Our home burned down in the January 7 Palisades Fire. After such a calamity, the grief and sense of displacement never really go away, but dealing with the aftermath is itself all-consuming. My wife and I have so much to do: meet with insurance companies, city agencies, and attorneys; visit our burned-out lot to oversee debris removal; hire engineers and architects to determine the condition of our foundation and the prospects of rebuilding.
The bureaucratic minutiae that fill our days are overwhelming, frustratingly banal but laborious and complicated. As a bonus, we found out that an attorney screwed up our trust arrangements five years ago, which means that, in addition to everything else, we’ve had to make a series of trips to the county clerk’s office just to prove that the house that no longer exists did actually belong to us. I would be angry with the lawyer, but his home and office burned down as well.
For a week or so after the fires, the insurance companies, the city agencies, the county clerks were all sympathetic. Even the baristas at coffee shops were offering free lattes. That generosity has faded, leaving us and all the other people who’ve lost their home or business in the clutches of corporate and government bureaucracies that have the same fatigue dealing with fire survivors that I have dealing with them. In the best of times, building in Pacific Palisades was complicated and expensive; permitting was always a nightmare, contractors always seemed to charge a premium, and insurance was already hard to get. Now, with the coming tariffs on building materials and the likely effect of mass deportation on the immigrant labor that many subcontractors rely on, everything is getting more costly and difficult.
Still, my wife and I loved our house. We renovated the modern Spanish with sweeping ocean views in 2022 and believed that it was the house we would live in for the rest of our lives. So, immediately after the fire, we were determined to rebuild. Even if we had been a little underinsured, we were fortunate enough to be able to. Along with the house, we had lost virtually all of our possessions—most of which could be replaced, if I could remember to list them for the insurer, but also objects of sentimental value, especially inherited artwork, that are lost forever. But we believed that if we continued to work hard, every day, we could rebuild our lives here. We loved our town.
Then Donald Trump was inaugurated president.
I don’t need to go into his many executive orders and policies that made me question what America is becoming, but they did make us wonder at the wisdom of spending all that time, effort, and money to rebuild a house here. The country is becoming a harder, more frightening place, one where the leader’s ruling party, backed by roughly half of the population, seems gleefully cruel and wildly incompetent. Their vision of America is totally at odds with the one we believe in.
Some of our friends, people who donated and phone-banked for Democrats, are saying that they’re no longer paying attention to news or politics. Another one decries the constant reporting on Trump’s transgressions as clickbait for liberals. In other words, they are finding ways to cope by disengaging. But when I make the mistake of logging onto social media or watching Fox News, the would-be authoritarians among us seem to have boundless energy and redoubled enthusiasm.
I’m not so vain as to imagine that I would end up on some list of undesirables. I’ve been a TV writer and producer for the past decade, and my record as a journalist and novelist before that is unlikely to make me a target of Trump’s retribution. But how many of us are second-guessing these things? Will publishing this essay add my name to some ledger of enemies of the state? The fact that I’m even doing the calculation startles me. And now my wife and I are combining this anxiety and dismay with the prospect of spending all of our capital along with years of our lives to rebuild in a country that we don’t particularly want to live in—and that may not even want us here. Is that wise? That is the question that’s been on our minds.
For now, this is the answer we have arrived at: We no longer believe we can have a dream house in Trump’s America. The fire forced us to reconsider everything. Then the growing shadow of authoritarianism made us decide to move to Spain.
My wife and our daughters have German passports, which allow them to settle in another European Union country; as a spouse, I can somehow secure EU residency. We are lucky enough to have found a rental house in an area familiar to us while we look for a new, more permanent home. I know how this may sound: I am aware that even having this option is a privilege, one that many Americans with similar trepidation, and perhaps better reason for it, do not have. But losing your home and almost everything you own to a huge conflagration doesn’t exactly feel like the start of a winning streak.
At a practical level, preparing to make this international move means even more homework, a different set of daily actions, and navigating new bureaucracies and Spanish lawyers—and Spain is famously a society more legalistic even than our own. But, compared with the daunting task of rebuilding after the fires, relocating to Spain has come to feel not just manageable but more prudent and more positive. Rather than immediately rebuild our modern Spanish, it makes sense to move to modern Spain, where we can sit out Trump’s chaos, watching from abroad. We still intend, someday, to rebuild our home in the Palisades when we can feel more optimistic about the United States’ prospects.
I’m copping out, I know—and perhaps if we still had our home intact, we might be willing to stay and weather this defining battle over the American experiment. Maybe we’re doing the geographic version of our friends ignoring the news by instead reading it from abroad. Building a home is hard work. We’ve done it before—and it’s among the most challenging projects a family ever undertakes. But building a house is not the same as building a home.
The fire took our house. But it’s the Trump administration that may be destroying our home. My fondest wish is to be proven wrong and soon return to rebuild.
The post I Lost One Home. Now I’m Losing Another. appeared first on The Atlantic.
