A vintage green-leather Rolex watch case. An Alekos Fassianos painting. A hard drive and albums with family photos. Phone chargers and laptops. Medications and passports, of course. Some clothes.

Most importantly, the pets.

What to pack? How long will they be gone? What will they return to?

Destruction on their doorstep, evacuees like Maryam Zar grabbed what they could in their final whirlwind moments at home.

“You’re just kind of on autopilot,” said Zar, former chair of the Pacific Palisades Community Council, who knew her hillside California neighbourhood has long been vulnerable to wildfires.

“In my head I had sort of thought it through. So I ran through the house pretty quickly and gathered it together. As I look back, I think I pretty much got all the things I would have wanted to get.”

With the fast-spreading blaze approaching her Pacific Palisades home on Tuesday, Zar grabbed a suitcase and some bags.

She recalled the pungent smell of burnt eucalyptus trees, their sap and bark extremely flammable.

A wave of flames flashed through a rear window. Thick smoke turned the sky murky orange.

Zar’s teenage son grabbed sweatshirts and shoes. Her daughter, in her 20s, packed extra clothing because she was traveling in a few days.

Zar rushed to a drawer and grabbed from it passports, as well as insurance and banking documents.

She packed a few pieces of clothing that had “emotional value.” Three pairs of pants and some shirts for her husband, who was out at the time. And the old watch case, which belonged to her late father.

“I reached for a couple of old albums, just really old pictures, and then a couple of newer frames,” Zar said.

“I thought, you know, I can’t take it all, but if I can just have some, then this is a sampling of family history and the recent past.”

On the way out, Zar stopped in her son’s room and took a leather-bound booklet, engraved with his name, that they had recently given him.

“I thought, well, maybe we’ll write, you know, as we go through the next few days, we’ll just kind of write what we’re going through,” said Zar, who’s now staying with her family in Redondo Beach.

Finally, they rounded up the cats and made a “mad dash” for their cars, she said.

As they headed out, Zar’s husband arrived. A blizzard of embers had turned an affluent coastal community into an inferno.

Zar’s husband hosed down the ground around their home. He extinguished small flames in a neighbour’s yard, she said. And he took one last possession on his escape.

“He had thought of something that I had forgotten, and he grabbed it. It happened to be a car,” she recalled.

He climbed into his vintage sports car and sped away. Houses and steep hills burned under wind-driven embers.

On traffic-choked roads, some people abandoned their cars and walked.

‘I had no more fight left at that point’

At an evacuation shelter in Pasadena, volunteers dispensed food, water and clothes to people who fled with little time and little more than what they were wearing. Evacuees rested on cots. Some had pets.

Raya Reynaga was there to pick up underwear, socks and shoes. “I’m wearing other people’s clothes right now,” she told CNN on Thursday.

She was among the many Southern Californians who tried to fight off the flames with garden hoses.

The Eaton fire – one of a few major fires raging across Los Angeles County – consumed her 103-year-old, English-inspired cottage in Altadena, a neighbourhood nestled in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains.

“I tried to save my house because that’s all I have,” she said.

“Everything I’ve ever worked for my entire life was there. My work equipment. My brother’s ashes. My daughter’s mementos. My keepsakes. My deceased mother’s photos and belongings that she passed down to me.”

Reynaga lived in the house nearly three decades. She was one of the last people left on her block after the fires started on Tuesday. The hose she used had little pressure against the growing flames. She dropped to her knees and prayed: God please save my house.

Reynaga, a CPR instructor, recalled a firefighter telling her, “‘Your life is at risk. You have to leave.'”

“I just broke down… I had no more fight left at that point. I knew it was over.”

She drove away from home, ash smeared on her face. Embers rained down around her. By that time all she could take were the cats.

When Reynaga returned on Wednesday, the historic cottage was gone, along with so much that was meaningful to her.

“I was speechless,” said Reynaga, who’s now staying at her father’s home. “I’m still in shock.”

She added, “I don’t care about stuff. Stuff is just stuff. But what I can’t get back are the family photos. What I can’t get back is the family heirlooms that my mother passed down… I can’t get back the pillows she made me.

“I can’t get back the little sewing and knitting kits she passed down from her mother to me.”

Embers hit bike helmet as he rode away

Francois Auroux rode his bike to his family’s Pacific Palisades home on Tuesday night.

He found the back of his home on fire and quickly doused the flames with a hose.

Several houses across the street were fully engulfed.

“I ran and grabbed a hard drive that our family photos were on. I grabbed a couple of our family heirlooms,” he said.

He stuffed heirlooms, dating to the 1700s, in a backpack and duffel bag. He grabbed his grandfather’s beloved model of an old steam tug.

Lastly, he snatched two paintings closest to the front door, including one by the Greek painter Alekos Fassianos.

“I was thinking about all the things that I didn’t get and that I could have gotten really quickly but didn’t because it was literally like, I thought the house was going to burn. I’ve never been in a situation like that,” said Auroux, his voice filled with emotion.

“This is our house. The backyard’s on fire. I’m out of here,” he told the reporter, the camera rolling. “You can take these paintings, I guess. I can’t ride with these.”

The reporter offered to hold the paintings for Auroux. Wearing goggles, gloves, a mask and a helmet, Auroux rode into a smoky night illuminated by flames.

“All I heard was just – clack, clack, clack – the clatter of all of these red hot embers hitting my helmet and hitting my body and my face and my hands,” said Auroux, who’s staying with relatives on the Westside of Los Angeles.

A friend who returned to the neighbourhood to rescue a cat sent Auroux a photo of the burnt remains of his family’s home.

How to live in ‘a town that doesn’t really exist’?

After evacuating her Pacific Palisades home this week, Tricia Consentino reflected on the escape.

“I just grabbed like the dumbest stuff and now I’m sitting here wondering why I didn’t take all the other stuff,” she told CNN on Thursday.

“Most of us took nothing… It’s a frenzy. I ran out. I actually took dog food. I took cat food. I forgot the cat’s medication. I yelled at my son to make sure he got his medication.”

She added, “We got nothing. I got no pictures… It is a really incomprehensible thing to imagine not only everything you own, everything you’ve worked for, everything you’ve created, but everyone you know, every memory you made in the town that you’ve lived In, that all of it is gone. I’m getting mad about it, you know, because it’s so much more than just the stuff.”

The fire destroyed the building that housed the Kumon Math and Reading Center of Pacific Palisades, an after school academic program run by Consentino.

“I lost the building of my business, but I am my business,” she said. “I’ve been on the phone with the parents that I work for. And so many of my students have lost their homes. They have lost their schools.”

Consentino and her family consider themselves fortunate. Their home remains standing.

“The question now will be, how do we live in a town that doesn’t really exist,” she said.