California is on fire ... yet again. Pacific Palisades and Malibu are torched, Altadena is cinder city. It is an old story, one I've lived with most of my long life.
My parents inherited a big, old house in Hollywood, about 6 blocks from Hollywood and Vine. We lived there till I was seven.
Then the Hollywood freeway went through our neighborhood, and our little one-block-long street disappeared. We relocated to our weekend cabin some 60 miles northwest of LA in a place with the unlikely name of Ojai (pronounced "oh-high).
There I lived until I went away to college and there I became 'acquainted' with forest fires. Every few years the mountains of the Los Padres National Forest would burn off. It wasn't truly forest, more like brush and scrub but it burned well.
Evenings we'd sit in the valley watching the line of flames burn across the mountainsides. It was Ed Sheeran's "I See Fire" lyrics live and in person.
Our house was in no danger, irrigated orange trees don't burn. Relatives would call "long distance" to see if we were still alive. The air was smoky but we were fine. Santa Ana winds are nothing new in SoCal, they are unpleasant even when there is no fire.
Fast forward a half century plus and the retired DrsC have a rural home between Oroville and Paradise. It is November and we are on a cruise ship three days west of Honolulu headed back to the States.
The news is full of the Camp fire that burned down the town of Paradise, CA, and killed 80+ people. The internet says our house is probably ashes. We think about that, losing our hilltop house with a 40 mile view that we'd built 31 years earlier.
Three days later we sail into Honolulu, our phones go "live" and we get a message from our neighbor saying our house is okay. We get home and discover the fire burned to with 10 feet of our house. We lost landscaping but our buildings were okay.
So yeah, I do know California's forest fires or wild fires, up close and personal. Honestly, I don't miss them.
