The staff writer Dana Goodyear has reported on California extensively: the entertainment industry; a deadly crime spree in Malibu; Kamala Harris’s rise in politics; and the ever more fragile environment. She covered the destructive Woolsey Fire, in Los Angeles, in 2018. Recently, Goodyear found her own life very much in the center of the story. Living in Pacific Palisades, she had to evacuate early this month, and she documented her return days later to a scene of devastation in this audio story. “The house just is an idea of a house, or the aftermath of a house,” she said. “You can walk through the arched door at the front and the back, but there’s just pretty much nothing in between.”
Chapter 1: What is the main focus of Dana Goodyear's reporting?
And recently, she and her family found their lives very much at the center of the story.
you
so you you have a press pass and you're trying to get up there is that well i guess my question to you is what's your ultimate goal today i have combined goals um so i write for the new yorker magazine it's long form non-fiction journalism okay and i need to be seeing things that all the heroic emergency operations people are doing and i also need to figure out what in the hell is going on at my house because we haven't been able to see it okay and i know it's gone but
Chapter 2: How did Dana Goodyear feel returning to her home after the wildfire?
More than that.
Yeah, I'm sorry for that.
Chapter 3: What did Dana discover about the aftermath of her house?
Well, I mean, the thing that's so weird for me is that I've reported on so many fires, and I just can't believe that... It happened to you. I can't believe it. The beautiful Palisades. It's just... Unreal. I'm driving up Chautauqua, and I have an absolute pit in my stomach. I know I'm about to see the neighborhood, but this is the road that I drove up every day.
And I'm glad a lot of these houses are standing on Chautauqua. So the fire didn't rip down through this little stream so much. But I'm just so scared because I'm about to actually finally see it. I've been imagining it for a week. And when I was here with Brad, it was like fire everywhere, smoke in the air, emergency vehicles. Just now it's pretty much dead calm.
Dead calm, no cars, no fire trucks. It's like a lot of broken lives. Okay, here we go. Here we go. There is literally no one anywhere in this neighborhood. It's... It's so strange. It's so quiet. The wind is blowing lightly. The doves are back on the wires behind the house. I'm looking into this pit of plaster and
rebar and kind of understanding how my house was made there's the fireplace that i really loved in our family room with the kind of i forgot the name of that shape but it's i think it's maybe a kiva shape the sort of um almond shape half an almond shape opening in the fireplace and the tiles on one side are still there um
Then there's sort of a tangled mass, and there are all of our roof tiles scattered everywhere. Pizza oven. There's, like, shampoo bottles that are completely intact that were by the outdoor shower. The garage, it looks like Monday afternoon in my garage. The pillows are on the couch. My...
daughter's jar of homemade slime is sitting there intact on the on the counter all my books are in the shelves everything looks completely fine um and then The house just is an idea of a house, or the aftermath of the house, I guess. You can walk through the arched door at the front and the back, but there's just pretty much nothing in between. Ugh.
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Chapter 4: What emotions did Dana Goodyear express about her possessions?
I wish I knew how it caught and why and if there's anything we could have done to change this outcome. And why is our garage still standing? I wish I knew how to know what its narrative was at this particular house, like where the ember went in, what caught, what's that splatter all over the back.
wall of the house the part that's still standing is just looks like someone took a paintbrush with black paint and flicked it flung it all over the house did something explode there what's so weird is just we had so much We had so many possessions, so many stupid possessions and so many really special possessions. And you can't see any of that here.
Chapter 5: What insights did Dana share about the nature of her home?
It's almost like what it all comes down to is nails, plaster and nails. Our world was really little tiny pieces of metal holding it together.
Dana Goodyear in Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles. More in a moment.
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They were trying to get attention. They were even trying to get sanctions. They were never trying to get refugee status. And now that they have it, that domestically is a really big problem for them.
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So Dana, you've been documenting the loss of your home while you're reporting on the effects of this immense catastrophe in Los Angeles. And that's gotta be beyond difficult. You told me you went back to the house again a few days later. So what did you find there?
Yeah, so I went back and I was just wandering around when some law enforcement emergency personnel saw me and everyone was really super friendly. You know, do you need water? Do you need a snack? Are you okay? And I said, yeah, I'm just, you know, they said, we'll come walk to your house with you. And so I went, finished the walk, got to my house and I said, you know, the thing that I've been...
really wondering about is this fireproof safe. It was a 400 pound safe that I had just installed in October and feeling very pleased with myself. I got all of my important documents out of storage in downtown LA and put them in the fireproof safe along with a small box of jewelry. And when I went back, I've kind of had, I think my eyes had adjusted to the new layout of my home, you might say.
And I had figured out where my office was because it was in a closet in my office. And I saw this kind of listing four file high, totally black, it used to be beige, piece of metal. And I was like, that's got to be it. And And this incredibly helpful person with steel-toed boots said, you know what? I'm going to go in there and see if I can get it for you. I was like, are you serious?
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