What Do You Pack When It’s Time to Evacuate?
Thoughts from Los Angeles.
I need to start by saying: We are so lucky. Beyond lucky. Our home is fine. As fires burned to the east, north, and west of us last week, we stayed put. When one broke out to the south, forming what was called the “ring of fires,” we made the choice to leave. We have a place to stay, thanks to some dear friends.
The devastation we are all seeing out of Los Angeles is unfathomable. My head and my heart cannot comprehend what has happened these last few days or the uncertainty of when this crisis will end. The city we have called home for nearly four years is still burning, the fires threatening new neighborhoods and raising concerns about air quality. The recovery will be lengthy and complicated.
First and foremost: LAist has a solid list of ways to help right now, while Mutual Aid LA set up a Google spreadsheet of organizations in need. I have read conflicting reports about the (well-intended) influx of supplies, but monetary donations are always welcome. The New York Times has gathered reputable nonprofits, while GoFundMe aggregated the pages of California Wildfire victims. There is also this spreadsheet of displaced Black families in Altadena and another with ways to volunteer in-person if you are in the Los Angeles area.
I was heartened to see Prince Harry and Meghan’s low-key visit to victims of the Eaton Fire in Pasadena on Friday. A Los Angeleno at heart, Meghan’s pain for her home town was evident.
I debated writing about our experience at all, when so many people have lost so much. But these last few days taught me a valuable lesson, which I have sent to loved ones and would urge you to think about, too: What you would bring if you needed to evacuate?
At the heart of So Many Thoughts is a reflection on our belongings — clothes, yes, but the wider umbrella includes all kinds of possessions — and the meaning they hold. To be sure, people (and pets) will always and forever be the priority. But physical items, which we so often dismiss as stuff or things, hold a special place in our hearts, too. Our family went through the terrifying, fascinating exercise Wednesday evening of deciding what to bring when we chose to leave. I have spent these last few days wishing I had tackled this long before crisis hit.
A good starting point is the “6 Ps” — ABC News sums them up as: People and pets / Papers, phone numbers and important documents / Prescriptions, vitamins and eyeglasses / Pictures and irreplaceable memorabilia / Personal computer, hard drive and disks / “Plastic” (credit cards, ATM or debit cards) and cash. There are more utilitarian ideas from the LA Times here (like a whistle to signal for help) and CalFire here (including a physical map with at least two evacuation routes).
The hardest bit for me was “irreplaceable memorabilia,” as you’ll read below. I sincerely hope you never need any of this! But always better to be prepared in case you do. Take care, friends.
***I am looking for more ways to directly help those affected by the Los Angeles wildfires. If you have been impacted, please send me a note at Hello@SoManyThoughts.com.***
What Do You Pack When It’s Time to Evacuate?
As our family drove out of town Wednesday evening, leaving Los Angeles ablaze in the rear view mirror, each of my children processed what was happening very differently. The stress of the smoke-filled day reached a fever pitch just before we left, during the 30 or so minutes we packed up. The fear that the devastating fires could reach our house suddenly felt much more real; I urged us all to gather the things we loved most.
Our trunk at capacity, we crawled through traffic. Oliver, age 7, could not stop talking. He had question after question, stories for days, requests for songs he wanted to sing. Five-year-old Eleanor would intermittently scream, as loud as she could, desperate for all noise to stop. Fitzgerald, age 9, sat in the back row, surrounded by suitcases and tote bags teeming with a random accumulation of things we grabbed on the way out the door. He was quiet — until he vomited, getting carsick for the first time in his life.
Within moments, we were all laughing, a welcome release after a surreal day. My family had pressed, more than perhaps we should have, for normalcy — in no small part because it was my birthday. We awoke to billowing smoke clouding the sunrise. Mom’s birthday became a distraction: Time for pancakes! School was in session, so we off we went, walking each of our kids to their classrooms and checking in with their teachers.
Back home, I responded to texts from family and friends with a screenshot of our location on the Watch Duty app, which offers real-time updates on fires, evacuation zones, and air quality. “It feels like LA is burning in every direction,” I texted a friend.
For most of Wednesday, there were growing fires on three sides of us — to the west, east, and north. Smoke filled our skies but the blazes remained miles away, with sizable amounts of concrete in between. “We seem to be in the clear,” I responded when wonderful friends offered up their beach house north of San Diego. “We are fine,” I insisted to another. However, I didn’t feel fine. Images from those fires were taking over my Instagram feed; doom scrolling suddenly became exponentially more dire. Whole neighborhoods flattened in what felt like an instant.
The night before, as the Santa Ana winds were whipping about, I started packing a “Go” bag. The famous gusts are deeply unsettling at their normal strength; these supercharged winds were much scarier. I pulled one of' Matt’s old duffles from our closet and threw in our passports, a few external hard drives, and my jewelry.
I stared at that bag for much of Wednesday, wondering when I should add to it. My gut, which I can usually trust, felt rattled. What was an appropriate response and what was an overreaction? By school pick-up time, I thought — foolishly, in hindsight — that the worst had passed. Our family once again, in the midst of my birthday, collectively sought comfort in the routine. The kids came home, Matt made dinner.
As we sat down to eat, another fire started, this one to the south of us. We were surrounded. Every group chat erupted with questions and a new round of evacuations were announced. Midway through the meal, Matt and I dumped out our untouched wine glasses. It was time to go.
I texted our friends who had offered their beach home, to which they responded immediately (I am forever grateful). To be sure, we were not in an evacuation zone. But images of charred houses were seared into my brain and I couldn’t resist imagining our home suffering a similar fate. A frantic panic took over as I started packing.
Faced with gathering both what we needed and what I wanted, I chose the former. It was the wrong decision in hindsight, as all of that is much easier to replace. Packing T-shirts and sweatpants, however, was the more straightforward task to tackle. I flung open my kids’ closet and tossed whatever was on the top of the stack into a suitcase. I also followed the advice I had seen on social media of bringing the contents of your laundry basket as a quick source of in-season clothes that you presumably like. “Please bring me two garbage bags!” I shouted to Fitzgerald, who then held them open as I dumped dirty clothes in.
Once the necessities were in place came the much tougher ask: What would I miss most if my house burned to the ground? My thoughts swung wildly, from very practical things to super sentimental ones. I shoved our “Important documents” folder with birth certificates and bank account information into my backpack. Then I reached back into the far side of the boys’ closet, where I stashed baby clothes of mine and Matt’s. I grabbed the whole lot, including a red Annie dress my mom made, and laid them (hangers and all) on the top of my suitcase.
All the while, Matt and I were trying to firmly but calmly direct the kids. The boys were great at following directions and helping but Bird, bless her five-year-old heart, was not. “I AM VERY SCARED!” she shouted through her tears. I fully own that I botched this moment as a mom. My focus was getting our family out the door as quickly as possible. I tried to tell her repeatedly we would be fine, we were choosing to leave out of an abundance of caution. It was not enough.
With her screams as a soundtrack, I walked through each room of our home and scooped up what caught my eye: Fitz’s tiny baby blanket, Oliver’s stuffed sloth, the drawing Eleanor had taped to the door. I left the photos I knew I had digitized, but reached for my stash of random soccer, basketball and baseball pictures. Could I replace this if I need to? rung the chorus in my head.
Clarity, however, was hard to come by. As Matt was loading up the car, I took one last look around and spotted the quilt my mom made me. I was appalled at myself for overlooking this. Why was it not among the first things I thought of? I grabbed it, and the quilt my mom’s friends made us for our wedding, and added them on top of the too-full trunk.
An hour and a half into our drive, another fire started. This was much closer to us than any of the others had been; the images on the news, shared in several group chats, were horrifying. I started attempting to mentally calculate what parts of the city would burn before it reached our own home. Then my mind flashed to everything I had left behind. Why didn’t I grab some Christmas ornaments, especially the ones with my mom’s handwriting?
We arrived at the beach well after bedtime. As I tucked the kids in, I felt foolish — at my panic while packing, the stress I had put on my children, my lack of preparation for this moment, and my concerns for what we left behind. We had been given the luxury of time to pack up, as well as a place to go. Our family was safe. Seeing the kids snuggled up, under the quilts and Oliver’s beloved blanket he calls his “So Cozy,” made me weep.
The fear and tears return when I think about what so many have lost, assuaged only by the myriad ways our community is showing up right now. My WhatsApp chats and Facebook groups are organizing everything from large-scale supply drives to fire station food drop-offs and localized family-to-family help. We are eager to join them and donating from afar in the meantime.
When we return, I have resolved to refocus and repack, being more intentional about what to put in our “Go” bag. I hope we don’t have to go through something like this again, but I want to have thought it through if we do.
What would you pack to evacuate? I would love to hear your ideas. Please click below to share them in the comments.
PS: John Mayer had thoughts, too. He shared a picture of a file folder containing photos of his father. “This is the most valuable thing I own,” he wrote in the caption. “When you hear someone say they’ve lost everything in a fire, this is much of that everything, if not all of it.”
Please be gentle on yourself. I live in a hurricane zone and the decision about evacuating is so hard. For the past 15 years my job requires that I stay and work in our Emergency Operations Center, which is another agonizing process. I also recommend some trauma-centered counseling for you all. I never feared the wind until Hurricane Florence. Now it completely unnerves me. Holding you all close to my heart and praying for all affected and donating. World Central Kitchen fed us during Florence and I had the honor of meeting Chef Andres and I will never forget the kindest eyes and the biggest heart.
As someone who has lived through this many times(I’m from Orange County) and every time we think we would pack up and it would all be gone. I was talking to someone on the plane the other day from Connecticut and she said I never thought that the smell of fire would affect someone so much and I said as someone who evacuated as a child, the smell of ash and fire is something that I’ll never forget. I evacuated the night after my senior year homecoming dance and I bought my homecoming crown was the most important thing at the time now I’m not so sure I would grab it.
We now have fire extinguishers in every room with a list of all the things that if we had 5, 10, or 30 minutes what we would want to grab from the room, but I’ll never forget the first time when we had camcorders, and we went around the house video recording everything thinking that was our best bet to save the things that we couldn’t remember later on. I think the hardest thing is that my mom hadn’t digitized all of her photos and choosing between a wedding album, the year we were born and so many of her other memories, especially of her dad, was one of the most heartbreaking things that I’ve ever experienced. All that to say, the people in my community became our family after this, staying behind to hose the roof down or sitting all together in a parking lot just waiting until we knew more, the possessions we had in our cars, that was it. I hope you never have to experience this again and your family stays safe and sound, but please know you have a whole village of people to support you whenever you need it.