A few Sundays ago, Alice Goldsmith ’10 received a frantic phone call from her mother in Calabasas, a city just north of Malibu, Calif. The Goldsmith family, along with their entire neighborhood, was forced to evacuate, as the California blaze was merely hundreds of yards from their home.

Goldsmith’s mother asked which of her daughter’s personal belongings she would like the family to take as they evacuated. For Goldsmith, everything she owned and considered essential to her childhood suddenly seemed inconsequential, as she asked her mother to pack up a few scrapbooks and diaries in her room.

“That may have been the oddest phone call I’ve ever received,” Goldsmith said, “I had trouble deciding which of my prized childhood possessions were worth keeping, my prom dress, middle school awards, and stuffed animals all seemed pretty trivial, so I had my mom grab my scrapbooks, and that was that.”

Goldsmith and her family waited anxiously the next day as the fire destroyed many of their neighbors’ homes and nearby sites of personal importance. By the Monday afternoon following the phone call, however, a brisk wind had swept the flames away from Goldsmith’s Calabasas neighborhood and towards the other side of a nearby ridge, burning the Malibu Presbyterian Church, the site of Goldsmith’s pre-school.

“Southern California is very much defined by our natural disasters, and the most constant of these is Santa Ana-driven wildfires,” Goldsmith said. Although it’s normal around this time each year to hear of encroaching fires, this season has been particularly destructive in Calabasas,” “Although minimal damage occurred on our property, this recent blaze made it very clear to Southern Californians that we are in a natural calamity zone facing an unstoppable force of nature.”

The fires in Southern California, which caused the largest mandated evacuation in the state’s history, burned approximately half a million acres, an area more than twice the size of New York City. Nearly 2,000 homes were destroyed. For the approximately 250 Wesleyan students from California, the images from last week’s wind and fire evoke surreal loss and devastation.

Spencer Sheridan ’10, a native of Yorba Linda, a city in Orange County, received a terrifying call from his sister as the fires raged near his neighborhood. Sheridan’s dog, Gizmo, was suspected to have wandered into the red zone, an area of government-mandated evacuation no more than a mile and a half from Sheridan’s home, and had not returned for many hours.

“This fire came a little too close to home for my family,” Sheridan said. “We got incredibly lucky. Later that night, a volunteer firefighter, who my sister said bore a striking resemblance to Christian Slater, returned Gizmo. The firefighter was headed home after a 30-hour shift when he found Gizmo roaming around newly charred soil. Apparently my little puppy was covered in ash and was quite a sad sight.”

President Michael Roth sent an all-campus email on Oct. 26, conveying his sympathies to students from Southern California affected by the fires. Additionally, class deans reached out to students from California.

Dean of the Class of 2011 Noel Garrett reported that students’ families seemed to be doing well.

“We have had students share that some of their friends had lost their homes, and a few students reported that families had to be temporarily evacuated,” Garrett said. “All Class of 2011 students reported back that their families, even those evacuated, were moved back in rather quickly.”

“Like all of us in the Dean’s Office, I know that President Roth was extremely concerned about our students’ families,” he added.

Kaitlin Kall ’09 was also touched by the wildfires. Her stepmother and two siblings live on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu and spent many hours trying to suppress the encroaching blaze in their neighbors’ backyards with garden hoses and buckets of water.

Kall’s family was quickly evacuated from their home and moved in with a friend farther inland, but was unable to gather information on the status of their house for two days—all connecting roads were blocked off, and they couldn’t get in touch with the fire department.

“This has been a very hard time for my family as they try to rebuild their neighborhood,” Kall said. “Although my stepmom’s property was mostly unharmed, to a wildfire a house is simple kindling and another thing to burn. I sincerely hope that my family has grossly exaggerated their neighborhood’s changed landscape.”