Why We Live Here

Steve Lopez in the LAT explains...

It's 90 degrees in November, the full glory and perennial curse of Southern California on fierce display. Devil winds, hill-hopping infernos, smoked mansions, torched trailers, barren freeways, and brilliant sunsets lingering in low-hanging canopies of burnt dreams.

Are we all crazy? Don't live here, says the wind, the trembling earth, the parched land whose natural inclination is to explode in flame every year about now.

But we do.

Don't build near the kindling, say the voices of common sense.

But we do, for all the wrong reasons and all the known glories. Our winter snowfall is flakes of ash and flame retardant falling on bougainvillea, so it could be worse.

At least the last big quake was a fake -- a Thursday run-through to test our preparedness. Followed immediately, of course, by a genuine, rip-roaring disaster, the kind of astonishing immolation that allows folks across the nation to feel smug despite their black ice and frozen rain.

I could have gone in any direction to find fire victims Sunday. With flames roaring through Montecito, Sylmar, Corona, Anaheim Hills, Yorba Linda, Diamond Bar and elsewhere, thousands of people had fled. Millionaires on the move, trailer park residents out the door in pajamas.