Ali Riley will never forget her wedding day. And the reasons for that have nothing to do with her vows.
Five days before Riley was to be married in Ventura County, her parents were evacuated from her childhood home in Pacific Palisades. When she should have been double-checking details with the caterer and the florist, she was monitoring the progress of a monster blaze that moved from the horizon to her old neighborhood in half an afternoon.
Three hours after John Riley and Bev Lowe left the home they had lived in for more than four decades, the house was gone — as was every other one on Kagawa Street, once a tidy lane of spacious homes but now a place where only memories remain.
“By the time of the wedding, we knew,” Lowe said of her home’s fate.
Yet much of what the fire took physically, the wedding gave back emotionally and spiritually.
“When the sad news was going around, our neighbors were just saying ‘well, at least we have the wedding’,” Ali Riley added. “I did ask my mom if they were going to be too sad and she said ‘Oh no, we need this.’ We had a lot of people who had lost everything there in borrowed clothes and mismatched shoes.”
“Everyone got lifted up,” John Riley added. “There were quite a few people there who also lost their homes. {But] everyone was just so happy. That helped a lot. It really did.”
Ali Riley is among the world’s most decorated women’s soccer players, having played in five World Cups and captained the national team of New Zealand — her father’s birthplace — a record 50 times. She also plays in the NWSL for Angel City, so she’s long been resilient, if nothing else.
Still, just thinking about her wedding to former Swedish soccer player Lucas Nilsson brings tears of both joy and sadness less than a week later.
“We sent the save the dates out in like May. So we’ve been planning for a while,” she said. “And a lot of people turned out. It just felt like this little oasis in the middle of hell.
“So yeah, everything … it was perfect.”
The night before the fire started, Ali Riley, who lives in Canoga Park, had driven over the hill to have dinner with her parents, then spent part of the night atop the house looking out over the ocean. About 12 hours later, her parents’ cell phones lit up with evacuation orders.
“We’d actually done this before so we’ve been through the drill,” Lowe said.
But those other times it was just that: a drill; the flames never really came close and the couple was able to return quickly. As Lowe and her husband packed this time, they expected much the same. The fire was blocks away, the wind was blowing in the other direction. Their street is lined with concrete and asphalt, not towering trees and dry brush.
“We went to some friends in Manhattan Beach. By then you could see the billowing clouds,” John Riley said. “I think Ali and Bev immediately figured it was gone. I felt hope for a few days.”
What in the past had been a short evacuation will never end this time. A friend, who had sneaked back to the neighborhood in the days after the fire, shared a video that shows a blackened mess where the home the Rileys hoped to return to once stood. But there was no time to wallow.
“I think we were more worried about everyone else, worrying whether [the wedding] was going to go on. We could focus on something else besides ourselves,” Lowe said.
“There’s no sense in looking back. The house is gone. The sad thing is the contents. But we were able to remove a lot of very precious things.”
Asked how she could maintain such clear perspective at such a dark time, Lowe said the wedding helped.
“And also having good insurance,” he added.
Still, a planned reception in the Palisades had to be canceled, new lodging had to be found for guests from New Zealand who were going to stay there, and a hundred and one things that were already organized had to be changed. Yet the wedding went off without a hitch, even if some of the guests were wearing blue jeans and bedroom slippers instead of suits and dress shoes.
Afterward the bride and groom returned to Ali Riley’s apartment in Canoga Park, where they nervously eyed the smoke from the Palisades fire, which had crested the Santa Monica Mountains and had begun to menace the San Fernando Valley.
“We feel very lucky,” said Ali Riley, who was forced by fire to evacuate a team hotel during the last women’s World Cup in New Zealand. “We want to have purpose and be able to help and make a positive impact, to connect with our community and give them love. It was a lot logistically, a bit tough, but it’s really, really cool that everything worked out.”
“Our wedding was trial by fire and we survived,” she added. “So I guess we’ll have a long marriage.”
