LOS ANGELES – John Wirth and Gail Matthius Wirth lay awake, retracing their way through their lost home. Up the front steps, brick, where marriages and births were celebrated and photographed. Past the kitchen counter, where new boyfriends sat for interrogation. Opening cabinets and drawers. Looking toward shelves, reaching for the chalkware Shirley Temple figurine or the Tony Gwynn foul ball.
These were the little things, the things they collected over 72 years of life each, the things that made that saltbox house on Charm Acres Place theirs, that made it home. These were the things they left behind.
John and Gail, a writer and actor, are two among thousands across Los Angeles who are doing this sleepless mental taxonomy, picturing themselves wandering down hallways that no longer exist, reduced to ash in the firestorm. The two biggest blazes, one in Pacific Palisades and another in Altadena, burned through more than 12,000 structures. Among them were local landmarks and movie backdrops; inside were works by world famous artists and original recordings by master composers.
But another loss will be impossible to quantify: the personal archives of countless Angelenos and their families – belongings gathered, gifted, handed down, cherished. They might have been mundane, but they were full of meaning. Together, they told the story of lives lived; en masse, they told the story of a place.
“We’ve lost our home and community and lifestyle,” John said. “But we also lost our imagined future. I thought I would be here forever.”
John and Gail, like all those who survived – at least 27 did not – were among the lucky ones. They escaped the Palisades with their two dogs, a few photo albums and a couple bags of stuff, hastily grabbed. A friend helped them find a temporary place to rent, and they moved in Wednesday.
Even so, they face a daunting reality. They’re both in their eighth decade, and they must now start over in a new place, where stark white walls and empty closets are constant reminders of everything they lost.
“They wanted to tell us about the storage space,” John said with a faint smile. “Yeah, we don’t need it. I’m laughing so I don’t cry.”
In California, a life built together
That was, as it happens, how their Hollywood fairy tale began – with next to nothing but each other.
The high school sweethearts met in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where Gail was born and raised, and where John spent his senior year. The native Californian walked into class wearing mukluks. Gail noticed the new kid and thought: “What is that foreign creature? I want that. I want the variety of that.”
After college, like so many in their generation, they went west. They arrived in Los Angeles in the late-70s, he with a script and she with a stand-up act.
Before long, Gail made it onto “Saturday Night Live,” where she was a cast member alongside Eddie Murphy and Gilbert Gottfried in the show’s sixth season. She co-hosted Weekend Update and played the recurring character Valley Girl Vicki, with an exaggerated Southern California accent and a devastating eye roll.
She kept all of her scripts and the letterman jacket she wore in the Vicki skits.
After SNL, Gail acted in a string of animated shows, like “Bobby’s World” and “Tiny Toon Adventures.” She kept the cartoon cels – sheets that animators use when hand-drawing characters – for every role she voiced.
Meantime, John worked to break into television. He wrote a script on spec and sent it to “Remington Steele,” the 1980s detective procedural. The series put him on staff and his career took off. He was a writer and executive producer on “Nash Bridges,” working on nearly all of the show’s six-season run.
As he racked up credits, John sought out hard copies of every episode of TV he made. Eventually he had more than 1,000 of them on DVD. And he kept mementos from each job, like the tribal blanket he was given as showrunner on “Dark Winds,” a thriller set in Navajo Nation.
In 1995, they bought the Palisades house, one of the few in the neighbourhood they could afford. And even then, it was a stretch. The place was built in the ’40s and needed fixing up. But it was close to the ocean and the couple could walk their two young daughters to school. They made it work. And over time, they filled it with stuff.
When they first got the evacuation order that Tuesday, they didn’t think the flames would ever make it to their door. They packed quickly, just in case, but they did so assuming they’d be back home the next day.
They didn’t grab the SNL scripts or the letterman jacket, the cartoon cels, the DVDs or the blanket.
They left the art deco tea set, the paintings made by friends, the pillow that said “#1 Dad.” The vinyl records John boosted in high school. Gail’s childhood dolls – Tiny Tears and Thumbelina.
They left the poem John wrote to Gail when they were in college and nearly all the many books that lined the shelves in John’s office, hundreds of hardcovers, some of them signed by authors no longer living.
A few days after the fire, John typed out an email to his family and friends.
“I am living in the moment today,” he wrote. “Grieving in a way I never have.”
“It’s the loss of the things that held my feet to the earth that I’m missing now. It’s that house, not perfect, not showy, but filled with memories of raising my kids there, of the many great people we hosted, the parties and dinners. That place on earth is gone now.”
All that filled their home – “72 years of life stuff” – reflected who they were, what they valued, moments in time. When that life stuff was close by, the moments were easier to recall. Without it, they could grow fuzzy, like a dream slipping away.
“Mostly they’re access to memories,” John said of his lost possessions. “You see them and hold them and smell them and they take you to a place. I’m worried that, with them gone, am I going to lose access?”
‘Everything is gone’
John and Gail spent the first week after the fire with their oldest daughter and her family in North Hollywood. They had lived together before, but this time it was the other way around: parents moving in with kids.
Gail’s birthday was Tuesday and John’s is Monday, so their daughter, Hannah Wirth, put up some decorations and dug through her jewelry box. One piece she pulled out, a carved turquoise necklace, had originally belonged to Gail’s mother. Gail had given it to Hannah years ago and Hannah was now returning it to her mom, who no longer had jewelry of her own.
“What’s occurring to me,” John said, “is that the things we were willing to give away in life are the only things that survived.”
Hannah and her husband, Geoff Worrell, were also mourning the lost house.
“It was home base,” Geoff said, the place their kids learned to walk and learned to swim.
Their oldest, 6-year-old Hunter, is just old enough to understand something has changed. He knows the toy closet at grandma and grandpa’s house is gone, along with the room he slept in, the room that used to be his mother’s.
On his first day back in school after the fires, the nurse called to say Hunter had reporting “feeling tired and sad.” The next day, when John was putting him to bed, Hunter began listing the things he would miss: “Our dog walk is gone. Gelson’s is gone. The yogurt place is gone. The park is gone. Everything is gone.”
‘How did we get here?’
As John and Gail packed up once again, this time to drive to their new house, they considered their pile of things. It had grown in recent days, from trips to the Gap and Nordstrom Rack for a change of clothes and new shoes, to the hasty online orders for new pillows, toothbrushes and dog food. One friend dropped off a bag of tea.
“I think I’m done crying for now,” John said. “I’m moving forward.”
They set off for the new place, a few miles away in the hills above Hollywood. They had some misgivings about the house: It was up a winding set of streets and surrounded by trees, a place that could burn. It was tasteful, but impersonal, not their style. The rugs were covered in plastic and the bath mats still had tags on them.
But their insurance plan – which State Farm had previously canceled and was due to expire just a couple weeks after the fire – was paying for it, and they felt lucky just to have somewhere comfortable to go.
The couple sat in their new bedroom, John on a chair and Gail on the floor, leaning against the bed, one of the dogs playing with a squeak toy at her feet.
“How did we get here?” John said.
“I’m sitting in someone else’s house,” Gail said.
Moments later, their doorbell rang. Their first guests. It was Hannah, Geoff and their grandkids. The door opened, the dogs barked, the boys ran through the kitchen. And, for a time, the house was too full to notice the white walls, the empty closets and all the ghosts of home.