Parents and kids navigate talks of loss and tragedy as they return home after LA area fires
Ceiba Phillips, 11, couldn't believe what he saw when he returned to his Southern California neighborhood a month after a wildfire reduced it to rubble.
The ruins of his best friend's house and his beloved school. His house survived, but the backhouse where his grandparents lived and packed him lunch every morning was reduced to ashes and a silver pool of melted aluminum. His favorite cozy diner, Fox's, was decimated.
Seeing it in person — after seeing it through photos — brought shock and tears.
'There's not even a word created for it,' Ceiba said. 'It's sad, it's heavy, somewhat angry. Why did this have to happen?'
The Eaton fire that tore through Altadena on Jan. 7 left parents and children alike to deal with the trauma of one of the most destructive fires in California history. As people return to their neighborhoods, many kids are navigating the grief of losing everything that was familiar. Their parents, meanwhile, are learning how to help them cope.
Children thrive on routine, and reestablishing one as quickly as possible is key to helping kids cope, said Lori Peek, a sociology professor at the University of Colorado Boulder who studies the impact of natural disasters. It's essential for kids to stay connected with their friends, and for parents to have honest conversations with them about the difficulty of what they are facing.
'Being honest about our own emotions and opening up, but then being very inviting for children to share what they're feeling, what they're grieving, what they're experiencing, that can be one way to start those really important conversations,' Peek said.
It's this kind of space that Chiara Angelicola, who works in early childhood education, was trying to create when she organized a Kids Town Hall event for families affected by the fires. Children had the opportunity to share how they felt and participate in art and somatic therapy exercises, which focus on how trauma can affect the body. Ceiba's 4-year-old sister, Quoia, went with their mother, Alyson Granaderos, along with more than 100 other kids and parents.
'A lot of these kids had a lot to say ... and some of it even made the adults uncomfortable,' Angelicola said. 'I think that exercise in learning how to be uncomfortable experiencing certain feelings is very necessary for children because we're modeling for them that feelings won't hurt us.'
Hundreds of therapists and non-profits also have offered their mental health services for free to victims of the fires.
A last normal day
Ceiba's home was one of about six on his street that wasn't destroyed, but it sustained so much smoke damage it's not livable right now. On a recent day, the family carefully entered wearing respirator masks and protective equipment.
Ceiba looked out his bedroom window and said he didn't care that his house had survived. 'I'd rather have all of Altadena,' he said.
Ceiba remembers every detail of his last normal day.
School let out early due to intense Santa Ana winds that fueled the fires. He and his sister went to Ceiba's best friend's house. They played on a trampoline, drew comics, and chucked LEGO figurines off the balcony.
'I've probably been to his house more than 2,000 times,' Ceiba said.
That evening, the family received a text message from Ceiba's grandma asking if they saw the fire that had broken out nearby. They ran to their window and saw the whole mountainside ablaze.
'I was on the floor like praying, please protect my house and my family. And you know, mom's like, 'Come on, you got to get up, pack your stuff,'' Ceiba said.
The 11-year-old sprang into action, dumping his clothes and quarters into his bag and packing for his younger sister.
They sheltered in their dad's office in neighboring Pasadena. Ceiba could barely sleep. By the morning, much of his neighborhood was gone.
Finding a rhythm again
Ceiba's days have taken on a rhythm again, even at his new school in Pasadena.
When he greeted his mom on a recent afternoon, he shared a fun fact he'd learned that day: In 1846, a future president, Abraham Lincoln, had almost joined the ill-fated Donner Party as it set out from Springfield, Illinois, on its infamous journey out West, only to get trapped in California's Sierra Nevada.
Ceiba has decided to play the saxophone in band class, and his state project will be on Michigan, where his mom is from. Granaderos said her son already seems to be adapting.
But his conversations with friends now veer into unusual topics for 11-year-olds.
'The insurance isn't covering us and how's your house? How's this person's house?' Ceiba said, sharing what he and his friends discuss.
He wonders what will become of his community. He's optimistic though.
'I know Altadena and I know that it's going to stick together,' Ceiba said.
Beauty, sadness and destruction
Ceiba had clamored right away to go back home after the fire, but Granaderos was hesitant. After the dust settled, she knew that allowing her kids to see and experience what happened was part of the healing process.
'You're facing this realization of certain conversations you have to start to have with your kid, right?' Granaderos said. 'There's beauty in the world, and there's also a lot of sadness and destruction.'
Quoia burst into tears when the family drove past what was left of The Bunny Museum in Pasadena dedicated to rabbits. She loved seeing the giant inflatable bunnies that loomed over the street corner nearly every day. Ceiba cried along with her.
'I just couldn't really take it,' he said.
But not all is lost.
Granaderos named both of her children after trees — Ceiba, the tree of life, and Quoia after the Sequoia. She planted a sapling of the iconic Sequoia — which is extraordinarily resilient to fire, insects and disease — in the home's backyard when Quoia was a baby.
After the fire, it is still standing.
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The Independent
22-02-2025
- The Independent
Parents and kids navigate talks of loss and tragedy as they return home after LA area fires
Ceiba Phillips, 11, couldn't believe what he saw when he returned to his Southern California neighborhood a month after a wildfire reduced it to rubble. The ruins of his best friend's house and his beloved school. His house survived, but the backhouse where his grandparents lived and packed him lunch every morning was reduced to ashes and a silver pool of melted aluminum. His favorite cozy diner, Fox's, was decimated. Seeing it in person — after seeing it through photos — brought shock and tears. 'There's not even a word created for it,' Ceiba said. 'It's sad, it's heavy, somewhat angry. Why did this have to happen?' The Eaton fire that tore through Altadena on Jan. 7 left parents and children alike to deal with the trauma of one of the most destructive fires in California history. As people return to their neighborhoods, many kids are navigating the grief of losing everything that was familiar. Their parents, meanwhile, are learning how to help them cope. Children thrive on routine, and reestablishing one as quickly as possible is key to helping kids cope, said Lori Peek, a sociology professor at the University of Colorado Boulder who studies the impact of natural disasters. It's essential for kids to stay connected with their friends, and for parents to have honest conversations with them about the difficulty of what they are facing. 'Being honest about our own emotions and opening up, but then being very inviting for children to share what they're feeling, what they're grieving, what they're experiencing, that can be one way to start those really important conversations,' Peek said. It's this kind of space that Chiara Angelicola, who works in early childhood education, was trying to create when she organized a Kids Town Hall event for families affected by the fires. Children had the opportunity to share how they felt and participate in art and somatic therapy exercises, which focus on how trauma can affect the body. Ceiba's 4-year-old sister, Quoia, went with their mother, Alyson Granaderos, along with more than 100 other kids and parents. 'A lot of these kids had a lot to say ... and some of it even made the adults uncomfortable,' Angelicola said. 'I think that exercise in learning how to be uncomfortable experiencing certain feelings is very necessary for children because we're modeling for them that feelings won't hurt us.' Hundreds of therapists and non-profits also have offered their mental health services for free to victims of the fires. A last normal day Ceiba's home was one of about six on his street that wasn't destroyed, but it sustained so much smoke damage it's not livable right now. On a recent day, the family carefully entered wearing respirator masks and protective equipment. Ceiba looked out his bedroom window and said he didn't care that his house had survived. 'I'd rather have all of Altadena,' he said. Ceiba remembers every detail of his last normal day. School let out early due to intense Santa Ana winds that fueled the fires. He and his sister went to Ceiba's best friend's house. They played on a trampoline, drew comics, and chucked LEGO figurines off the balcony. 'I've probably been to his house more than 2,000 times,' Ceiba said. That evening, the family received a text message from Ceiba's grandma asking if they saw the fire that had broken out nearby. They ran to their window and saw the whole mountainside ablaze. 'I was on the floor like praying, please protect my house and my family. And you know, mom's like, 'Come on, you got to get up, pack your stuff,'' Ceiba said. The 11-year-old sprang into action, dumping his clothes and quarters into his bag and packing for his younger sister. They sheltered in their dad's office in neighboring Pasadena. Ceiba could barely sleep. By the morning, much of his neighborhood was gone. Finding a rhythm again Ceiba's days have taken on a rhythm again, even at his new school in Pasadena. When he greeted his mom on a recent afternoon, he shared a fun fact he'd learned that day: In 1846, a future president, Abraham Lincoln, had almost joined the ill-fated Donner Party as it set out from Springfield, Illinois, on its infamous journey out West, only to get trapped in California's Sierra Nevada. Ceiba has decided to play the saxophone in band class, and his state project will be on Michigan, where his mom is from. Granaderos said her son already seems to be adapting. But his conversations with friends now veer into unusual topics for 11-year-olds. 'The insurance isn't covering us and how's your house? How's this person's house?' Ceiba said, sharing what he and his friends discuss. He wonders what will become of his community. He's optimistic though. 'I know Altadena and I know that it's going to stick together,' Ceiba said. Beauty, sadness and destruction Ceiba had clamored right away to go back home after the fire, but Granaderos was hesitant. After the dust settled, she knew that allowing her kids to see and experience what happened was part of the healing process. 'You're facing this realization of certain conversations you have to start to have with your kid, right?' Granaderos said. 'There's beauty in the world, and there's also a lot of sadness and destruction.' Quoia burst into tears when the family drove past what was left of The Bunny Museum in Pasadena dedicated to rabbits. She loved seeing the giant inflatable bunnies that loomed over the street corner nearly every day. Ceiba cried along with her. 'I just couldn't really take it,' he said. But not all is lost. Granaderos named both of her children after trees — Ceiba, the tree of life, and Quoia after the Sequoia. She planted a sapling of the iconic Sequoia — which is extraordinarily resilient to fire, insects and disease — in the home's backyard when Quoia was a baby. After the fire, it is still standing.
The Independent
12-01-2025
- The Independent
Fires burn Los Angeles schools and destroy outdoor education sanctuaries
For Irina Contreras, a program manager for Los Angeles County's Department of Arts and Culture, outdoor education was a refuge for both her and her daughter during the pandemic. Now, much of that refuge has been burned in the raging wildfires around Los Angeles. Her 7-year-old daughter, Ceiba, hikes with a kid's adventure group called Hawks and attended Matilija, a bilingual forest school for preschool and kindergarten. Rain or shine, she and her friends would spend their days climbing, jumping, hiking, and swimming in places like Eaton Canyon Nature Area, a 190-acre (77-hectare) preserve near Altadena, now destroyed by fire. Ceiba learned to ask plants for permission before taking samples to glue into her nature journal. Once, her group discovered a hidden path that led behind a waterfall. Ceiba couldn't stop talking about it for days. For parents like Contreras, the wildfires have been devastating not just because of the loss of life and thousands of homes. They are mourning natural and educational areas that served as sanctuaries and learning spaces for local families, especially in the years since the pandemic. The fires have torn through natural areas that served every type of educational setting: public and private schools, nature-based preschools, homeschool groups, summer camps and more. They have burned school buildings, too, including Odyssey Charter School in Altadena, which Miguel Ordeñana's children attend. 'The community has been devastated by the fire,' said Ordeñana, senior manager of community science at the Natural History Museum. 'It's been a challenge to carefully share that news with my children and help them work through their emotions. A lot of their friends lost their homes. And we don't know the impact to school staff, like their teachers, but a lot of them live in that area as well and have lost their homes.' Some areas untouched by fire were inaccessible because of poor air quality. Griffith Park, home of the Hollywood sign, had not been affected by the end of the week but it's not clear when the air quality there will be good enough to resume outdoor programs, said Ordeñana, who was the first to capture on camera a late puma in the nearby area that gained fame under the name P-22. Ordeñana said his family was able to connect with some other families from Odyssey Charter School for pizza and an indoor playdate, but he is uncertain what the days will look like for them with school closures already extending through next week. All schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation's second largest, were closed Friday because of heavy smoke and ash over the city. Classes will not resume until conditions improve, officials said. Pasadena Unified School District also closed schools and several of its campuses sustained damage, including Eliot Arts Magnet Middle School. The California Department of Education released a statement Wednesday saying 335 schools from Los Angeles, San Bernardino, Riverside, Ventura, and San Diego counties were closed. It was unclear how many would be closed Monday. During the pandemic, Contreras felt like she was stuck on a screen. She devoted much of her energy to working, writing and organizing, but her daughter's outdoor education helped her better understand the value of stepping away from the grind. Contreras feels confident the outdoor programs will return, although it's unclear when it will be safe for people to hike around areas like Eaton Canyon. 'The nature center is gone,' Richard Smart, superintendent of the Eaton Canyon Natural Area in Pasadena, said Thursday. 'The wildflowers, the shrubs are gone.' The park hosted dozens of school field trips a year and Smart estimates more than a thousand students visited yearly. ' Teachers liked it because it was also free, it was local, it was nearby. And it was a place to see nature — wild nature but also in a friendly, safe environment,' he said. Only a few exterior walls of the Eaton Canyon Nature Center were left standing, he said. 'For many of the local school districts, we truly were in their backyard, and now they won't be able to use it for the foreseeable future,' he said. 'The park is such a touchstone for people in the community, and so to lose that is just, devastating is not even the right word. It feels indescribable.' Many parents and teachers are likely wondering what to do and where to take their children as fires continue to burn across Los Angeles, said Lila Higgins, a senior manager for community science at the Natural History Museum and author of 'Wild L.A,' a field trip and nature guidebook. A certified forest therapy guide, Higgins says time in nature lowers heart rates, lowers blood pressure and helps children with attention deficit disorder feel more calm and relaxed. 'For children's cognitive development, time in nature and time spent connecting with nature is so important," she said. Outdoor spaces also can help children learn how to develop relationships through connections with animals, understand orientation through space by following trails and map-reading and understand human impact on wildlife. 'A lot of the places that we're talking about are really popular with homeschoolers, but they also are a destination for some field trips, certainly places like Eaton Canyon," said Greg Pauly, co-author of 'Wild L.A.' and director of the Urban Nature Research Center at the museum. "I do think it's safe to say that people are going to continue to be interacting with those landscapes and it will hopefully still be a field trip destination in the future. But it's certainly going to be a while before that happens." 'This is the reality of modern Southern California," he said. 'Fire changes the landscape and people's lives shockingly often.' ___ Mumphrey reported from Phoenix and Lurye reported from New Orleans. ___ The Associated Press' education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP's standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at
The Guardian
20-10-2024
- The Guardian
The ride of our lives: why the horse is crucial to human history
It was a heart-stopping sight. On 24 April this year, blood-drenched horses galloped through rush-hour traffic in central London, smashing chaotically into a tourist bus and a taxi, before careening along pavements in blind panic. The horses, which serve in the Household Cavalry Mounted Regiment guarding the king, were on their daily morning exercises near Buckingham Palace when loud noises from a building site caused them to bolt and rampage through the capital for more than two hours. Six people were hospitalised with minor injuries, but all the horses survived in what seemed a once-in-a-lifetime event. Then, on 1 July, it happened again. Three regal horses bolted through Knightsbridge, this time fleeing a London bus. Having just published Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History, William T Taylor knows a thing or two about horses and he acknowledges the curiousness of the horses' escape when I call him at his home in Colorado. 'The funny thing about our modern world is that horses are so deeply embedded in so much of our culture,' he says. 'That grew out of their role in things like transport, communication and agriculture. It's a powerful example, these military horses. It might take them escaping and running amok for us to think about it, but it has actually always struck me, when visiting London, just what a majestic and dangerous symbol of power and authority they represent.' Taylor, an anthropologist at the University of Colorado Boulder and curator at the CU Museum of Natural History, explores the deep and ancient links between horse and human in forensic, academic, archaeological detail in his book. He plots the evolution of the horse from the extinction of the dinosaurs and the survival, at the time, of the tiny 'dawn horse' – the size and shape of a puppy – which would evolve into the tall, long-legged, magnificent creatures we know today. Taylor comes from a long line of cowboys. His own choice of work, he says with a sigh, was inspired by an Indiana Jones video game. 'Yeah, it's a real cliché,' he laughs. But it can also be seen as a lifelong quest to connect with his own past because he grew up in a house filled with western kitsch, dressed in cowboy kits at country fairs – and today he goes riding in Mongolia. He was recently left his grandfather's tack: saddle, bit, reins. 'At the beginning, it didn't particularly mean a lot to me,' he says. 'But as I got into this work and began exploring, one of the first things I did with my dissertation work in Mongolia was to begin to try to understand, how does this horse equipment work? What is it? I began to dive real deep into the basics of how different configurations of horse equipment work and what they might mean. 'And my grandfather's horse equipment set-up tells me how he was a very direct communicator. This is a piece of my family heritage. I'm trying to restore and revive some of that so that maybe I can actually end up using it myself. This might be a little silly and overly dramatic, but there's something special about connecting to the past through objects. And, of course, I would be a terrible archeologist if I didn't believe that!' As we speak, Taylor, a lone-ranging bachelor, is preparing for a fresh field trip to Mongolia, where much of his research is carried out. His flight leaves in six hours, but he's well-prepared: he's packing a full rucksack of coffee along with his GPS drones and several high-quality trowels. 'Coffee and trowels, man, I can get the rest there. But you can't get a decent coffee or a good trowel in Ulan Bator,' he says. Mongolia is the focus for so much of his work, he explains, because it's one of the places where people and horses are closest today. 'Mongolia is a place where almost the whole archaeological record is intertwined with horses in some important way, and significantly for Hoof Beats, the role of Mongolia in the human-horse story has been largely omitted from the story told so far,' he says, pointing out that, even in 2024, there are more horses than humans in Mongolia. Mongolia, a Buddhist nation between Russia and China, is perhaps most famous for the marauding horseback Mongol hordes led by warlord Genghis Khan in the 12th century. Khan commanded the largest land empire in human history, using vast and exclusively horseback armies of expert archers: they were the world's most mobile and deadly military unit. Khan united the nomadic tribes of the Mongolian Steppe and conquered much of central Asia and China. At their peak, the Mongols controlled an area about the size of Africa – thanks, in the main, to their deep knowledge of the horse. Khan's invasions were brutal and genocidal, but he also abolished torture, forged new trade routes and even created the first international postal system. It was an era of unprecedented globalisation: of ideas, objects, and people, all horse-powered. The connection between people and horses is among the most ancient connections that we have with the animal world, says Taylor. And some of these connections lie surprisingly close to home for many of us. In Hoof Beats, he details how a perfectly preserved stone age site, discovered in 1974 in the chalk cliffs of Boxgrove, Sussex, gives us evidence not only of the first human-horse contact in the British Isles, but also perhaps the first proof of human hunting anywhere in the world. Later excavations revealed an almost complete horse skeleton, attacked and killed by early humans more than 500,000 years ago. A drinking mare was ambushed by a group of early humans, Homo heidelbergensis, using the water's edge to trap and ambush the horse. The hunters killed and butchered it in situ, carefully removing its spinal column, brain and tongue – prized fleshy delicacies. They cracked open some bones for their marrow, and sharpened others as tools and weapons. And it is bones such as these that can today yield extraordinary amounts of new data when analysed by modern techniques and interdisciplinary science. This archaeozoological approach underlies much of Taylor's work, since the sites he excavates sometimes offer only fragmentary glimpses of the past. The Boxgrove site is so perfectly preserved that pieces of flint knapped from larger stones have been fitted back together like a 3D jigsaw, showing the origin and use of each tool. Some were used for scraping the animals' hides, raising the tantalising possibility that these early humans dressed themselves in horsehide, while hunting the animals using horse bone spears and daggers. But horses became more than a source of food when they were first domesticated, 3,000 years ago in the Black Sea region. Then, 1,000 years after that, came the invention of the chariot, followed by the emergence of technologies such as the lighter-spoked wheel, the stirrup and saddle, which allowed humans to ride the animals for trade and war. This spread into new territories, new environments or along new trade routes, all of which brought about widespread and revolutionary shifts in human culture, says Taylor. Working with international teams, including geneticists and even dentistry experts, Taylor studies scraps of bone, or sometimes fully assembled ceremonial chariot burials, to understand how the animals lived and died, and from this to deduce if they were ridden, or controlled using bits and reins, or if they pulled chariots or carts with yokes. By the second millennium BC, horses moved people, goods, languages and technologies into areas they had never before been seen. 'Horses are kind of like an ancient internet,' says Taylor. The search for artefacts exploring horse and human contact has unearthed objects as rare as they are bizarre: the first documented human faeces in the Americas, more than 14,000 years old, was found at Paisley Caves, Oregon, alongside horse bones. The oldest known pair of trousers, 3,000 years old, were designed for and worn by an early horse rider. These were found at a tomb in Yanghai in China's Tarim Basin in 2014. Some of the most magical finds have been in Mongolia, including monumental standing stones known as deer stones for their carved adornments featuring the animals. These structures encircle sacrificed horse skeletons, hollow eyes facing the rising sun, buried in full tack alongside their owners and their chariots. There are several thousand such monuments across the country. Many artefacts have been extracted from deep inverse pyramidal burial grounds in the country's frozen high plains, says Dr Bayarsaikhan Jamsranjav, a colleague of Taylor's, who discovered the world's oldest evidence of mounted horseback riding. In 2016, he found, identified and dated a fully intact 2,000-year-old wood-framed saddle with iron stirrups in a tomb at Urd Ulaan Uneet in Mongolia, which he says was the highlight of his career. Aside from the academic discoveries, what resounds most clearly through our conversation is Taylor's deep love of horses: his relationship with them provides him with what seems to be his most intense personal motivations. We discuss the thrill of galloping, of the flowing unity between rider and horse when the animal seems to teach the rider the correct rhythm to experience an ineffable, but terrifying, sense of weightlessness, of effortless flight. 'Yes! It's one of the purest ways to understand not just another animal and not just the landscape, but also yourself. It really is transcendent. Most people who spend time on a horse will recognise aspects of that feeling, that moment of pure connection between rider and horse. There are very few experiences like it. When I go someplace new, and I'm trying to get a sense of the landscape, riding horses is one of the purest ways to do it, because you feel it rather than know it. You can academically read about things for a long time, but that experience is incredibly important.' Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History by William T Taylor is published by University of California Press. Buy it for £25 at
