News of the Arroyo
Title: | Winds of change rearrange |
Subtitle: | |
Date: | 2007-11-02 |
Summary: | Editor Larry Wilson ruminates on the recent fires and the havoc they wrought. |
Author: | Larry Wilson |
Publication: | Pasadena Star-News |
Content: | By midday Tuesday, the smoke had settled on the San Gabriel Valley as it always does, as if the fires this time, as so many times before, were our own. They weren\'t, or not yet. But at first light it was gorgeous out. The Wilson family is trying to learn or bolster our Spanish with the help of one of those little daily calendars with a quote in Castillian, and yesterday as I tore off a new day it read \"El otono es mi estacion favorito.\" It\'s true: The fall so often is my favorite of the seasons. Even this late-October heat is a perfectly normal favorite time: our inevitable Indian summer. As Charlie the dog and I began our morning run down the hill into the Arroyo Seco just before the sun came up, a woman running up the other side of the street pointed to the swirling cloud of smoke to the east and called out, \"It\'s so beautiful!\" And indeed it was. Even the Santa Ana winds that are mostly to blame for making ordinary wildfires into devastation for Southlanders all around us have been entirely absent here beneath our part of the San Gabriels. Though the Arroyo can be a perfectly good canyon for the devil winds to howl down from the desert through, it has been absolutely still in Pasadena for days. And all this peace when we know all too well what thousands of our neighbors are going through produces something akin to survivor\'s guilt. Not that we would wish it on ourselves. Not that we imagine the people of San Diego or Lake Arrowhead or Santa Clarita or Malibu would wish it on us. Many of us have been there before, and we would not wish it on anyone. But there is a kind of guilt nonetheless here in the eye of the firestorms. Uncharitably, there is probably in the back of some minds - OK, of my mind - some tut-tutting as well. When you build housing almost endlessly up into the serpentine canyons of Southern California, it is going to be surrounded by the driest chaparral in all the world. The stuff is pure kindling and always has been. A spark, a breath of wind, and you\'re gone, baby, gone. Building the cities on the plain as we have from the Pacific to the desert is one thing. Building in the canyons and on the hilltops - mountaintops, even - where the brush can never be cleared is entirely another. Once a fire does start, getting people and equipment to these places to fight it is very rough duty. When we do choose to live in such places, it has to be done with eyes wide open about the dangers. And it has to be, or rather should be, done in a prudent manner - brush cleared for dozens of yards around structures, the right kinds of roofs, the right kind of building materials all around. Sometimes it seems the only rational way to live in our foothills would be in one of those burn-proof experimental jobs you\'ve seen some architects and homeowners come up with: all concrete, with windows that can be covered quickly with steel fold-down shields against the bombs thrown out by exploding eucalyptus, scrub oak, toyon and sumac. And it\'s hard not to recall Southern California historian Mike Davis\' incendiary cover story in the LA Weekly a decade ago: \"Let Malibu Burn\" was his economic argument against the rest of us paying for the efforts at suppression. But those are uncharitable thoughts. I can\'t fault anyone wanting to live here, beautiful here: Who wouldn\'t? I just want the winds to die and the people to live. larry.wilson@sgvn.com http://insidesocal.com/publiceye |
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