemary was so huge I once worried Fergus had escaped when he’d just disappeared for a nap under the immensity of the thing.
We’d spent years puzzling over a strange chicken-smelling weed that kept sprouting up as yet another chicken-smelling tree—until we dug it all up and hauled it out, making a drought-tolerant Eden with a patch of no-mow, low-water, belly-cooling ground cover expressly for the dog. When we planted those sprigs of turkey tanglefoot two feet apart in a grid, it seemed impossible that they’d grow enough to create an expansive stretch of green, but they did.
“I’m done,” Ted said after we’d been there just an hour. “Everything’s gone.”
I knew what he meant—that everything was ruined—but not everything was gone. That first day, I reached a gloved hand into the ash where my dresser had been and extracted a heart-shaped truffle tin filled with jewelry from high school.
I found my mom’s pearls exploded in a burnt Sucrets box.
With some half-assed notion of fire prevention in mind, I’d been storing valuable things in flimsy tins for years. I found every backup drive I owned destroyed together in the same Fabulous ’50s kitchen canister designed for storing flour.
Nothing I unearthed was useable, much of it unidentifiable, but with everything we owned up in smoke, I couldn’t begin to recall what we’d lost without the prompt of the ruined things I found. The more I found the more I understood what was missing.
• • • •
You’re going to need to do an inventory, warned survivors of other wildfires—Woolsey, Paradise, Maui, Camp. The Facebook algorithm was hard at work, and these posts were immediately all over my feed. It’s the worst chore you can imagine, but you simply must get it done.
Such a list comprised everything lost in the fire along with its value—from your furniture and your clothing to your boxes of Band-Aids and shakers of salt. It was crucial whether you were a renter or owner; you’d need it for FEMA, for insurance, for grants.
We all know that stuff is just stuff and it doesn’t matter—so forget the bikes and the books and the art and the holiday haul of new sneakers. Forget the framed dollar bill signed in Sharpie by Joe Strummer from the Clash.
The fire took the vintage French doors scored at a rundown lumberyard and all the time sanding them, fitting them, and hunting for great walnut stains.
It took the research that went into building the astonishingly effective DIY whole-house fan—not to mention the balls it took for Ted to saw a hole in his own roof to install it.
It took the perfect baby blue 1970 Volvo that Ted had been tooling and retooling for a decade. We discovered it on a dog walk and then spent a year stalking it, watching it collect and shed a coat of pollen and leaves. The owner wasn’t interested in selling, but he must have seen us driving by. Mind if we check on the Volvo? Let’s just real quick check on the Volvo. Until, at long last, the guy called ready to sell.
The fire took other project cars, but that Volvo alone contained years spent scouring eBay—for OEM parts and unusual screws that regularly arrived on the porch in tiny packages from Sweden.
A lifelong renter and tiny-apartment dweller, I never knew you could build and rebuild and restore and create so many things. Who can count the number of Google hours and tools and trips to and from Altadena hardware (which, of course, burned down along with everything else)?
How do you ascribe value to all that on your Personal Property Inventory? And after the slap in the face of it all disappearing overnight, are you supposed to want to do it again?
• • • •
“Every time I think of an object,” Ted said right after the fire. “I imagine it burning.”
“Like what?”
“Everything. The cabinets and blinds. The sheets on the bed. The clock on the nightstand. A particular shirt on a hanger.”
At the time, I thought he sounded a little dramatic, but I had yet to see the ruins myself.
The first thing I personally pictured burning was the picnic table in the backyard.
I was broke when we first moved in but eager to contribute, so I spent weeks salvaging an ancient paint-caked set I’d found on the curb.
We lived at that table—as did the carpenter bees who made it their home, announcing their annual reemergence with a fresh mound of sawdust on the patio brick and offspring who’d go on to inherit the nest. (Yet another instance of generational wealth stolen by the fire!)
Obviously, a wooden picnic table had no chance of surviving the blaze, but still, I thought to myself: How can that picnic table possibly be gone?—and there it was in my mind, the entire hollowed plane of it catching like tissue paper, disappearing in a dazzling instant.
At the end of the day, you can’t help but think: How the fuck did this happen? How can an entire house and everything in it just disappear?
I see it starting with the two oaks at the front corner of the house, their combined canopy extending across most of the roof. I picture the canopy like a baseball mitt, snatching an ember and casually rolling it into the attic vent. Such an easy play!
I picture the attic flames crawling down the beams to my closet, first igniting the gauzy summer shirts. The dresses fan in the wind, expanding with oxygen to feed the fire.
Ember to oak, oak to attic, attic to closet.
I can see that part clearly—and I can see the flames moving toward the center of the structure, across the roof and rafters until they hit the living room wall, but that’s where I get stuck.
All the videos online start in the attic and build, suddenly cutting to a shot through the front window, nothing inside but flame.
What I want to know is: what happened in our house between the attic burning and the camera footage through the window? How did the flames get to the fireplace mantle? What was their route toward the wooden box that held the dog’s remains?
Don’t get me wrong: I understand that Fergus was already dead. His ashes had been sitting on that mantle for a year, but there’s nothing like loss to make you feel loss all over again.
Ted wanted nothing to do with sifting through the rubble, but it was all I could think about—and clearly I wasn’t the only one. Federal agencies and volunteer organizations were out in the parking lots, depositing Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) through car windows as we chugged along the distribution line. My whole trunk was packed with it—the disposable zip-up Tyvek suits, the respirators, the safety-rated gloves, the goggles.
The next time back at the house, I found a rectangular tile marked with a circle onto which it seemed something had once been glued. Then I spotted an odd hook poking up from the ash. I almost tossed these objects, but instead I set them on the ledge that had once been our foundation.
“Did we have a tile that was a magnet or something?” I asked Ted. “Maybe a magnet with a hook glued to it?”
“Maybe,” he said. “That seems familiar.”
We could both picture it—but only sort of.
Days after, I realized the tile was the base of the Day of the Dead sculpture—and days after that, Ted took another look at the hook, flipping it over, patiently studying this small piece of nothing. “It’s the Day of the Dead parasol,” he said.
This should have come as no surprise, given the fact that the only objects found atop the ash were all parts of the same broken thing. Still, we stared, as we had with every other puzzle we’d encountered since the fire, trying to make sense of yet another thing that was familiar and foreign at the same time.
• • • •
When the fires started, I happened to be in New York visiting my mom. We were watching CNN broadcast live from Altadena, and I kept thinking: Wait, that’s our street. Or is it?
If it was our street, I’d know it. I’d walked Fergus for a decade around the neighborhood. I knew every house, every flower patch, every pair of palm trees a dog could pee on.
But even after Anderson Cooper mentioned Harriet Street by name, with the houses gone and the embers ricocheting around, I couldn’t figure out where he was standing until I cross-checked the wrought iron gates behind him on TV with the corresponding houses you could still see on Google Earth.
I’ve always told students that fiction was the ultimate way of making the familiar strange, but now I know better: It’s fire.
• • • •
The footprint of the house was just 1,060 square feet, but with the roof and the walls and everything leveled to ash, it was incredibly easy for me to get lost in it. The bathtub was the only thing rising from the rubble, so I had to locate it to figure out what room I was in and where I needed to be to look for whatever I hoped to find.
Back when the place had walls, I hadn’t realized my desk was pressed up against the tub. Along with the desk and bookcase, my closet and dresser were all in this same small room, so it was where I dug for jewelry and knick-knacks.
For a time, the room also hosted a twin bed for the guest we imagined might someday come, and, as if a bigger bed might better beckon this fantasy guest, at some point Ted replaced the twin with a full that was such a tight fit I had to slam my body into the bedframe to shift it enough to get into my sock drawer.
In truth, I always resented that bed and how it ate up my floorspace, but after the fire, I was grateful for the way it cordoned off the area worth sifting. The narrow belt between the bathtub and bedframe was where I’d find office stuff; at the foot of the bed was where the jewelry would be.
What I was most hoping to find was a sand-cast bracelet my mom gave me when I started college. A length of the silver had split and couldn’t be repaired because reheating the metal would dislodge the turquoise. Still, I wore it regularly and freaked out when the pouch it was in once disappeared while traveling from JFK.
“It’s broken,” I told the lost-and-found woman. “I don’t think it’s actually valuable, but it’s valuable to me.”
Believe it or not, TSA actually found the pouch lodged in the x-ray machine and sent it to me by FedEx.
Obviously, if the bracelet couldn’t withstand the soldering required to repair it, there’s no way it survived the fire, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it—as proof it was possible to find something you thought you’d truly lost.
• • • •
I ran my gloved hands through a dustpan of ash and found three bangles I’d always worn together still clustered, even though the box that contained them was gone. If I took my time, I could discern identifying markers in the sad globs of things gone molten: the stripe of a clay bead, the single red rhinestone of my grandmother’s starburst brooch, the metal skeleton of her cut-glass necklace, which I’d worn to every dress-up party for thirty years.
Each familiar bit corroborated reality as I’d understood it, even though that reality was no longer on scene. Oh! I know where that comes from! Like the shot of pleasure in recognizing a friend’s features in their kid’s face or strolling through an old neighborhood, letting the gentrified storefronts prompt you to remember what used to be there.
I found a heart-shaped tag from Fergus’s first vaccination, a heart-shaped tag with his name and an old address, a heart-shaped tag with both my phone number and Ted’s. Of my vast squished penny collection, I found only the one from the World Trade Center. (A very lucky penny.)
Beneath the rubble of my desk and the books that broke apart like shale before turning to dust, I found binder clips and notebook spirals, the three-hole punch. The battered everyday tools brought on the same kind of sorrow I associate with stepping into a tumbledown New England barn, its interior flooded with late-afternoon light. It was like I was homesick for everywhere I’d ever been.
• • • •
How was it possible that in a house full of stuff, nothing remained that was worth finding?
I downloaded lists of objects you could expect to survive and a chart of temperatures at which materials melted and at which they burned. Ceramics. Jewelry. Tools. Coins. These were things it was possible to find—and these were the sad things I’d been finding. But the internet also said it was possible to distinguish cremains in the aftermath of a house fire. “I saw them do it on YouTube,” I told Ted. “A woman was extremely upset that her mother’s ashes had been lost in the fire—but they found the ashes in the ashes. It took less than an hour.”
I did not mention the presence of the dogs who’d been specifically trained to find human cremains, and I hadn’t bothered to find out if anyone trained dogs to find cremains of their own kind. I wanted Ted to believe along with me that it was worth looking. “Okay,” he said. He loved Fergus, too.
Our destroyed lot held its own particular perils—the asbestos shingles, for example, which were perfectly preserved, a fallen house of cards around the perimeter of what had once been a structure. It was like a magician had come to denude the place—poof.
These shingles were thin and crisp, like Ak-Mak crackers before they get stale. When I stepped on one, it would make the crispest most satisfying sound. Snap. Snap. Snap. Of course, such breakage released particles into the air, which was why you weren’t supposed to disturb these shingles at all. “You know those are asbestos,” Ted reminded me, as he stepped without a helmet into the collapsing garage.
Safety. Both of us were chronically concerned with it. We both sported reflective gear while biking, set timer lights when leaving town, and were ever mindful of points of egress at public events.
Of course, I did unsafe things like live paycheck to paycheck in a perpetual state of terror, while Ted had made all the prudent sacrifices to do the safe thing and buy himself a house.
Just be glad you’re safe, said everyone upon learning you’d lost your house in the fire. In fact, the realtor said it that morning while showing us a price-gouging rental in Echo Park.
“I was safe before this happened,” Ted fumed when we got back in the car. “Now I’m an underinsured person with twenty years left on a mortgage and nowhere to live. Can you explain to me again how I’m sitting here safe?”
No wonder he couldn’t stomach the digging. Every mangled scrap was more evidence that homeownership could renege on its promise of retirement safety. Still, he suited up to help me—but we hadn’t slept in weeks, the collapsed wall was too heavy to move, and there was no avoiding the flattened feeling that nothing you’d owned or done or aspired to do mattered.
• • • •
Did the fire start in the back of the house or the front? Did the ember come from next door or uphill or across the street?
“It doesn’t matter,” Ted said. “The fire was everywhere; it could have been ignited by multiple embers at once. Why do you want to think about this stuff?”
“I don’t want to think about it. I want to be finished thinking about it.”
Ted put in his earplugs; he’d already bought new ones.
Ember to oak, oak to attic, attic to closet.
The gauzy summer shirts, the billowing dresses.
Does each slat of a wood blind burn individually? Or does the cord dissolve dropping all the slats to burn in a pile? How hot and horrifying must a fire be to melt the windows and puddle the glass?
Wood furniture, wood doors, wood floors—and not a hint of burnt wood anywhere. How did the flames get to the mantle? What was their route toward the box of the dog’s remains?
Every night, there’s the box of ashes in its position on the mantle—the only thing in the house not burning. How long did it go on like that? And how many nights will I spend imagining the sentient helpless horror Fergus would have experienced had he been left behind alive like so many other pets, when all that utterly helpless horror is clearly my own?
Yes, I understand he was already dead. He lived almost sixteen years. He had an acupuncturist, electromagnetic therapy mats, and a specialist in a beach town three hundred miles away. He was still playing the morning he went out to the backyard and died on his patch of no-mow lawn.
How did the fire transform my greatest sense of success into this relentless sense of failure? All night, I’ll stare at that box, out of reach, impossible for me to do something—anything—to keep him from being cremated all over again.
• • • •
Fergus’s ashes had come in a wooden box, marked with his name and secured with a gold-colored lock not much bigger than one you might find on a teenager’s diary.
There was a black clay vase on the left side of the mantle, a black ceramic cat on the right. I’d set the wooden box precisely in the middle. We’d been waiting for spring to spread the ashes at his favorite spots up and down the coast.
If you knew exactly where to look for the cremains, said the internet, it was likely you could find them—as long as you left the debris in that area relatively undisturbed.
I knew exactly where to look—and despite the fact that the Santa Ana winds had been strong enough to roll embers for miles, everything in our house seemed to drop straight down from whatever elevation it had occupied. The shower caddy landed just so on the edge of the tub; all the mystery keys dropped into the ash precisely where they’d been stowed in their mystery-key drawer. Even the fireplace wall had collapsed onto itself in one solid sheet of plaster on a core of chicken wire.
I’d bought the special clippers necessary to cut the deadweight of it into manageable sections I could move out of the way. But first, I lifted a span of terracotta that must have been part of the chimney, and there was the once-black vase from the left side of the mantle, bled of its color but all in one piece on a cushion of ash. I thought this boded well.
Then I found shards of the black clay cat that had been on the right. Everything was in line just as it should have been, but there was no dog.
I should have paused right then. I should have taken a break, but there was no power in the area and a curfew after sunset. It was still January, the light fading well before five, and the mist was already mounting into the predicted rain that I’d been hoping to beat before it sank whatever I might find into the ruined ground.
I broke out the clippers and cleared chunks of stucco and melted glass into buckets and garbage bags, bumbling in my too-big boots as I scanned the soil with increasing awareness that I was probably kicking the already dead dog I was looking for. That’s when I filled the first of many baggies with scoops of whatever ash and dirt was at my knees, hoping that certain granules were more than just paint chips and debris.
How can I explain to you the defeat in this?
• • • •
Question: If I’d had a chance to pack a go-bag, other than Fergus’s ashes, would I have thought to include the things I’m now saddest to see gone?
My dad’s ’70s embroidered chambray shirt
The cat-shaped pillow my mom made from a Metropolitan Museum kit (and secretly remade after the first was eaten by our family dog)
The cherry-shaped earrings from Ted that I’d barely had a chance to wear
A pair of paintings and a handmade book
A tiny doll that had hung from my grandmother’s secretary key (a Portuguese dancer, my mom just told me; I’d only known there were too many layers of skirts to count)
When I thought of these things, I was briefly crushed with sorrow and a resigned acceptance—but none of them truly mattered nor could any of them have withstood the blaze.
But those ashes? They mattered; unlike everything else that had once seemed terribly important, the ashes were the only thing in this colossal mess of shape-shifting loss that I couldn’t bring myself to accept as garbage.
If telling yourself that stuff doesn’t matter helps you cope with the fact that it’s gone, how are you supposed to ascribe value to your personal property? And if none of it matters, what the fuck were you doing all those years with your money and your heart and your time?
• • • •
Funny how so many of the things that remained intact made me feel sort of stupid for having bought them in the first place.
Of all my possessions to be found in one piece, why did it have to be the promotional Actos Pharmaceuticals mug in the shape of a smiling stomach?
Now I’d be saddled with this guy for the rest of my life because how can you throw out something—anything—resilient enough to survive?
Ted was quick to accept that his tools were now all garbage—but then he met someone in line at the disaster center who said it was possible to resuscitate them. Ted had accumulated about a hundred thousand tools over the years, and even though the steel wrenches had maintained their shape, the fire had made them overly brittle—or it had made them overly soft. This depended on the rate at which they’d heated, the temperature they’d reached, and the rate at which they’d cooled. Obviously, we had none of this information, and either way the tools were ruined.
But the person at the disaster center suggested having them reannealed, which involved reheating them to a specific temperature and re-cooling them at a specific rate, a process that would either make the tools better or ruin them further, depending on what had happened to them in the first place. It was like a trick question you had to solve without a single variable in place.
“Seems like a lot of work to end up right where you started,” I said, but I was aware of the larger time/money/insurance equation Ted had been working through: If you’re underinsured, you needed to rebuild quickly—but given the number of people wanting to rebuild at once (not to mention the threatened trade tariffs and deported workers), the chances of rebuilding quickly were slim.
So even if you could sell your rebuilt house for twice as much as your vacant lot, if rebuilding was slow, you might end up in the same financial position as if you’d cut bait and sold the vacant lot in the first place.
It’ll take two or three years, people said. Maybe four.
