COLUMN LEFT/ ALEXANDER COCKBURN : Living Above It All Means Losing It All : In the Oakland hills, woodsy ambience came first, but fire has always been the natural order.

I drove across the Bay Bridge from the San Francisco side at about 9 p.m. and met the warm, slightly acrid smell of a wood fire about halfway over. Directly ahead, through the superstructure of the bridge, I could see a glow halfway up the hillside, bright near the ground and then melting into a dusky crimson, like a Turner sunset.

At that point, for the first time, the reporters on the radio were beginning to talk tentatively of a slowdown in the fire’s intensity. The airports around the bay were showing zero wind velocity, and though the yearned-for cool humid breezes from the Pacific were nowhere to be felt, the flames were no longer being whipped by fierce northeasters, tearing down the canyons and ravines at 30 m.p.h., driving the humidity down to 10%, leaving some of the highest-priced real estate in Northern California ready to explode.

The inferno was a flare-up of a small fire that firefighters thought they had under control. The patch of smoldering brush soon became an acre of flame; the flame became a plume of smoke; the plume began to move. Within hours neighborhoods looking at someone else’s horror a couple of miles away realized that for them too the fire was this time.

Claremont, Montclair and Rockridge contain expensive homes creeping up the hillsides, perching over narrow ravines, patchworking themselves up toward the ridges. Decade after decade, the Bay Area’s realtors have grazed prosperously off the dreams of the upwardly mobile. The Claremont Hotel itself, marked by firefighters as the point beyond which the inferno should not pass, was thrown up in 1910 as a giant billboard to advertise the joys of high-priced East Bay real estate. Realtors would put up customers in the hotel as their homes were built. It was right here around 1910 that exclusionary-use zoning to protect high-class residential areas was born.

Earthquakes favor the rich, whose homes have secure foundations, while the shacks and tract homes of the poor jump off their piers and break their backs. In California at least, the wealthy are victimized by fires and mudslides. Down on the poorer flatlands there are wider streets along which fire engines can swiftly deploy. The back yards are not thick with underbrush and tall trees, most especially blue gum eucalyptus.

Back in the 1860s, short of railroad ties, their landscapes stripped of trees by the gold rush of the 1840s and 1850s, Californians turned their eyes to Australia and to the quick-growing eucalyptus. The seedlings grew fast enough, but the twisted wood was useless for ties, and the wood and leaves were oily and volatile.

A dry eucalyptus doesn’t so much burn as explode. All Sunday afternoon and early evening the fire leaped from tree to tree, all parched as paper on a hearthstone. Firefighters and insurance companies know all about eucalyptus and its perils. But those hillside residents cherished them. They protected, sheltered, soared in the gray-green silhouettes of a countrified cityscape. They were, nonetheless, lethal agents of inferno. In fact, neighborhood associations in Montclair and Rockridge have rules strictly limiting the cutting of trees and shrubs. On Sunday that tasteful drapery of green turned into curtains of fire.

By midday Monday, an estimated 1,700 acres were incinerated, and with them went more than 600 structures. The beautiful and the vulgar blazed alike; wood-shingled homes built by Maybeck in the late 19th Century; spec-built condominiums thrown up to slake the fortunes of the Reagan-Bush years. To these costly residences, crammed up the hillsides, the fire trucks could scarcely penetrate and when they did the water soon drained from the reservoirs and electric pumps failed.

It’s a scene that could be duplicated, in this sixth year of California’s drought, almost anywhere in the state. The state’s geographical ecology--Mediterranean chaparral--is fire-adapted, with many plants and trees requiring intense heat for germination of their seeds. In the natural order of things fire is essential for the cycling of nutrients. In former times the landscape had to wait for lightning or spontaneous combustion. Today a cigarette or a campfire ember does the job.

I turned off the Bay Bridge and headed north into the Berkeley Hills, which a few hours earlier had themselves faced evacuation. A neighbor came by looking for decongestants. He had a refugee, Rand Langenbach, an architectural historian, co-author of “Amoskeag,” an elegy to the 19th-Century mill town of Manchester, N. H. At 1:30 that afternoon, Langenbach, who lived off Highway 24 in Oakland, had seen 35,000 photo slides of 19th-Century buildings burn blue as his house went up and, as was happening all around the East Bay, his history turned to ash.