The weather was beautiful in Los Angeles on Sunday. The sky was blue, the temperature balmy, the winds calm, and the smoke from the fires had largely blown out to sea. Life had finally returned to the weather-beaten city; cafés, bars, and restaurants were open, people were walking their dogs, and drivers were cruising down main thoroughfares.

In the debris zones, however, the wildfires’ epic destruction was on full display.

While in the LA region reporting a story on the fires and the insurance industry that is slated to come out later this week, I was able to spend a couple hours at the northern end of the Pacific Coast Highway’s restricted region. It was a ghastly, surreal scene from just south of Malibu to just north of Santa Monica, along a stretch that until a few days ago contained some of the most valuable real estate in North America.

When I was a child and a young adult, my grandmother, who lived in the San Fernando Valley, would take me to Gladstones, a wonderful seafood restaurant on the corner of the Pacific Coast Highway and Sunset Boulevard. We would drive over the canyons from the valley, turn right onto Sunset Boulevard, drive down through the Palisades area, and finally park in the lot abutting the Pacific. After eating lunch on the Gladstones deck overlooking the ocean, we would then walk down to the beach, take off our shoes, and walk along the sands for half an hour. It was one of the great rituals of my youth.

Last week, the Palisades were destroyed by flames. Gladstones somehow survived; but pretty much every other business and home along that stretch of the PCH was obliterated. Ashes are all that remain, along with twisted piles of metal and strange, out-of-place relics of the people who used to live there.

In the debris piles of everyday personal items that the fires left behind, one can imagine all of the dreams and homes that were destroyed, and one can see ghostly hints at what once was. There was the warped, burned exercise bike, now grotesquely perched in front of ruined walls. There were the mailboxes that stood intact outside of homes that were annihilated, and the street number signs glued to what were now front-wall skeletons. There were the washer and dryer staring out into the sunset like two stuck-open eyes, the laundry room that once surrounded them now ash. There were the melted cars and the stubbornly still-existent barbecue grills. And, to cap it all, there was the young couple, walking south hand in hand along the sands of the beach that my grandmother and I used to walk decades ago; to their right was the glorious ocean, the sun setting over its waters, to their left was unbridled destruction.

Those scenes will, I am confident, stay in my mind’s eye for the rest of my life.

With the exception of watching Manhattan’s Twin Towers burn and fall in 2001, I can’t recall ever seeing anything that left me quite literally gasping in shock in the way that these miles of destruction did.

After leaving the restricted region, I continued driving south, and, just as suddenly as I had entered the fire zone, I was out of it. The world around me looked as normal as it had been before the fires and the fierce Santa Ana winds scourged the hills and coastline to the north. For those who lost their homes, however, I doubt that their lives will ever be quite the same again.