Saving the Sword: An L.A. Fire Victim’s Quixotic Quest
When you lose everything, it’s the little things that make the difference. And at this moment one of those things, for Jonathan Sims and Kyle Shire, is that Altadena’s Grocery Outlet is still standing.
“Oh my God, oh my God,” Shire laughs as we drive past the discount store with a postcard-perfect mural declaring “Greetings from Altadena” on its side, a little patch of normalcy on a street that is now studded with the torched remains of businesses. The couple will soon exclaim over the loss of several favorite spots devoured by the Eaton Fire — a breakfast joint here, a pizza spot there — but here is a favorite destination for bargain groceries, suddenly glorious in its mundanity. “I’m so sorry, but I’m really happy to see that grocery store,” Shire says.
Shire and Sims are just two of the thousands of entertainment workers whose lives have been upended by the Los Angeles wildfires that tore through sections of the L.A. area starting Jan. 7. The rental home where the longtime couple resided for four years — the first home they lived in together — was destroyed in the blaze, along with nearly all of their possessions.
Shire, a producer on the popular web series Critical Role, was able to race home from work the night of Jan. 7 and gather some belongings, as well as their four cats. But when Sims, a former VFX artist on The Hunger Games and X-Men: Apocalypse who now directs projects for drag queens, returned from a gig out of state, he realized that he had forgotten to ask Shire for the retrieval of a precious family heirloom. That’s why the couple is back here one week later: to dig through the rubble in an attempt to find a katana sword said to have been surrendered to Sims’ grandfather William J. Sims II, then a major in the U.S. Marine Corps, near the end of World War II.
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Reaching this area, a once-bustling stretch of Lake Ave. just two miles from their former home, has taken roughly two hours. The National Guard and Sheriff’s Department deputies have cordoned off the areas under evacuation order in Altadena, including the hilly neighborhood where the couple lived. To get across the barriers required a member of the media covering a natural disaster (which is where The Hollywood Reporter came in), talks with Sheriff’s Department deputies, one conversation with a member of the National Guard and a few calls to the Sheriff’s Information Bureau before a deputy arrived to escort our group past the barricades.
Once heading northwest closer to the San Gabriel Mountains, the view begins to turn dystopic. What was once a patchwork of burnt building husks, here and there, turns into an eerie vista of levelled neighborhoods, dusted in soot, punctuated by brick chimneys that still stand tall. Hollowed-out cars, their tires melted, appear occasionally on the sides of the road. The streets are barren, save for occasional officials’ vehicles. After we climb higher and turn a corner, Shire says, “This was us,” signaling that we’ve arrived. On a hill with a stunning view of downtown Los Angeles stands the remains of their home. Their former mailbox — now just a wooden stump — is marked with a telltale pink polka dot ribbon. The Sheriff’s deputy tells us that this innocent-looking decoration denotes total destruction of the structure; every house on this part of the street appears to be marked with one.
The lot is mostly rubble, framed by collapsed and flattened walls. Strange items remain, damaged but recognizable: The teeth of a rake. A stationary bike. The skeletons of a washer and dryer. Shire and I step more carefully around the driveway, littered in one section with nails, but Sims boldly jumps into the rubble. He knows where to look: The sword stood next to his writing desk at the time his house burned. Armed with two layers of gloves, Sims starts digging with his hands and a hammer.
Almost immediately, Sims finds something. “This is from it,” he announces, holding up a decorative element to the scabbard. He sets it aside and keeps digging, bending pieces of wall as if they were wet cardboard. Soon, he discovers another piece, a separate part of the scabbard. Then suddenly, improbably, not far under the surface, Sims pulls out a piece of metal that almost looks, initially, like a long branch. It is darkened with soot, gritty and bent, missing a grip, but it is still unmistakably a blade.
“Not the Arthurian ending I hoped,” he says, as he shows us the weapon. “That must have been a really hot fire. Can it be forged anew? Is this Narsil?” he jokes, referencing a blade in TheLord of the Rings. Initially, the state of the weapon saddens Sims. “I was hoping that it would just be fine,” he says. “It’s silly, right?” But the more he considers it, the more he brightens, realizing the sword is generally intact, just warped. “This is a project,” he decides. He holds the tip of the blade to his gloved finger — it’s still sharp.
Though his grandfather is his namesake, Sims — whose real full name is William J. Sims IV, though he goes by the J. part, for Jonathan — didn’t know the details of his past growing up. He remembers the man he calls “Colonel Bill”as a “big, old jolly man” who didn’t brag about his history; he died when Sims was in his early 20s. But the older Sims got, the more he heard stories “that he was like a war hero, this pillar of his community,” he says. As he handles the sword, Sims muses, “I guess it just symbolizes that people go through phases in their life and they change and there’s more to people than you really think.”
Sims and Shire don’t know what they’ll do in future. Currently, they’re staying with family in the San Diego area, but “we’re not thinking beyond the next 12 hours,” says Sims. He has been working as he’s dealt with the loss of his home, tackling several projects after experiencing a dearth in opportunities over the last year. That’s not uncommon: Many freelance entertainment workers have faced a dearth of work in the past few years through the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2023 writers’ and actors’ strikes and the overall contraction in the business, with the wildfires just the latest hurdle.
Unlike the more well-heeled Pacific Palisades — famously home to industry executives and celebrities — before the fires Altadena was a generally a more middle-class enclave for entertainment workers, home to crew members, writers and others who had achieved some measure of success, enough to buy a home in the L.A. area. It was also historically a Black community, with Black people at one point accounting for nearly 43 percent of the population, according to census data cited by The New York Times(now it is closer to 18 percent). Now that both areas have been debilitated, Sims hopes that the industry finds a new way forward. “I think that there’s just this attitude with streaming and the strikes and all this stuff and natural disasters where it’s like, ‘Oh, we’ve just got to get through this one,’” he says. “No, like this is a new normal from the top down, on almost every facet of our life… We have to stick together because it’s not going away. You can’t pretend it’s going to go away.”
Sims has heard the refrain over the past few days that what he lost was just stuff; that at the end of the day, possessions are replaceable. He, Shire and their animals, are safe, and that’s what counts. But Sims feels that, like a lot of creative people, he built his space with many intentional objects that held meaning for him and that he drew from in his work. He’s still grappling with the loss of those things.
The sword at least offers some measure of closure; the retrieval effort a bit of agency in an unfathomable situation. “This was the last thing I wanted to do,” he says as we prepare to depart Altadena. “I wanted to take something from this house, something from my past, so that this was not… You know what it was? So that this didn’t get the last word.”
A few days after the trip to the remains of their home, a twist emerges: A family member sent Sims an old letter from his grandfather to his grandmother, describing the sword. It turns out the blade found wasn’t the one that was surrendered to the major; his grandfather obtained it in a trade with a friend who cared more for the beauty of the sword that the major originally had in his possession. The sword Sims dug up was the “boring one [his grandfather] traded for the really beautiful one because swords didn’t interest him much,” he writes in an email. It was the one Colonel Bill brought home because he thought his future kids would enjoy it.
“The truth was much smaller and less simple,” Sims continues. “But that’s okay. Myths are important. The myth is what brought me back to find it, though Colonel Bill would probably say that old thing wasn’t worth the trouble.”
