Without Love, What Is The Point?
The Story of Diane and Robert Lang
It’s college musical time…that means bonding with new friends in the shared experience. It is a special kind of bond for those who haven’t experienced it. There is a closeness that happens quickly, sometimes lasting, sometimes not. For Diane and Robert, this was at first a fun friendship with shared experience and lots of laughter.
Fast forward to a life they began together years later.
As fire survivors, Diane and Robert Lang have a story that is so much more. They both are such practical, resilient people. They show many of the emotions that other fire survivors express and at the same time, a recovery unlike any others I have seen so far.
The story of three homes, so much loss, and love that supersedes it all. I sat with Diane and Robert Lang to learn about their lives, their fire experience, and how their supportive relationship has carried them through this tragedy.
I have known Diane for a while. She was my teacher and mentor for the docent program for Eaton Canyon. She may not realize it, but she is the muse that has brought me to the here and now.
What is remarkable about Diane and Robert is their shared purpose. Each has a deep, defining vocation — Diane as a leader in nature education and the Eaton Canyon docent program, and an accomplished children’s book author, and Robert is a physicist, mathematician, and one of the world’s foremost origami artists. Two extraordinary careers, two extraordinary callings. And yet what strikes me most when I sat with them is not what each has accomplished separately, but how completely they support each other. Purpose shared. Purpose sustained. And, at the same time, completely independent.
I am all about being purpose driven and my conversation with them was in part to discover what that purpose is. What drives them? How did this impact fire survival?
There is a calmness to both of them individually and together. What also strikes me is their openness and straight forward way to express their hopes and dreams. They see their life before them with what is good and what they have accomplished without pomp and circumstance, but matter-of-fact.
I said, “you both are not regular people,” and they pushed back. Of course we are regular people. I don’t know, but most regular people have not accomplished what they have in their lives. The world needs all of us and our contributions, so maybe I should just accept that to them, they are normal.
So when the fire came, it disrupted these two lives. It took Robert’s life’s work, not replaceable. Not replicable. One of a kind.
Robert’s work is hard to simply describe. I spent hours scouring websites looking at his volume of work and the high level of skill and expertise he has with origami. It surpasses impressive and I suggest you look at his website to understand. The pictures are worth more than any words I could use to describe.
What is interesting to me is how does one become this? What inside motivates and propels?
Robert explained how he got interested in origami as a young child, encouraged by his parents. He seems to have been called to do this.
Many artists lost work and I don’t know who all of them are, or if they are trying to recover their lost work. I do know, and Robert expresses this, that one cannot replicate work of the past. Creative endeavors are that: they are done at a moment in time within a person who is in that current state. Change anything and you change everything.
So to me it is heartbreaking, and yes, for everyone, that we have lost this volume of Robert’s work. The time and evolution of an artist driven by math and science to create extraordinary things.
Robert said there is no time to recreate what he has done over fifty years. He says this with acceptance, frustration and a calm I wish I could borrow.
Diane is easier for me to understand and she talks less because I know more of her story and she understands how remarkable what Robert has done in his life is. He is an accomplished physicist and mathematician, just for a start. And that ability and perspective on the world enabled him to develop his craft to such a high level.
Diane was lucky because all of her writing and book drafts were on her computer, and fortunately, a fire cannot extinguish her incredible imagination. Yet, there were irreplaceable memorabilia and books, that can now only live in her head. That recollection brings sadness. But Diane is sitting outside in the yard of her soon to be home again and she says, “I love being here.”
Their house was two-thirds done and I was able to tour it. They lived in this house three weeks before the fire and are replicating it almost exactly as it was to be their forever home. I felt their lives happening here. Diane talked of the wonderful oak and sycamore trees - almost fully grown, they will plant in the next few days. I could feel the anticipation and with that, recovery.
The road here has been long and filled with decisions, insurance stuff and lots of things no one wants to do. The end is near to move into what will be home, but there are two more houses to reconstruct. The one they had just moved out of and Robert’s studio.
The fire was an upheaval no one asked for or was prepared for. Sometimes you just do what you have to do.
The new home tour was full of hope and anticipation for the future. Life will be back. Robert and Diane are grateful for where they have been while reconstructing, and have been comfortable, but there will be nothing like going home.
The fire was a disruptor, but not a stopper.
On to our second meeting. We realized that we had not talked about the fire itself. Our conversation began again in the lovely to be yard of their in-process rebuild. This time their sweet dog, Casey, joined us.
Much of Robert’s life is about transformation. He takes a flat piece of paper and makes it into something, many complex figures. His accounting of his time as the fire started and going through the next 24 hours or so is not different. He frames it as each was the next step. This narrative made it both vivid and easy to follow.
Both he and Diane filled their cars with the same idea. Let’s take some things but we’ll be back in a few days. Robert was able to fill his car with a couple pieces of historic origami from past masters, plus his lifetime notebooks where he had sketched each new design. Diane—the Altadena-raised girl who assumed she’d soon be back; that’s what happens after fire— just tucked all their animals (two dogs, two tortoises, a snake, and a tarantula) into the car, along with her computer. If they knew what they know now, the cars would have been crammed and loaded.
I find it interesting what people take under the time pressure and the black hole of not knowing. I also understand fathoming what to do is somewhat a shot in the dark.
Heading out from their home after messages from the weather watchman Edgar MacGregor, both Robert and Diane kept watch in different spots. Moving about the area a few times throughout the night.
The description of watching the fire’s progression is chilling, told by Robert with clarity and not too much emotion. He was recounting his experience in a way that he may write down the steps to a complex origami fold.
The roads were closed and blocked but Robert knew back ways to be able to see and assess what was happening. During his vigilance over his community he was texting neighbors reporting their property’s status. Both he and Diane stayed on watch in their neighborhood, not ready to escape the smoke and flames. They took refuge in their cars re-parking to avoid the smoke.
I did not take notes during this conversation, captivated by the story almost feeling like that would be a disturbance. The play-by-play description of the sequences compelled.
There was a rationality in their process as they walked through this fire experience. So much to mind - the homes, the studio, where it would end.
All the while Diane was at her parallel vigil, moving between locations, receiving texts from Robert. Their support system strong and resolved. How to do this together. Two people, two cars, two vantage points — and one understanding that needed no words: what happens to you happens to me.
His eyes were on the three homes, but most of all the studio and it was intact well into the night. He describes how he was parked and watching and waiting. He was watching as the fire plumes whipped in the wind going horizontal. Then around 1:00-1:30 AM, Diane and Robert together watched as the flames overcame his life’s work. As he spoke, I was there. I think it is impossible to imagine what he and Diane felt at those moments.
Both their home and the studio had memories of a life. Mementoes from travel, family heirlooms, all the things we collect through our life’s journey. And then there is the work of an origami master. Works that are one-of-a-kind. Work that cannot be replicated.
The human spirit has a resolve that can be remarkable. I didn’t hear what will we do now or I can’t keep going. They just kept doing what needed to be done.
Unlike many others who left when law enforcement directed them to, Diane and Robert needed to know. They needed to account for what was happening — to understand in their own minds what had occurred. That is how I heard it. That is what I took from sitting with them and listening to how they told their story.
There is something profound in that — at least to me. The patient, precise, unflinching attention to what is actually in front of you. You don’t look away. You stay. You witness. Together.
Robert described the rebuild of his studio in detail with all the architectural challenges due to the extreme nature of the geography. The plans are well thought out, 395 pages, and sound spectacular. Work will resume and continue.
We drove up a narrow winding road to where the studio once stood. I never knew this place existed. It borders the National Forest. I understood immediately why someone would want to do solitary creative work here — and I knew that everything surrounding me here would beckon me to it.
The view is panoramic — the National Forest in one direction, the ocean in another. And on the hillside, a row of empty patio chairs standing in a line, waiting. The quiet was complete.
I found myself thinking — and this tells you something about where I come from — how do you get up here in the snow? Then I remembered. No snow here.
It is the kind of repose I have always craved and never had. Close enough to the world to feel connected, far enough from it to think clearly. A place where magic can happen — where it did happen, for years, in the hands of someone who folds paper into the impossible.
Sometimes when I look out into a scene such as this seeing what is there, what has been created, not by man, but by nature. I am humbled. This was one of those moments.
What happened here. What is yet to happen here.
That led us to the next day and the practical matters of needing dog food, somewhere to live, and a chance for some sleep and a shower. They didn’t say much about their feelings that day. What comes when reality hits and the suspense of what will happen has happened. The practical matters don’t mourn or wallow. For all of us life marches ahead.
I left feeling inspired. And I left understanding something about Diane and Robert that no conversation could have fully given me. They are not just surviving this loss. They are, in their quiet and purposeful way, already imagining what comes next.
Their life has not stopped. There may be less travel now and more paperwork. Nonetheless, it continues together. Maybe different than before. But still together.