When nature’s dragons awake

On Friday the morning sun burned red like something out of Stephen Crane or Stephen King, and for hours it seemed that this was no longer Earth but Mars. On Saturday, dun-colored clouds created distant mountains behind the hills and ash fell from the sky. On Sunday, people fled to the beaches, hoping to find cooler weather and a more familiar landscape, but the smoke was there too, clamped over the water and sand like a hot fog.

Children playing in the water coughed, rubbed their eyes and adults nervously looked over their shoulders at the land behind. There was reassurance in the rollerbladers, the bicyclists, but not much. Was this a good idea, to be here and not at the house in Glendale, Tujunga, Burbank, La Canada? Would their lives remain where they had left them?

Even the Pacific looked different, the swells were slick and gray under the smoky sky and the waves seemed hostile. That the water was cold came as a happy surprise -- at least the seas were not yet boiling.

Here in California, we spend much time and money trying to perfect our relationship with nature, to find balance between conservation and development. Being the arrogant creatures we are, we portray ourselves as caretakers of the wilderness, stewards of the land, protecting it from our own imperfect selves.

And so we are astonished when the roles reverse, when we are faced with forces beyond our control. A century after the Industrial Revolution and still there are larger things than other humans with their germs and evil intentions that threaten us. Still there are dragons in the mountains, and when they are truly wakened, it is hard not to believe that the end is near.

Even in Los Angeles where we think we know the fire season well. To other parts of the country, autumn brings flaming foliage that is a metaphor; here the flames are real, part of our culture, our literature, our sense of identity. Earthquake weather and fire season are two of the taxes we pay to live in a place so often described as paradise.

So when the fires began in San Bernardino County, it was news, but normal news, folded into the general irritation over relentless high temperatures, the whine of the Santa Anas, the strike-increased traffic.

Southern California would lose a few hillsides, traffic might get a bit worse as smaller freeways closed, a few unlucky folks would lose their homes. That’s how it goes in fire season.

Then the fire spread, in two cases by suspected arsonists. Houses began to burn, people began to burn. Suddenly the impatience one felt upon noticing that the car was filthy white went breathless with the realization that the feathery ash could be what was left of someone’s home -- his grandmother’s bureau, her unpublished poetry, their children’s artwork.

Two hundred homes, then 300 and now this was not just fire season, this was a statewide disaster, razing the psychological landscape as it blackened the topographic one. Here was an enemy whose destruction was truly random, a serial killer that needed no secrecy, a terrorist that required no support cell. Lives that a few days ago seemed manageable were suddenly a mere hillside away from destruction.

The world got smaller somehow -- only one of the fires was in L.A. County, but as the ash fell and the smoke burned our throats, blazing San Diego County, Ventura County and San Bernardino suddenly seemed like very close neighbors.

Airports shut down and schools closed and insurance experts advised that everyone living in a fire hazard area -- which essentially defines Southern California -- should start checking out their insurance policies, photographing their belongings, making lists of what they would take in an evacuation.

The photo albums, the wedding dress, the baby shoes, the manuscripts, the art. All over Southern California, people began making mental lists of what they would take when the LAPD or the sheriffs showed up, as they have in countless neighborhoods, saying it’s time to put down the garden hose and go. The pets, the jewelry boxes, the children’s toys. What are the things that are necessary?

“Basically, what I have is what I have on,” said one man surveying the burned outline of his home, and the rest of us try to believe that this is somehow liberating. In Southern California, everyone seems to know someone who has lost “everything” in fire, earthquake or mudslide, but still it is a shock when it begins again, the scorching reminder of how tenuous is our hold on the hillsides, on the earth, on the lives we have created for ourselves.

Ten wildfires burn and we name them -- the Paradise Fire, the Old Fire, the Mountain Fire -- hoping that this will contain them, as if fire and wind understand the concept of borders, of ZIP codes, of neighborhoods.

“Humbling,” one firefighter called a blaze in San Bernardino County, which he said was all but impossible to fight.

How difficult it is for us, citizens of the city of the 21st century with the world wired to our fingertips, to be humbled. How difficult not to see it as a sign of the end of civilization. Through the smoke and the heat, not only the landscape is changed, the entire world looks different, incomprehensible, uncontrollable.

Seven hundred homes gone and counting, 13 people gone and counting, and once again we are clustered around our televisions, which have become almost literal electronic hearths. All the news seems bad. Neither the grocery workers’ strike nor the MTA worker strike shows signs of settlement, fire-closed freeways have made terrible traffic worse, meteorologists predict more days of 90-plus temperatures and for a time an Amber alert is in effect as an armed and dangerous man kidnaps his young children.

Fire season in Los Angeles. It is a staple of noir, a literary incantation used to call up dangerous nights and brooding days. In most years, there is something sexy about fire season; it is proof that we have chosen a life less safe, that this is a city not quite civilized, where coyotes sit like German Shepherds in million-dollar driveways and the San Andreas fault shivers out there in the desert.

But in days like these, anything edgy and cool is lost in the smoke. Instead of drinking gin and smearing lipstick in convertibles parked on Mulholland, we are poring over insurance policies, keeping constant tabs on our friends, our family. The Amber alert is suspended -- the children are found and safe and that is something. But still we watch the flames through the smoke and hope that the sound we hear in the distance is just traffic finally picking up and not the hoof beats of four grim horsemen.