Devon and Leah Meyers lived in a guest house with their son, Tullie, who was a junior at Malibu High School at the time of the fire. Leah’s elderly father lived in the main house with caretakers. Devon is a photographer for The Malibu Times, has his own photography business, and is a musician/singer/ songwriter on the side. Leah is also a creative person, doing needlepoint, mosaics, and painting.
On Thursday, November 8, Leah and Tullie were driving on Kanan Road in the hills above Malibu. They could see two fires off in the distance: the Hill Fire off to the west and the Woolsey Fire in the east. They were headed to the library in Agoura Hills (just north of Malibu) – but when they got there, it was closed because of falling ash. The two fires seemed so far away that Leah didn’t think that either would ever reach Malibu – but she did think they should at least prepare.
When she got home, she told Devon they ought to pack up some belongings and get gas, just in case. He didn’t think there was any chance the fire would make it to Malibu, “And he was like, ‘nah;’ so I had to like kick him a little bit,” she joked. Then Devon started to take the whole thing more seriously. “All night, the dogs were real nervous and you could smell smoke in the air,” he said. “We had a few things ready by the door, like hard drives and cameras. I think we knew then that it was coming. We weren’t in full panic mode, but we were definitely nervous.”
At 7:00 am the next morning, they got the evacuation alert and spent the next half-hour getting ready to leave. “20 minutes of that was spent just getting my 92 year old father-in-law up the stairs,” Devon said. “Dad lives in the main house and we told his caretaker the night before to get his stuff ready, but they didn’t take our advice.”
Before leaving, Devon grabbed his four guitars, “Because they have stories, and they’re old and would be hard to replace,” he explained. Otherwise, the family didn’t pack much: they took a few changes of clothes and a laptop, but assumed they’d be coming back soon.
“It seemed like no one was around the neighborhood. Ash was starting to fall like light snow,” Devon described. “We drove down to Pacific Coast Highway, which was already bumper-to-bumper. That’s when we saw the Armageddon dark cloud crashing over the whole Santa Monica Mountains.” It took them four hours to get to Santa Monica (normally a 30-minute drive).
The Meyers drove their old Volvo so the dogs could get in, but left two cars that later burned: a MINI Cooper that had just been purchased four weeks before, and an old Mercedes. “We were in shock when we found out our house was gone, but tried to be as positive as we could about it. It brought us together closer as a family,” Devon said.
“The first night we got to Santa Monica, we went to a restaurant at 10:30 pm. Tullie thought it was like the greatest thing that ever happened – because nothing in Malibu is open that late,” Devon continued. “It hurt him to miss the next five weeks of school; he had just started getting tutored for SATs. I had to drive him from Santa Monica to Malibu High School every day until he finally got his driver’s license in December.
“Tullie was surprisingly fine about the fire experience, even though he lost everything,” Devon said. “He’s pretty reserved and didn’t show much emotion until he saw the architectural drawings for rebuilding our house. Then he got really enthusiastic and happy, and all of a sudden he ‘snapped in’ when he saw he’d have a place to go back to.”
Devon lost many years of his photography work in the fire, and is also sad that all of Tullie’s artwork went up in flames. “That one really gets me,” he said. “All my negatives from college were stashed in the garage, and were too big and bulky to take,” Devon explained. “The first 10-15 years of my career are gone - things like Rolling Stones concert photos from 1984 and various other things are all gone.
“Taking those photos is when I first realized I could make a living at photography. It really turned on a light on for me. Those photos ran in a bunch of newspapers and I sold a bunch to my friends. Anyway, when it burned there was no more room left for us to store anything else in the house, so now we can start all over again.”
