How Los Angeles Dreams Became Kindling

The house was a sweet little Tudor Revival at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains where Pasadena gives way to Altadena.

The $130,000 asking price was a steal, our real estate agent told us, and we’d be fools not to grab it. This was the mid-1980s, and there was no greater incarnation of the Los Angeles dream, as she put it, than living in suburbia amid the wonders of nature.

I looked out the picture window and saw rock, ravine, oak, canyon, stream. We were steps away from disaster, I reckoned, from earthquake and fire. I might have questioned her more — I was a young journalist with The Los Angeles Times — but I already understood one thing about the metropolis: From the houses on stilts in the Hollywood Hills to the aqueducts that shipped in water from faraway places, Los Angeles was a preposterous proposition.

Besides, my wife was eight months pregnant with our first child and in the throes of nesting. I did not dare a counteroffer. We moved into the house on Beverly Drive, two bedrooms, one bathroom, as the floats for the Rose Bowl Parade rehearsed their lineup. The next day, New Year’s Eve, our baby girl was born.

The author’s former home in Pasadena.

When nothing would stop her colicky fussing, I took her on a walk one day to see the folds in Eaton Canyon. Suddenly, she grew quiet. The San Gabriel Mountains, possessing some strange gravitational pull, it seemed, became a mesmerizing force in our lives.