by John Pixley

I was going to write a nice little column about how Claremont has changed over the years, about how things were there and suddenly not there, about how Claremont is suddenly the way it is, and we barely remember the way it was, even a few months ago.

This occurred to me recently as I would go north on College Avenue from Arrow Highway and see the traffic lights at Green Street and think they had always been there, even though they were installed late in the fall. There was another traffic light and that weird permanent cone in the middle of the street a block south, replaced by the new lights, right? Right?

I was going to write about other examples of this. Not far from the new traffic lights was a lovely field of wildflowers and grasses before it was used as a movie set across the street from where the Courier office once was, just south of the railroad tracks, where I used to go in my wheelchair to hand deliver a hard copy (before it was called a “hard copy”) of my column.

There was the old Courier office on Harvard Avenue (now Crème bakery) where I began working as a summer intern, and the train-car restaurant instead of the large office building that now seems to have always loomed over the Village along First Street. There was the vet office where the Village West plaza is now; and there wasn’t always a traffic light just north of Memorial Park on Indian Hill Boulevard, right? Right?

There are hundreds, thousands of these small, not so small changes that have happened. I even had a nice, clever title: “In the blink of an eye, another Claremont.”

Then there were the fires. And, suddenly, in the blink of an eye, my column wasn’t so nice, wasn’t so little.

Sure, the catastrophic wildfires, at least as I write this, are “over there.” They aren’t a Claremont story, as my old editor Martin Weinberger would say.

But, for many of us, they are our story. The fires, which so far have wiped out tens of thousands of acres, thousands of structures, caused at least 25 deaths, and may well go on to do who knows how much more destruction, are my story.

I have friends and cousins who have been evacuated from Pacific Palisades and Topanga Canyon. One of my caregivers has been evacuated from Pasadena.

What’s more, much more, though, is that I’m familiar, so familiar, with many of the places now gone or now in danger. That’s really what makes these fires — which some say will end up being the worst natural disaster in U.S. history — so real, and, as more than one person has been quoted in the LA Times as saying, so “surreal.”

When I graduated from college I told myself I would live in Claremont because I could easily get from there to LA and other area communities. And that’s exactly what I did. A lot. I loved living in Claremont, but I also loved spending days on the beaches along Pacific Coast Highway,  hanging out in Santa Monica and on Melrose Avenue. I attended outdoor plays in Topanga Canyon and in dozens of tiny theaters in Hollywood and everywhere else. I enjoyed drives along Sunset Boulevard, past Will Rogers’ house, past UCLA, which I attended briefly, and through Beverly Hills and West Hollywood. I enjoyed getting as far as I could in my wheelchair in Eaton Canyon, and going to movies and free outdoor concerts with well-known artists in Pasadena.

Now, some of those places, like Will Rogers’ house and the Eaton Canyon Natural Area and Nature Center, are gone, or have been left unrecognizable, like the beaches along P.C.H. in Pacific Palisades and Malibu.

Even with rebuilding, which is already being talked about with both hope and desperation, Los Angeles — my Los Angeles — will never be the same.

Actually, the LA I know and love hasn’t been the same for some time. In a painfully real way, LA, for me, was already gone. Since becoming more disabled after my spinal surgery seven years ago, going into LA, especially with all the traffic, has gotten too difficult. If I go, it’s only once or twice a year, usually to see friends. I have also enjoyed some time in Eaton Canyon, but, sadly, it looks like that’s gone too.

While we are safe here in Claremont from the fires “over there” for now, I know already what it’s like to lose LA, the LA that I knew, the LA we all knew.