Jimmy Dunne is as proud a Palisadian as they come. He gets a twinkle in his eye when he talks about his town.
“In a city that's dotted with literally hundreds of communities,” he says, “very few have that sense of belonging like there is in the Palisades.”
Unable to return to his home, Dunne – who once helped create a bocce league in the Palisades to bring elderly neighbors together – is working with his neighbors to keep the community alive during its darkest hour.
The week after the blaze, they rented a covered boat called a duffy that’s about the length of a Chevy Suburban. After a brief naming contest, they proudly dubbed it the Palisades Duffy.
Now, most weeks, they head out in the Marina del Rey harbor with their displaced neighbors.
“I just find that once we get out into the marina, people say things and express things that maybe they wouldn't have done when we're onshore,” Dunne explains. “It's been a wonderful refuge for people to have a little bit of emotional release.”
While talk about rebuilding the Palisades often focuses on debris removal, insurance, and architectural plans, trips aboard the duffy — with its floating support group — are also part of how the neighborhood recovers.
The Palisades Duffy in its slip in the Marina. Photo credit: Zeke Reed.
On a recent lap around the marina, Christie Smith is among those getting some much-needed emotional support. She moved back to LA from England a decade ago, but the rest of her family stayed behind. Now her house is gone, and she's in a hotel room in the Marina too small for her 13-year-old blind dog.
“ I have got so much time on my hands. It worries me,” Smith tells the group aboard the duffy. “I don't have any family here. If anybody has any jobs that you're doing, will you think of me?”
“Can you be the president of the community council?” quips Palisades Community Council President Sue Kohl, who’s seated nearby.
Kohl also lost her home in the blaze, but says it was losing family mementos that caused her the most anguish.
“I have five kids, they're all adults now, but throughout the years, I saved all the letters they wrote me from camp,” Kohl tells her neighbors out in the water. “I thought, ‘Oh, when I'm old and feeble, I'm going to have this folder and I'm going to read through these again.’ That loss is more tragic to me than the actual structure.”
Sue Pascoe, who runs a digital outlet in the Palisades called Circling the News, chimes in with a similar experience: “I still had a picture that one of the kids had done in grade school because I thought it was so cute. It's still on my refrigerator — or,” she catches herself, “was on my refrigerator.”
In addition to mourning her personal losses, Pascoe is frustrated by the lack of clarity about what went wrong when the fires broke out on January 7th. She believes the LA Fire Department didn’t sufficiently put out embers left from a New Year's fire, which could have caused the blaze.
“ A lot of us are just really angry because we don't feel this should have happened,” Pascoe explains. “And now that we're faced with it, they keep saying, ‘Oh, it's easy. You just fill out this…’ No, nothing is easy.”
Christie Smith (left), Neven Karlovac (center) and Sue Pascoe (right) chat aboard the duffy. Photo credit: Zeke Reed.
The group’s emotions keep changing as the boat tools around the harbor. At one point, Dunne offers up a playful pop quiz testing the kind of insider knowledge you would only have as a Palisadian.
As the duffy pulls up to the edge of the marina near the breakwall, Dunne points out a familiar spot on the coastline.
“ This is where the marina meets the world,” he beams. “We're also going to see the most beautiful town in the world, far in the distance – Pacific Palisades.”
Everyone onboard shares a moment of silence as they look out at what’s left of their neighborhood, recently turned green after the rains. As the boat turns and starts heading back to the slip, Dunne recites a poem that he wrote.
“Across the waters, was our town,
Where fire engulfed us all around.
And as we drift out in the sea,
Our town is sitting next to me.
Look at all of you right here,
You’re what makes a town so dear.
So let's raise our glass to what life brings,
May kindness be what always sings.”
He chokes up a bit at the end as his boatmates applaud.