(For the View From Your Window contest, the results below exceed the content limit for Substack’s email service, so to ensure that you see the full results, click the headline above.)
I am so excited to win, and the news is very well-timed, since I fractured my fibula this week and just learned that I will be on bed rest for a bit. I am happy to accept the book and continue to support the work you and Andrew do!
Speedy recovery! The same goes to the countless residents of LA. One in particular is on Berkeley’s mind:
When I saw in the news that one of the latest fires in Southern California has reached Pacific Palisades, I couldn’t help but think of the ceramic artist, Moye, who provided the view for contest #307. Her home is just blocks away from the edge of the fire on the most recent fire map I’ve seen:
It looks as if her place on Mabery Road must be at least in the evacuation zone, if not worse by now. It’s concerning.
And it’s strange, but with so many people victimized by this horror (an unknown quantity of them probably even readers of the Dish), Moye is the only person I know of who’s been directly affected by it. I’m hoping her house stays intact and she’s able to return soon, but even when she does it won’t be the same as before. Not with so much devastation just blocks away.
I don’t suppose you’ve heard anything from her recently?
I’ve been texting with Moye over the past week, and she and her family and their beautiful home are still doing okay. She gave me permission to share her initial text (to which I’ve added some photos she sent):
Awww, Chris, this is balm after some very difficult days. It’s exhausting even to search for words. Here’s a brief summary of the past three days:
We saw fire break out on a distant hillside around 10:30 Tuesday morning — not that unusual, but it quickly became apparent that the raging winds were turning this into much more than a typical brush fire. Within an hour, it had grown from 20 to 200 acres, and officials issued an evacuation order for the entire Palisades, including our canyon at the southeastern edge.
View from our deck in the early hours, then just before we evacuated.
Honestly, while our fears were very real for many friends in the Palisades, we weren’t particularly concerned about our home or beautiful canyon neighborhood, so far from the flames. So we stayed home, texting with friends, searching for reliable updates anywhere we could find them, and watching the fire spread in real time — in savage winds — from our deck. Finally, after getting yet another text from our kids begging us to evacuate, we hosed down the house, gathered up important documents and old family photos, threw some clothes in two duffel bags and left around 8 Tuesday night to stay with a friend in Venice. From there, we watched the catastrophe continue to unfold on our various screens.
The red dot is our house in Santa Monica Canyon. Orange is the fire perimeter — about 17 miles long, up to 7 miles wide. Red is evacuation zone. Green is evacuation warning (in northern edge of city of Santa Monica).
Today I can report that our house and Santa Monica Canyon are mostly untouched, at least for now. Several fires have broken out in our immediate neighborhood in the past 24 hours, destroying three houses in our little canyon, I just learned! But firefighters — on ground and in air — have managed to control them.
Sad truth is, now that the Palisades is lost, resources have freed up to focus on our neighborhood at the edge of the devastation. Clearly officials and firefighters are desperately trying to keep the fire from spreading into neighboring Santa Monica and have established a strong defensive line of fire trucks in the heart of our canyon and along PCH below our street. So, as I said, today our house and Canyon appear to have been spared the worst.
This is what saved us — Main Street at the base of the canyon, and looking down the steps to the beach at end of our street, Mabery Road.
But we have many very close friends whose homes were directly in the fire’s path and who have lost everything. Entire neighborhoods wiped out. So much of what has made our community — our neighbors and friends, favorite eating places, schools, rec center, theater, parks — have been damaged or destroyed. We’re in a kind of mourning for this catastrophic loss, whose extent will only become apparent as we learn more in the coming days and are allowed to return to the fire zone. For now, we’re still staying with friends in Venice.
Ruskin after evacuating: not a care in the world, the crazy world.
Again, Chris, thanks so much for reaching out. Doug, Ruskin, and I send our love to you and Andrew. And to that beautiful blue-eyed girlfriend of yours, who is probably also worthy of our love and appreciation, even if she doesn’t produce a podcast.
She later added, “After all the dark, a bit of bright: this morning on the Today show” featured one of Moye’s friend, Jamie Lee Curtis, giving one of Moye’s ceramic orbs to Hoda Kotb as a farewell gift:
Such a happy bit of serendipity. You might recall that in contest #321, we got a glimpse of the amazing Dish orbs that Moye made for Andrew and me:
Coincidentally last week, when the wildfires broke out, I hosted from out of town a good friend of mine I had met while living in Los Angeles four years ago; and a close mutual friend out there, John Fenoglio, has been busy reporting on the fires. In classic John fashion, he interrupted one of his live reports by grabbing a firehouse when he spotted a flame encroaching on the house he was standing next to — which sparked a small news item of its own, “KTLA reporter helps douse home ablaze in Eaton Fire”:
Speaking of the Eaton Fire, here’s the LA super-sleuth in Eagle Rock:
Good to have the VFYW back from the holiday break. Nothing much happening in Los Angeles this week.
The truth is that the fam is out of the country until April. (I won’t say precisely where, for Window View Capturing Purposes.) Our house in LA is in the evacuation zone for the Eaton Fire. We tried to prepare ourselves to lose it. Our short-term renter found shelter elsewhere when things got grim.
We’re people who have faced some catastrophic losses before. So we told ourselves, sure, it would suck to lose our house, but we have everything we need right here: our clothes, our computers, our family. But would we truly feel the same when the view from our window was smoldering ruins?
At the moment, it seems like the fire went the other direction, but a flood of friends were not so lucky. Scores. We’re learning of more every hour. And that’s to say nothing of the actual thousands of other family homes wiped out.
Already, there are too many people with opinions about it all. I encourage everyone to just stow the hot takes. It won’t help. Send money instead.
The Dish just made a donation to this GoFundMe to help displaced dogs in the area. Back to the VFYW, below is a followup on last week’s contest from the ski nerd, who continues his story about skiing in White Mountain National Forest:
We learned in the news later the next day that two teen snowboarders (in jeans!) had gone up the main (steeper) headwall and gotten caught in a slide. One was completely buried and the other managed to dig himself out. This was 1989, and foolish snowboarders certainly didn't have transceivers and shovels. Rather than try to find his buddy, the guy walked a mile back to the ranger station. By the time the ranger got back to the slide an hour after the slide, the other boarder was dead, likely from asphyxiation rather than trauma.
I’ve done a lot of stupid shit over the decades, but not that stupid (knock on wood).
Our Eagle Rock sleuth also a contest followup — “a reality check on Donnie Iris” (the musician covered by the Indy super-sleuth last week):
He adds, “Music is a tough business.” Our super-sleuth in Bethlum brightens things up:
As a follow-up for the contest two weeks ago, the Peacock spider “Stayin' Alive” video made my morning when I watched it last year. I shared it with the family for my “best of 2024” list, namely best insect video. I also went back and watched some of the Nick Cave material, which is wonderful. Thanks to this community that shares such marvelous things.
On to this week’s window search, here’s the super-sleuth on the UWS:
Now this is the way to start off the year: something figure-out-able. I’m banishing thoughts of that impossible end-of-year view (and my poor showing) and feeling back in business again.
So does the super-sleuth on Park Avenue:
It’s certainly easier than the Xmas contest. I spent a solid two hours looking at Dollar Generals and Republic of Tea retailers before I got distracted. My daughter and sometime VFYW assistant declared that whoever got that one “has too much time on their hands.”
This next sleuth has a gut guess this week:
Mobile, Alabama? I don’t have a specific reason for it, but it looks familiar and I’ve been there a couple of times. The trees and weather look like something Mobile would be experiencing right about now.
Running through a bunch of other clues is this sleuth:
I am a returning one-time champion who still manages to get more wrong than right. So, let’s again go through all the clues I could find (in the order of my Google searches). I need a location that could be in the US but looks vaguely more European ... with a 7-Eleven store … yellow fire hydrants … a rainy climate … hilly terrain … autumnal leaves … pine trees … blue public buses … a seemingly green-only hanging traffic light … maybe a body of water (not sky?) in the background … matching bus stop structures … the shape of those street light poles … similarly prodigious electric wires and poles … and general architecture style.
One place checks all those boxes: West Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Are you really going to tell me I am wrong again?
Yup. Another guesses “Toronto, Ontario, Canada,” and another goes with “Portland, Oregon, USA.” Here’s San Mateo with his VFYW Reimagined:
First we have to do some surgery. Let’s remove the rain on the window, enhance the Marriott logo, and add the Hilton logo on the right side that was cropped and/or blurred. Second we de-obfuscate (is that even a word?) the sign on the Coppersmith Visitor Center on the left. Lastly, in honor of my missing last week’s Dollar General VFYW, let’s overemphasize the 7-Eleven sign, which would otherwise be obscured in the greenery near the traffic signals:
Our super-sleuth in Bend names the right region:
The car models and license-plate aspect ratios imply the US or Canada. Conifers, hilly, and drizzly imply BC, Washington, or Oregon. Pedestrians in the drizzle without umbrellas also imply this is the Northwest region. And the wet season here is chilly, so we can wear water-resistant clothing without getting hot and therefore we almost never use umbrellas, unlike in places where it can rain when it’s warm. Plus, we wear hiking clothes everywhere, always, for everything anyway, or so the stereotype goes, and an umbrella here screams “tourist!”
Giuseppe names the right state:
There’s a chain store again in our photo: it was Dollar General for last week; and this week it’s 7-Eleven. But while Dollar General has almost 20,000 franchise units in the US, 7-Eleven has only 8,144 (plus 562 in Canada).
Also, this week we have some transparent clues: all those fir trees, the rolling landscape, and — above all — the blue-and-yellow colors of the bus definitely point to Washington; and there are only about 70 locations for 7-Eleven in that state ...
Here’s the aerial view from Chini:
The super-sleuth in Noumea gets close to the right city:
It was just two contests ago that you granted me super-sleuth status. I think that on the basis of this week’s contest, you should probably revoke that status.
As soon as I saw this week’s contest photo, I immediately ID’ed it as Seattle and, in fact, a street not far from where I lived for 30 years. Well, over the course of the next two hours, I could not find the photo location. But that purple/yellow King County bus, green bus-stop style, the trees, the rainy windows: they all scream Seattle … or, perhaps more likely now, a Seattle suburb. Looking forward to learning the locale of this oh-so-Seattle photo.
The Brookline sleuth focuses on the bus in particular:
As in past contests, my affinity for public transit made the difference. The blue-ish and yellow-ish color scheme of the Beagle Bus seemed pretty distinctive, and I soon identified the vehicle as belonging to the fleet of King County Metro in the Seattle area:
Another sleuth writes, “Dammit, I’m virtually certain that it has to be a King County Metro bus going along a hilly rainy road somewhere, but I cannot for the life of me find the street and route!” Getting closer to the right city is Paul from the “weekly sleuth trio from Vancouver, WA”:
Two contests in a row, we are left stumped. At least this week, the colors of the bus and shape of the bus stop matched with NW Washington state. We all agreed to settle on a guess of Bellevue, WA — well, because of Team Bellevue.
The Riverwoods super-sleuth looks at the graffiti:
There is a graffiti crew in Seattle called FTS.
The super-sleuth in Chicagoland brings up a map:
This week, are you feeling remorse over sending your sleuths through a depressing journey through the food deserts of Appalachia? Thought you’d give us a change of pace?
One look at this week’s view — rainy, hilly, commuter bus — and I figured it was in the Seattle area. Googling blue-and-yellow city buses pretty much confirmed it was somewhere in King County. However, what really made this easy was the 7-Eleven sign. Unlike Dollar Generals in Appalachia, there are less than two dozen 7-Elevens in and around Seattle, so checking them all was a snap.
He got to the right 7-Eleven, as did the Brookline sleuth:
Things would have gone more quickly if I had the technical skills to overlay a map of Seattle-area 7-Elevens with a system map of bus routes. But since I lack this expertise, I did some old-fashioned virtual legwork targeting 7-Elevens on long hilly streets close (but not too close) to downtown Seattle. It was not long before I arrived at a location featuring this version of the sign (with no other signage above or below it) in front of the same kind of curved apartment building as visible through the rain in the VFYW:
A sleuth in Walla Walla got to the same 7-Eleven — and names the right city:
I’ve been reading the Dish for a while now, but this is my first contest entry. I expect many correct guesses, as the bus, rain, and trees are a dead giveaway. This is a classic Seattle scene!
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