Lisa Kaas Boyle is an environmental attorney who serves on the Palisades Village Green board of directors and was a founding board member of Resilient Palisades.
Long before the Palisades fire destroyed my family’s home, I knew our coastal existence was threatened.
As an environmental attorney, I could see climate change increasing the natural threats we had accepted as the price of living in paradise. Neighboring Malibu had burned several times while we watched. But the fires had never crossed Sunset Boulevard into our part of town, my husband would assure me.
I did everything I could to be protective of Pacific Palisades, working with fellow environmentalists to make our neighborhood more sustainable. Now, having co-founded or helped lead multiple community groups, I am working to help rebuild my neighborhood of 35 years. And I’m doing much of it from my new home – in Nashville.
I am 61. Owing to the scale of the devastation burdening the city of Los Angeles’ already difficult permitting process, rebuilding our home will take between five and seven years, at least. That is too long for my husband and me to wait for a community to rise again.
Paul Thornton
My dear friend whose house survived is in an arguably worse position. She had to gut her home, as everything in it was contaminated with lead and other toxins. And she lives in a ghost town – pitch black at night, no grocery store open yet, no neighbors.
I am lucky, in a way that only a fire survivor can be. I grew up in Nashville, the child of professors at Vanderbilt University, where my father, age 88, still teaches. My husband and I bought a house close to him that we are remodeling. Returning to my childhood hometown, family and friends has been the biggest silver lining of the fire for me – and it has caused me to reflect on what we mean when we talk about “home.”
Truth is, I didn’t mean to end up in Pacific Palisades. I moved there with my husband after law school at Tulane University in New Orleans, where he was very much a fish out of water – out of the Pacific, specifically, and Pacific Palisades. After graduation he began a lucrative career in entertainment law; I started a less lucrative though very satisfying environmental law practice.
We raised two children in the Palisades, first in the small house we bought just after we had them, then in the two-story home where they grew into adults. Both houses are gone now.
We are a member-supported organization. No billionaires tell us what to publish. If you enjoy what you're reading, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription and support independent, home-grown journalism.
Thinking of what we lost, I am reminded of one of my favorite books, “Home,” by Witold Rybczynski, an architect and urbanism professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Rybczynski notes that the modern concept of the home came about only in the 17th century among the Dutch bourgeois, where ideas of individuality, privacy and the nuclear family took hold. Before this time, shelter was shared and rooms were utilitarian, barely furnished and not designed for either comfort or privacy. Shelter simply separated people from the outside world.
This is how Rybczynski puts it: “[‘Home’] brought together the meanings of house and of household, of dwelling and of refuge, of ownership and of affection. ‘Home’ meant the house, but also everything that was in it and around it, as well as the people, and the sense of satisfaction and contentment that all these conveyed. You could walk out of the house, but you always returned home.”
What I lost in the fire was my home in this significant sense. Rooms that had been lived in, celebrated within, for decades. Rooms that were carefully furnished and decorated with art and photographs of my family, family heirlooms on display, built-in bookshelves with signed first editions, many written by friends.
Our home was a private sanctuary and reliquary of memories nestled between the splendors of the Santa Monica Mountains and the Pacific Ocean. I know that I am not my cherished possessions and live on quite well without them. Even very special things are just things.
Jim Newton
But the community that burned – the places and people in Pacific Palisades carrying on – is another matter. I am doing everything I can to hold onto that.
I continue to serve on the board of the Palisades Village Green and assist Resilient Palisades on a sustainable rebuild. I am also working with the group Pier to Pier, a public-private partnership, to build a pier in the Palisades to allow for efficient delivery of building materials by ocean, which will help speed construction. The group envisions eventually connecting piers from Venice to Malibu with passenger service on eco-ferries to alleviate vehicle traffic and its associated pollution on an ongoing basis.
The home that my husband and our children had in Pacific Palisades is in ashes. There is no chance of recreating what we had with the people who surrounded us. We look at that life as a closed chapter.
Still, I am working to rebuild the community for others to enjoy, safely I hope. But my time in the Palisades is over.
Lisa Kaas Boyle is an environmental attorney who serves on the Palisades Village Green board of directors and was a founding board member of Resilient Palisades.
