Our old place was a 2-story, 3-bedroom/2-bath ADU, built right behind our landlord’s house (he was a contractor). We spent 4 ½ years there, from April 2021 til October 2025. During the January 2025 windstorm that touched off the Palisades and Eaton fires, the latter got close enough to our place that we decided to stay in a hotel for 2 nights.

I’m a born-and-raised so. Cal mofo. I’ve seen countless Santa Ana events. 9 times out of 10, all they’re gonna do is make nighttime a little creepier, make touching conductive surfaces a pain in the ass (tip: dryer sheets help with static shock), and maybe knock the power out for a night. They’re also going to aggravate your allergies, but welcome to southern California—what else is new?

I saw the forecast and the social media posts mocking the warning; I must admit, “life-threatening & destructive windstorm” did seem a bit excessive to me. I think we were all still a bit cynical over the dire forecasts of hurricane Hilary which, to be clear, did bring a lot of sweaty rainfall to so. Cal., but not the biblical rains and tornado outbreak the forecast had predicted. (Trivia: the reason Hilary wasn’t as hairy over southern California as predicted was because of excessive cloud cover over the region in the hours before the center of the storm moved through. Sunlight hitting the ground and heating up the atmosphere leads to instability and there just wasn’t enough sun destabilizing the atmosphere to lead to tornadoes and convective activity that precede hurricane landfall.)

TUESDAY

The morning of the 7th is cool and crisp. A trough had triggered some light snow showers over the Santa Monica and San Gabriel mountains. A low formed over Nevada and retrograded southwest over southern California and Baja, creating a pressure gradient with an area of high pressure to the north. This pressure gradient produced mountain waves, a relatively rare phenomenon in populated southern California. It’s a bit too technical for me to break down here, but basically what would usually have been a turbulent air mass that typically occurs high up in the atmosphere (think of cruising altitudes for commercial airplanes) instead occurred at the ground level, and not just in isolated areas, like a typical Santa Ana, but in widespread and highly populated areas like the San Fernando and San Gabriel Valleys. We live in the latter.

The wind wasn’t too bad for the first part of the day—mostly just breezy with occasional gusts. The power flickered once or twice, the ADU was prone to this, but nothing too concerning; however, every forecast I watched emphasized that the worst of the winds were to come in the evening and overnight, which made me think we were in for some Interesting Times and I go out onto our balcony to take down the big umbrella and lay it flat.

I first hear of the fire in the Palisades around noon. It had broken out and grew so rapidly that the channels that run local news broadcasts decided to pre-empt their regular schedule of soaps or talk shows, or whatever it is daytime TV is these days, and run continuous coverage of the fire.

The Palisades are way over on the bottom left and we are way over in the red circle (we have since moved, but are in the same general area, hence my being vague), so while the fire was definitely something I was keeping an eye on, it wasn’t something that posed immediate danger.

The winds picked up as the afternoon went on and Heather was sent home early, her team leader telling her and her co-workers that it was probably smarter to go home at 2:00, before the shit really hit the fan.

Our power went out around 4:30 and we decided to hit up the Target to get peanut butter, Lays, Pop Tarts, and just make a struggle meal for dinner, as we figured cooking would be too fraught an endeavor. The Target was only 3 mins. away and the entire block, including the Target, were without power. It was kind of weird to be in a Target running on generator power: it’s considerably darker than it usually is, not pitch black or anything, but enough to make one think of The Mist.

By the time we got back to the house the power had returned and I put cinder blocks on top of our garbage bins, as the wind had begun to push them around a bit. It’s still daylight but it’s getting late in the day and it’s January, so the light is dying fast. We put on the news and see the situation in the Palisades has deteriorated and seems to be getting legitimately unnerving. The winds seem to increase with the creep of nightfall.

Not too long after dusk the power goes out but then comes back on. This lasts for maybe 20 seconds before it goes out again, this time for good. We light a few candles: one on the coffee table and two on the dinner table in the kitchen. I turn on a local newsradio station, which has been covering the Palisades fire all day, to stay up-to-date. Heather makes herself a struggle PB&J in the flickering candle light and I pop open the bag of Lays. Gotta say: the candle light, the howling wind, the struggle dinner—it’s a vibe! I’m not not having a good time. I wish I could put on some music but I hate listening to music through iPhone speakers, so the local news it is.

It’s after 6:00. Heather finishes up her sammie and is texting up a storm in her group chats. I jog upstairs to my studio to see how widespread the outage is. Now, just to give you an idea, here’s what it looked like in the ‘hood on a normal night:

So I’m upstairs in the studio and I see there are a couple of lights still on (somehow), but otherwise a sea of roiling darkness; with the exception of an ominous pulsating glow in the distance obscured by the swaying trees…

The newsradio broadcast is still talking about the fire in the Palisades. Nothing else. Okay. “Hey babe!” I holler to Heather downstairs. “Yeah!?” she hollers back. “Come check this out!” Her footsteps pad up the stairs and she walks up behind me. “Oh, shit,” she says.

“You hear anything about another fire? They’re just covering about the Palisades on the news,” I say. She checks her phone. “Wonder if we can see it better in the bedroom,” I say and we migrate over. The bedroom and my studio both face in the same direction but that big tree doesn’t block the view from the bedroom.

And, yeah, we could see a lot better from here. Now the news is saying there’s report of another fire in the foothills just north of Altadena. I run down the hall to the studio and grab my Sony and run back to the bedroom.

Crank that volume and listen to that wind. Yes, that is the 4-year-old house creaking. This is some real Lord of the Rings shit.

“Uh, I think… we should pack a suitcase,” Heather says.

“Couldn’t hurt.”

“Yeah, let’s do that now,” she insists.

And you know the first thing I packed, right? That’s right, baby: BABY BILLY GIBBONS:

C’mon. C’MON. Paid just under $3K for this, took me years to save up. 100% custom. I played my previous guitar, a Schecter, exclusively for 13 years before spec’ing Billy out and pulling the trigger. Of course this was the first thing I packed: snugly right in its extra-tough soft case. But okay okay okay: this ain’t a guitar post.

So then I packed the Sony, the lenses (pry the Helios from my cold, dead hand), and spare batteries in my backpack, ran all that downstairs and then we started filling the suitcase with a change of clothes, toiletries, etc. before lugging it downstairs and setting it by the door. Heather put her bag and a jacket on the couch and I slip my wallet in my backpack, just cuz I hate wearing a wallet but don’t want to forget it in the event we need to evacuate(?).

We check the fridge to make sure it’s shut tightly; everything inside it should last a while without power as long as the doors are closed. I grab a Modelo, blow out the candles and we chill upstairs in the bedroom. The news is about equally devoted to both the Palisades and Eaton fire now, although I don’t think they were even calling it “the Eaton fire” at this point (or maybe they were?).

Heather is uneasy and anxious, which is saying a lot since she’s a very stoic Iowan girl: very few things bother her. As I said, “Santa Anas” are my middle name, so while I’m not particularly tense, this is one of the strongest, if not the strongest, wind event I’ve seen in decades. As a kid, Santa Anas used to creep me out and I’m sure they were much more dramatic in my tiny little child brain than they actually were, but this is the first time since then where I’ve felt a little creeped out by them. The fire, for sure, is a big part of it; when we were enjoying our struggle dinner in the candlelight, it was a vibe. Power is out, we’re literally in the dark, but it was kinda fun. Lays potato chips, sharing an untoasted brown sugar cinnamon Pop Tart. Good times.

But now….?

I crack open that Modelo and we watch the wall of flames march down the side of the San Gabriels. The wind is angry and howling and rattling the house. I see the neighbor’s car headlights light up and they peel off. Where are they going, the lights are out as far as the eye can see. It’s 11:00 PM and Heather is definitely not going into the office tomorrow.

I tell Heather she should try and sleep and I’ll stay awake in case anything happens. “I got first watch,” I say. “Oooookay, ooookay,” she chuckles.

I download the Watch Duty app, grant it access to my location, and am kinda shocked that nearly every block just north of us has been issued evacuation orders. We’re still in the warning area.

I sit for a while on the bed while Heather sleeps but I’ll be real: it didn’t take me long to lie down and fall asleep myself.

I didn’t even realize I had fallen asleep till a couple hours later when Heather wakes me up. “Babe, I think we should leave,” she says. “What, huh…” I’m totally confused, half-asleep still. Then I’m reminded of what’s going on and I sit straight up on the bed. “Didtheyevacuateussss,” I slur.

“No, but it’s getting closer. That fire is creeping me out.”

“Okaybabe. Okayyeah yeah. What time is it?”

“Just after 2:00.”

“Shit, okay.”

“Looks like there’s a hotel with a room available in Chino Hills,” she says.

“Okay, yeah, it’s nice over there,” I say, sounding less slurry. She had woken up after I passed out and had been monitoring the situation. I stand up and she gets out of the bed and goes to the bathroom. I tell her I’ll meet her downstairs.

I get my wallet from my backpack, she checks her bag, we both put on our jackets and I grab the flashlight and the suitcase. I open the door and it’s dead quiet. No wind. No howling. No barking from our landlord’s perennially pissed off poodle. No distant traffic, no light except starlight—nothing. Just the faint smell of smoke. Eerie. Granted, it was 2:00 AM but we lived close to the freeway and we could always hear distant traffic at all hours, not to mention a fart in your sleep could trigger that poodle into a fit, no matter the time.

She holds the flashlight while I load the suitcase in the trunk. We walk back and I get the guitar, my backpack, and we do one final check. We lock up and get in the car and slowly make our way through the neighborhood. The streets are blasted in branches and leaves and palm fronds and debris. I still can’t believe the wind is just nonexistent. After all that, it’s just gone. Santa Anas stop just as suddenly as they start, but as carnivorous as they had been for the last several hours, it feels impossible they just vanished. It felt strange, like we were in the eye of the storm.

Street lights are still out so we treat the one intersection we come across like a four-way stop, although there’s no one else on the road to interact with. We make our way onto the 210 East and other than a few 53’ers, there’s really no one else out.

Shit is pretty chill until we reach the Pomona area, when the wind kicks back up in a really angry way, making the car swerve and difficult to steer. Again, no one else is really on the road, so at least there’s that, but still. We finally get to Chino Hills and pull into the parking lot of the Marriott. Nothing fancy but nothing seedy or anything, either. We park and it is fucking bananas windy. Heather loses her hat and we both chase it down (we got it). I put the hood of my hoodie on over my hat and hold it down with my hand.

Luckily, the room is still available. The guy at the front desk is super nice.

We go back outside to get our shit from the car and the wind is just bloodthirsty.

We get back inside and up the elevator to the second floor. We roll the suitcase down the hallway to our room, unlock the door, and Heather immediately faceplants onto the bed. She’s beat but I’m wired. I’ve still got the local news on my phone. I look out the window: the parking lot is full and the little perfectly manicured parking lot trees are in a fight for their lives against this wind.

WEDNESDAY

After finally nodding off for an hour or so, I wake up around 5:00 to check the news. I turn on the TV but no dice. I go to the bathroom but the light doesn’t come on. Shit, the power’s out here too!? Heather wakes up not too long after and I tell her I think the power’s out. We go down to the lobby and sure enough, the hotel is now running on generator power.

We decided to check out at 12:00 and checked into another hotel for one night, just up the road. We hit up the Chino Hills Barnes & Noble so Heather could get some remote work done (I bought The Neverending Story on paperback), we checked into the other hotel with the winds still beating our asses (my eyes were on fire at this point and I had tears comically streaming down my face). We ordered a pizza, had some wine, and watched the news. Another fire had broken out in the Hollywood hills but was thankfully extinguished before it got out of hand. One of Heather’s coworkers, who lives in Pasadena, had decided to drive to Vegas. She asked if we wanted to join but we decided to stick close to home, but you can believe we low-key regretted not going. Our wallets were fine with the decision, though!

THURSDAY

We get back and the neighborhood is littered with debris: branches, leaves, fronds. The curb in out front is a magnet for trash. But the trash bins are still standing! The cinder blocks were a good move.

The house is okay, the fridge and everything inside it is okay, etc. We’re not sure when the power came back—we were just glad it did.

The first 3 shots were taken before the windstorm; the last taken after. It took several months for those trunks to straighten out.

Taken September 9th, standing tall again.

Another strong wind event occurred on January 20th, although this one was far more localized and nowhere near as destructive as the January 7th event.

You can see all the dust and ash from the fire kicking up and blowing west. It looks like it’s crazy windy right outside the house again, but it wasn’t—the trees and branches were still bent from the January 7th windstorm. It was actually pretty quiet on our street that evening, but you can see how windy it was in the foothills and mountains. This is a good visual representation of how localized Santa Anas can be.

THE MYSTERY OF THE CHAIR

So this chair was definitely not there when we got home from Target the evening of the 7th. I’m not sure if it was there when we left around 2:00 AM since it was pitch black, but I don’t recall the flashlight illuminating it. Point is, we didn’t move that chair and no one to my knowledge did, either (why would they…?). Our landlord and his family very rarely walked in the little courtyard between their house and ours (that wall in the picture is the back of their house) and in the near 5 years we lived there, they never touched or moved any of our shit.

The above is a still from a video I took when we moved in (I’m using this because I don’t have any other pictures of the front of the house). That chair was kept over on the right, where the arrow is pointing, along with two other chairs that were stacked on top of each other. So, presumably, the wind had dragged the chair from that side of the house, across the courtyard, to where we found it in front of the door.

Here’s what’s weird: the wind was from the NE, which means the chair moved in the opposite direction of the wind if it wound up in front of the door. The above shot is facing the west, the chair was on the west side in front of the house, so if the wind was from the NE, how did the chair move west to east? The only thing I can think is that some kind of vortex was created in that space in front of the house, behind the landlord’s house, and that brick wall, which moved the chair. But at that distance?

Because, otherwise….?

January 7th windstorm & the mystery of the chair

TUESDAY

WEDNESDAY

THURSDAY

THE MYSTERY OF THE CHAIR

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