Four months after wildfires, Kentucky Derby favorite Journalism embodies symbol of resilience

At 8:26 on the morning of Wednesday, January 8, a silver 53-foot, 18-wheeled horse transport van rolled up alongside Barn 59 at Santa Anita Park in Arcadia, California, seven miles due west of Pasadena and about 20 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles, in the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains.

At 8:26 on the morning of Wednesday, January 8, a silver 53-foot, 18-wheeled horse transport van rolled up alongside Barn 59 at Santa Anita Park in Arcadia, California, seven miles due west of Pasadena and about 20 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles, in the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains.

Workers efficiently loaded 15 horses in the care of thoroughbred trainer Michael McCarthy up a short ramp and into small travel stalls on the van. The process took just 25 minutes. At 8:51, driver Ysidro Cruz — everybody calls him Sid — slowly negotiated the hulking van off the backstretch to Baldwin Ave. and toward his final destination at the San Luis Rey Downs thoroughbred training center just north of San Diego. McCarthy also has stalls there, although unlike at Santa Anita, no parimutuel races are contested.

Cruz took the I-210 Freeway west to the I-15 Freeway south before exiting on Route 76, a few miles from the end. The 107-mile trip took two hours and seven minutes, pretty good time in L.A. traffic on a weekday morning. (Kerrie Sahadi, the third-generation horse transport owner whose company, KC Horse Transport, moved McCarthy’s horses, provided the exact travel times from her GPS tracking database.) The horses were offloaded into McCarthy’s barn at San Luis Rey, and bedded down. “Nothing remarkable about the trip...,” Sahadi told me.

And that is true. There was nothing remarkable about the trip. It was what horses do every day in America and around the world: They get on vans and they travel from place to place for an array of functional reasons. To race, to rest, to retire. It is manifestly ordinary. But the rest of that morning in Southern California, and the days and weeks that followed, were not ordinary; they were apocalyptic.

In the evening before McCarthy’s (and others’) horses moved, a wildfire had started in the steep hills above and to the west of Santa Anita; eight hours earlier, a larger fire had exploded in Pacific Palisades, dominating cable news coverage and stretching emergency resources. By late night, the second fire was encroaching on residential areas and was ominously visible from the racetrack. Fed by hurricane-force Santa Ana winds, it would become the Eaton Fire (for Eaton Canyon, where it started), the second-most destructive wildfire in California history, wiping out more than 9,000 structures, most in Altadena, and upending daily life for what is likely to be years. It would kill 18 people before containment.