The voice cracks when he detailedly tells about the whole process. The author and podcast profile Sigge Eklund had gone to another part of Los Angeles to have lunch with screenwriter Peter Birro when he received a text message from his daughter Belle, who wrote that "it's burning around the school".
When he called a neighbor in the Pacific Palisades district, she screamed straight out that "it's burning everywhere".
No one in Sigge Eklund's family was at home, but the dog was. When the Uber driver didn't want to drive him anymore, he got out of the car and started walking.
The first time I understand the scope is when I see the entire high school burning, all the cars are standing still, he says.
When he entered the house, the dog was shaking in a corner.
This was almost the scariest moment, I lost my sense of time, in there you don't know if something has landed on the roof.
Sigge Eklund put his computer in a plastic bag and took the dog on a leash, but left everything else, including all the diaries he had forced himself to write since he was nine years old.
Paintings in the back seat
Once out on the street, he gets picked up by an older woman, an artist, fleeing the flames with her paintings in the back seat.
On some roofs, Mexicans are watering, they've been paid for it, I assume. So damn unethical and mean. "You get a thousand dollars if you stand here and water until the fire comes".
The fire moved approximately as fast as the car, but the woman managed to drive them to Santa Monica, where Sigge Eklund was reunited with his family at a hotel.
Here we think the house might still be standing. But the whole area is covered in smoke, it's a dizzying feeling, you see the whole city burning, it becomes existential.
"Completely empty"
The day after, they watch film clips showing that the only thing left of their house is the foundation of the chimney.
The whole city is erased, says Sigge Eklund, without knowing how to continue living.
This was last night, you're completely empty. I don't even know how to make a plan, where do you start?
However, they do not want to move back to Sweden.
It feels a bit like 9/11, you're tied to the place, you care so much for Los Angeles.
