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| Angelika/Mike Schilli |
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Angelika The news often spiral out of control in these times. One disaster follows another. The people affected by them remain stuck in their situations while the world has already turned to the next topic. As mentioned, we were traditionally back in Los Angeles after the Christmas holidays. The year before, we had just left when devastating fires razed entire neighborhoods to the ground.
During our visit one year later, we were honestly surprised at how little damage we saw at first glance. However, we were not in Altadena, the neighborhood that was hit the hardest, but in Venice Beach, which had been spared. Then we drove up to Malibu in our car one day. There, the fire had relentlessly worked its way, all the way to the ocean.
In many places, the view of the beach was now suddenly unobstructed; where houses once stood, only individual concrete pillars jutted out of the ground like memorials. And as always, one cannot understand how it is possible that some single house has remained unscathed by chance, while all the surrounding ones are gone. We also saw charred palm trunks and peeling traffic signs. Traces of the heat, like scars in the landscape.
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