Fire rant

It's time again. Out of the east, the Santa Ana winds tear through the valley, like clockwork every October, a hot desert wind. It's just the way things go here. And yeah, I complain about it, because my allergies kick up, and besides, it's October, for cryin' out loud, and I just bought a new sweater, and I'm tired of it being 85 degrees because I want to wear it, whine whine, but I know what's in store and I choose to live here.

And it's fire season. The winds leave a wake of smoke and destruction. The San Fernando Valley is burning tonight, about 10 miles up the road from my office, and thousands of people are being evacuated, and it's all over the news. So I'm reading the story tonight, in the LA Times, and I notice a few of the "comments" people leave after the story, and I can't believe the response. "These winds are so predictable," they say, "why doesn't the city do something to stop this from happening every year when they know the winds are coming?" Over and over in the comments, people keep complaining that every year, we have fire.

Do I really have to spell this out? What, exactly, do these people hope that the city does to stop a force of nature from time immortal? Fire is fire, people, it's a fact of life. If you're gonna build a house in the mountains, in the path of hot desert winds, and in the vicinity of oh, maybe one or two adolescents and/or sociopaths who think it's funny to set a fire when the winds come just to see what happens, just what exactly do you expect the city to do about that, other than knock on your door at 3am and kindly tell you to get the hell out before you go up with the place?

I think this kind of stuff ticks me off so much because it's just part of the general American M.O. to think that we are capable of being completely, utterly safe from harm. I'm not sure where, in our survey of human history, we came up with this idea, but as a country we seem to have done a decent job of propagating the idea that we can buy our way out of the consequences of everything from germs to terrorism to acts of god.

And even within that genre of complete hubris, I think the "fire" uproar pushes an extra-special button of mine. Fire is such a necessary part of the ecological world. The landscape gets decimated, the landscape recovers. Whether we do controlled burns, or leave it alone, it will all burn, someday. Even the canyon where my house is. Someday. And while I feel deeply for the losses of the people who are affected by it, I'm still irritated by the assumption that we might have superceded the laws of nature just because we needed to sprawl.