Rashi Kaslow sat on the deck of a boat he bought from a friend for just $1 before the fire. After the blaze destroyed his uninsured home in the Palisades Bowl mobile home park — which the owners, to this day, still have not cleared of fire debris — the boat docked in Marina del Rey became his home.
“You either rise from the ashes or you get consumed by them,” he said between tokes from a joint as he watched the sunset with his chihuahua tucked into his tan Patagonia jacket.
“Some people take their own lives,“ he said, musing on the ripple effect of disasters. “After Katrina, a friend of my mom unfortunately did that. … Some people just fall into the bottle.”
The flames burn not only your house, but also your most sacred memories. Among the few items Kaslow managed to save were journals belonging to his late mother, who, in the 1970s, helped start the annual New Orleans Jazz Fest, which is still going strong today.
A disaster like the Palisades fire burns your entire way of life, your community, your sense of self.
The fire put a strain too big to bear on Kaslow’s relationship with his long-term girlfriend. The emotional trauma he experienced forced him to take a break from boat rigging, a dangerous profession he’s practiced for 10 years that requires sharp mental focus as you scale ship masts to wrangle a web of ropes, wires and blocks.
Some days, he feels kind of all right. Others, it’s like he’s drowning in grief. “You try to get back on that horse and do this recovery thing — the recovery dance,” Kaslow said, “which is boring, to say the least.”
Living on a houseboat comes with its own rituals; these largely keep Kaslow occupied. He goes to the boathouse for his ablutions, walks his chihuahua around the marina and rides an electric skateboard into the nearby neighborhoods for a change of scenery.
He’s not yet sure where he’ll end up. Maybe someday the owners of the Palisades Bowl will let him rebuild, but Kaslow is too much of a pragmatist to get his hopes up. Maybe he’ll eventually scrape together enough money to leave the city he’s called home for more than two decades and finally buy a regular old house — not a mobile home, not a boat.
As 2025 slogged on, Kaslow repeatedly watched leaders do little to help. The Los Angeles Fire Department had failed to put out the Lachman fire. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s state park had failed to monitor the burn scar for hotspots. The Los Angeles Department Water and Power had failed to fill the Santa Ynez Reservoir, meant to protect the Pacific Palisades. Police failed to protect his burned lot from looters. Mayor Karen Bass failed to force the owners of the Palisades Bowl to clear the lot of debris.
Kaslow imagines welcoming Bass and Newsom onto his boat — his life now — and sailing out into the sunset. “There should be some accountability,” he said. “I just want to look them in the eyes and ask them, ‘What the f— really happened?’”
It’s a sentiment shared by many from the Bowl, who Kaslow has dubbed the fire’s “great underdogs.” They’re among the Palisadians who’ve been essentially barred from recovering — be it due to financial constraints, uncooperative landowners or health conditions that make the lingering contamination, with little help from insurance companies to remediate, simply too big a risk.
“I don’t want to be a victim for the rest of my life,” Kaslow said. “I don’t want to let this destroy me anymore than it already has.”
As November’s beaver supermoon rose above the marina, pulling the tide up with it, he felt a glimmer of optimism — a foreign feeling, like reconnecting with an old friend.
Kaslow had received a bit of money from one of the various resident lawsuits against the Palisades Bowl’s owners, as well as a modest housing grant from Neighborhood Housing Services, a local nonprofit, that covered the rent for his spot in the marina.
But a week later, Neighborhood Housing Services ran out of money, and a federal loan that could finally help him to move on from simply trying to stay afloat to charting his future remains far off on the horizon.
Regardless, Kaslow cannot help but feel grateful, despite all he’s lost. He thinks of his elderly neighbors whose entire lives were upended in their final years. Or the kids of nearby Pali High, who pushed their way through the COVID-19 pandemic only to have their school burn in the blaze.
He thinks of the countless people quietly going through their own personal tragedies, without the media attention or outpouring from the greater community or support from the government: A messy divorce that leaves a young mother isolated; a kitchen fire in suburban America that levels a home; an interstate car crash that kills someone’s child.
“You start to appreciate things more, I think, when your whole life is shaken up,” Kaslow said, looking out at the moonlight glimmering across the marina. “That is a blessing.”
The post On a $1 houseboat, one of the Palisades fire’s ‘great underdogs’ fights to stay afloat appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
