It’s 11:30 AM on Tuesday, Jan. 7, and Thousand Oaks High School teacher Heather Austin is teaching her ninth grade English class. She gets a seemingly normal text notification from her friend. Normal, that is, until she opens it.
“[It] said, ‘Call your parents, because it looks like there’s a fire in the Palisades,’” Austin said.
Upon receiving the news about the fire, she called her mother and suggested that she and her father evacuate before the streets became too busy. With the fire conditions worsening by the second, the streets were crowded as hundreds of families packed up their belongings, grabbing anything they could fit in their car.
“It took them about four hours to get to Moorpark.” Austin said.
They would never know that this would be the last time they’d be able to see their beloved neighborhood in one piece.
The next day, at about 1:30 AM, Austin was awoken by the fierce Santa Ana winds. Worried about the state of her childhood home, she turned on the news on her phone, as the damaging weather conditions left her without cable.
“The first chance I got where I felt ‘this isn’t good’ is when I noticed they were doing their news reporting off-site,” Austin said. “I thought, ‘Why aren’t they going up? They should be able to just go up to Sunset [Boulevard] and tell the story from there.’”
Noticing this, she contacted her long-time friend who was a firefighter working in the Palisades.
“I said, ‘On the off chance that this fire gets down into the town, into the village, will you text me?,’” Austin said. “‘There’s no way it’s coming, but in the event, just make sure you let me know.’”
Hours later, the one thing she saw as an impossibility happened: The fire made its way into the neighborhood where she spent every day of her childhood.
“The next thing I knew, there was a picture of my house burned down to the ground,” Austin said. “All you saw, like everyone else’s home, is the chimney and the number on the curb…I had to tell my parents, and that started a very long couple of weeks.”
Austin’s parents bought their home in 1975, when she was a newborn. She recalled a “snowglobe childhood,” where she would attend Corpus Christi School from kindergarten to eighth grade, run in the annual Fourth of July 10k with her family and attend endless sleepovers at her neighbors’ houses.
“It was a really special, safe kind of treasure of childhood,” Austin said. “I always felt, as a young girl, a profound sense of community.”
Despite the overwhelming pain she and her family experienced from this tragic event, that familiar sense of community remained even after the 800 block of Galloway Street was reduced to rubble.
“Every single one of my mom and dad’s friends, 50 years worth, all of them lost their homes,” Austin said. “So it’s not just my mom and my dad. We’re in no way special, and there’s kind of a community in that, and like the sorrow of that, because they’re not alone in this.”
The Palisades Fire burned more than 23,000 acres of land and displaced thousands of communities, stripping them of the place they for years called home. For Austin’s parents, the fire took close to all of their possessions, including the wedding dresses of both Austin and her mother, love letters written by Austin’s great-great-grandfather during World War II and hundreds of family photos. Despite this, there was still one thing the fire could never take: The memories created in that home.
“I’m not sad about all the memories the fire took, because they’re always going to be my memories,” Austin said. “I don’t have to touch them for them to be memories or see them for them to be memories.”
While visiting the ruins of their home on Jan. 10, Austin and her mother were reminded of the hope that remains when they were visited by a familiar bird.
“As we were standing in what was their kitchen and bathroom, we look up, and on the chimney, we see a dove.” Austin said. “A second dove came and perched next to it, and I realized that doves stay together for life, and my mom says, ‘Those are my doves,’”
Before the fire, Austin’s mother spent almost every day in her garden; a place that became the home of generations of doves for years. The birds would come into her garden and lay eggs, then they would hatch and fly off, new doves returning the next year.
“[We saw] those two doves, in the bleakest of bleak, and it was an overcast day,” Austin said. “All you smelled was ash, and all you saw was rubble. You saw these beautiful two doves perched on top of their chimney. I’ll just never forget it. And it was the beginning of finding magic in something pretty horrific.”
