The Freak House

RIP

In 2008, when my then husband and I moved with our three young kids from the UK to the Santa Monica Mountains, I’m not sure they fully understood what moving meant. On New Years Eve of 2007 we all boarded an airplane from London to LA, with our maximum 2 large suitcases each, and headed to a rental I had identified before we even left England. I think somehow they couldn’t quite imagine that moving actually meant never returning to their Victorian home with an idyllic walled garden, and a quick walk down the sidewalk to the elementary school or the nearby park with the maze. The classic English home they had known was a world away from the house we landed in on top of a wild canyon overlooking the vast Pacific Ocean.

The house was entirely built from reclaimed materials, beams that had held up the old Santa Monica Pier, a glazed Sherman tank wheel as the window by the dining table, a Dodge hood over the stove, mosaic tiles in the bathroom. The home had been built in 1978 by Tim Matheson, one of the actors in the movie Animal House, and had notoriously hosted some wild nights with visits from those cast members, including John Belushi and musicians like Jerry Garcia. Was this just a legend? The house was wild and beautiful, and very quirky. Since this was 2008, in the days before Instagram, I can’t find many photos apart from what’s on a Zillow listing.

Our bed was built like a ship’s bed on a platform with a view straight out the window down the center of the canyon, over an enormous expanse of Pacific Ocean. The house was built around boulders which jutted out in the sunken living room. A round house, with a fireplace in the center of it, one guest remarked on arriving for the first time that “you live in a bong!” The kids rooms were a 1/2 level up, and had interior windows overlooking the rest of the house. They would climb through these windows and clamber down the walls into the kitchen, where there was an enormous sink supported by a metal frame they could swing from like a jungle gym as they navigated the levels of the house.

Our first morning there, when we woke up, we discovered an enormous tarantula on the top of the boulder in the living room — the kids watched, terrified, from outside the window as I stood on a chair with a can of bug spray, screaming, and their brave father protected them from certain death if bitten by this deathly creature — wielding a spade he found in the utility room to vanquish it. (Later we found out tarantulas are quite benign despite my certitude that you could only survive a tarantula bite by dancing the Tarantella furiously, until you’d sweat out all the venom.)

The clouds rushed up the mountainside from the sea and quickly enveloped you in mist as you stood on the patio, feeling like you could almost take flight over the canyon like one of the hawks circling overhead. Some mornings I would wake up in our ship bed and think I was looking out over the ocean, only to realize I was looking at a sea of clouds, like Gods on Mount Olympus.

And then there was the terrifying novelty of the rattle snakes which would greet us on the patio. I was advised to call a rattle snake wrangler to help clear the area, but when he saw where we lived he looked at me and shook his head. “You are in their backyard, they’re not in yours. Do you want a hug?” And then he went on to show the kids all the snakes he had in plastic tubs in his pickup truck — having just cleared a movie set…

The kids adapted quickly, avoiding the snakes, keeping our puppy safe from the coyotes who would start to howl whenever we took it outside. They developed a wild streak that was particularly charming with their English accents (which they sadly lost after a couple years). During those 6 months they were home schooled, which mostly translated to regular treks down the winding canyon road to the PCH, to explore all the amazing places LA had to offer, from open houses at the Jet Propulsion Lab, to the Natural History Museum, the Holocaust Museum, Chumash displays in the local state parks, the Getty Museum, and more. This is where the LA chapter of their lives all began.

Max, Hannah, and Lily photos taken on the patio

Just below our property there was a gate where a mysterious resident lived in a trailer with his Rottweiler. We had been warned about him, that he was a bit like a Unabomber type, and I worried every time I realized the kids’ explorations were taking them closer to his abode; but over the months we started a friendly conversation, and one day he invited us to go on a hike into the canyon. He led us into the scrub, crawling along coyote trails through the brambly bushes into a secret valley just below our home: a magical spot with a stream and giant boulders embedded with shell fossils, showing us clearly how the land was thrust up from the ocean floor to the heights of the Santa Monica mountains by seismic forces. We stepped into the stream, and there Max fearlessly grabbed a bright green garden snake in his hand while his sisters looked on with trepidation.

I loved the pink light and dry heat and the smell of wild sage drying in the sun. Walking barefoot on the vintage saltillo tiles in the kitchen. The unexpected beauty that came and went with constantly shifting sky and wind, the clouds rushing up and down the mountains from the ocean to the valley beyond.

We only stayed in that house for 6 months. By the time summer rolled around, we had sold the UK home, and the long windy drive up the canyon to a house with only ceiling fans to combat the incredible heat that would rise up from the San Fernando Valley, over the other side of the mountain, overwhelmed us. I would lie there under the fan, unable to move, as the hot dry heat blew and accelerated. The canyons were treacherous after a rain, when rocks would tumble down onto the road, and mudslides were a regular occurrence.

Last week, during the fires in Los Angeles, winds of 98 mph were recorded just feet away from this house at Saddle Peak, the road at the crest of the mountain. I heard that Las Flores Canyon, our turn-off from the PCH to get to this house, had been engulfed with fire. My friend who lived closer to the PCH announced his house had burned. One of my daughter’s elementary school friends who lived in that canyon said the same.

And now, my neighbor from that magical house — living just beyond the overgrown tennis courts where her daughter and my kids raced their Big Wheels — sent me a video taken of the tiny cluster of homes that were built nearby. All burned to the ground. The Freak House is gone, like so many thousands of homes that burned in the Palisades fire. We stayed in the Santa Monica mountains for 10 years, living in 6 different houses. Two of them (including the one I was living in at the time) burned in the Woolsey Fire, and this one burned in the Palisades Fire. The pace and fury of these fires is only accelerating, but I never once imagined they could devastate the heavily populated neighborhoods that have disappeared this week.

This is the story of just one of the beloved homes disappearing before our eyes, with all the memories and secrets held between its walls. Will the memories still be there in that mountainscape, with just the remaining boulders to hold them? Over the years, we have fondly referred to that house as “The Freak House”. Goodbye Freak House, we will always remember you and are grateful that you welcomed us for the beginning of a long California chapter in my family’s life.

As I write, sat in front of the wood burning stove in our current Maine home, thousands of miles away from the raging inferno that continues to threaten homes and livelihoods in LA, I am mindful of the terrible losses thousands are facing. The extreme exhaustion that the front line workers are experiencing — from the incredible fire fighters to my food community of growers, makers, and restauranteurs who always show up to keep people fed. The compound effect of so many climate disasters on our national — and planetary — psyche. The poisoned air everyone in LA is breathing. And above all, the impact this tragedy is going to have on all the young people in the fire zones, who have only just emerged from the trauma of losing precious years of their childhood on lock-down in the pandemic, to now lose their homes and schools and communities. But for now, it is time to mourn and remember, and pray for something beautiful to come out of the ashes.

Lily and I at the “Freak House”, reflecting…