The Anderson-Goldsworthy Family : During the Coming Months, We’ll Chronicle Their Trials by Fire as They Struggle to Rebuild Their Home and Lives

Scanning the mountains for smoke has long been an integral part of Nancy Goldsworthy’s routine. The Pasadena native and life-long veteran of canyon living in dry Southern California has always accepted the threat of fire.

In fact, Goldsworthy, 45, remembers many occasions during her childhood and later when approaching flames forced her and her Pasadena Glen neighbors to evacuate the enclave of older homes and cabins tucked beneath a thick canopy of trees and foliage at the base of the San Gabriel mountains.

But it wasn’t until 1975 that the nightmare of fire became reality for her. However, a faulty floor furnace--not mother nature--sparked that blaze, which consumed the house, devoured photos and destroyed irreplaceable mementos.

That was the first time.

“I never thought lightening would strike twice,” Goldsworthy, an architect, said recently. “But it did.”

On Oct. 27, flames from the Altadena fire raced through the Pasadena-adjacent neighborhood in unincorporated Los Angeles County, destroying 28 of 33 Pasadena Glen homes, hers included.

“We look and sound like whole people,” Goldsworthy said recently of her husband, their daughter and her son from a previous marriage. “But we’re really shells. We’re brain dead from all the trauma and disassociation from familiar routines, habits and accouterments of life. There’s so many disorienting things.”

It was just after 5 a.m. on Oct. 27 when Bob Anderson, Goldsworthy’s husband, awakened. The power was out.

Anderson, a building contractor, got up to check the electrical breaker. But when he stepped outside, he noticed the rest of the Glen, as residents call the neighborhood, was dark as well. Then he glanced toward the mountain ridges.

“I could see the glow from the fire,” Anderson said. “I just remember how eerie it was--big enough to see but far enough away not to feel imminent danger.”

Strangely, he said, there were no wailing sirens from fire and rescue vehicles, only silence.

Anderson told Goldsworthy, who immediately ran out to look for herself. The fire was to the west of the Glen, and all the mountain fires she had witnessed had burned west. She hoped that would be the case this time too.

“I called a couple friends in the Glen just to warn them,” Goldsworthy said. “Then I got the pictures that were scattered around in different places and loaded them in the car. I said to Bob, ‘Am I being stupid getting this stuff? Am I paranoid because the house burned down once before?’ ”

But both agreed to err on the side of caution.

*

Meanwhile, the electricity returned and the couple’s daughter, Calista, then 22 months old, awakened and was content to watch “Sesame Street” as Mom and Dad undertook the difficult task of choosing what to save and what to leave. Goldsworthy’s son, Jeff Hackett, 14, had moved out a few months earlier to live with his father and step family in Arcadia.

“During the last fire, I kept thinking, if only I had five minutes to get the stuff,” Goldsworthy said. “And we had probably more than an hour (this time) and it still wasn’t enough time.”

At first it went smoothly. They quickly began packing up family photos, important documents, Anderson’s company papers and his construction tools. But as the flames became more threatening, their efficiency gave way to disarray and forgetfulness:

They grabbed their good, but easy-to-replace clothing instead of their comfortable favorites. Goldsworthy took a pony saddle but overlooked the nearby rocking chair her great-grandfather had given her at her birth. They picked up other easy-to-replace items, but forgot a handmade quilt from Goldsworthy’s grandmother and the box of toys her son had played with as a child and still cherished.

“All I could think about was the stuff I couldn’t take,” said Anderson, who did much of the evacuation himself as Goldsworthy prepared the family’s two horses and pony to leave the one-acre property.

“I didn’t believe the house was going to burn. I was completely shell-shocked . . . in that first hour, we had gotten most of the stuff that we now consider to be the really important things. We look at the stuff in the last hour after Nancy left, and it all seems inconsequential.” As Goldsworthy prepared the horses, white ash rained down on the property and smoke was heading their way--the fire had broken from its historic burn pattern.

“I could see the fire coming east,” she said. “The gray and brown smoke was punctuated by these big black puffs of smoke and I knew they were houses.”

It was time to leave. Goldsworthy loaded the horses in the trailer and gathered up Calista. A neighbor led the pony to safety.

Anderson packed the last few items in the family truck and joined other neighbors in a safe vantage point from the approaching flames. By about 8:30 a.m., the fire had engulfed the Glen.

“I wasn’t absolutely sure (the house) had burned until I went back that afternoon, then I could see it,” he said.

Goldsworthy’s son, Jeff, was the first family member to arrive at the charred, smoky home site. The devastation left him in tears.

“I saw the lot where the house used to be and charred trees. It just looked like a pit,” the teen-ager said of the burned two-story home that had collapsed into its basement.

In the days immediately after the blaze, the family sifted through the blackened pile of ash and melted, twisted rubble that was their home and possessions. But the flames burned so hot, little was salvageable or even recognizable.

Among the toughest tasks was coping with the trauma of the loss.

“Emotionally, I just couldn’t face the fact that the house was gone,” said Anderson, also a Pasadena native.

“The emotional part didn’t come out of me until three or four days later when I would start bursting into tears at times when I’d see all the help people were giving,” he recalled.

Anderson was often surprised when objects unlikely to evoke a reaction would bring on the sting of tears, like the roadside portable toilet for residents set up by the sanitation department.

“It was just sort of tragic joy,” he said. “Everyone was lending a helping hand and that’s the thing that’s blown me away since this thing happened.”

Even young Calista didn’t escape the emotional upheaval. Anderson said that became clear to him recently when a family friend offered to meet him and the toddler at the burned home site to drop off a wooden high chair for her.

“Calista saw the chair and said, ‘Oh, no!”’ Anderson recalled. “But the way she said it and and the look in her eyes made it clear she knew she had a high chair and she was getting another high chair and this wasn’t her high chair.”

But much of that discomfort seems behind the 2-year-old, who is once again eager to help Anderson with the twice-a-day feeding of the family horses, who are back on the home site.

“At first she didn’t want to go up there,” Anderson said. “But now it’s like old times. It’s like re-establishing rituals.”

Still, the comfortable routines of life are a long way off. Since the fire, the couple, who met in kindergarten and married in 1990, and Calista have shared a roof with Goldsworthy’s parents. “We have all of Calista’s clothes in little baskets on the floor. It’s an obstacle course to get anywhere,” Anderson said. “We get a little cabin fever sometimes and I’m feeling disorganized.”

Anderson says he spends literally hours daily developing a list of lost possessions for the insurance company.

“It’s just a nightmare,” he said. “It’s unbelievable. It’s easy to remember the big bulky things but then you have to open up drawers in your mind and it’s really hard to do.”

*

The couple is close to settling with their insurance company and are expecting to get $180,000 for the 1,700-square-foot house, which they expect won’t cover the cost of rebuilding.

Meanwhile, life is returning to the Glen. Bright green sprouts of bulbs have pushed through the ash and mud. New leaves have sprouted along branches of the less-damaged oak trees.

“Every little bit of green is exciting,” a smiling Goldsworthy told a visitor one recent, cold morning. “When we first saw it, it looked like hell, like Dante’s inferno . . . there were still spot fires burning. There was smoke. It was really eerie. But with the bits of green, it now makes you feel like there’s life here.”