While Arlynn Page took me to her room to be obstructed in Altadena, she tried to answer the question that people always do after forest fires: why would anyone risk living there?
I asked myself that question again and again in the six years since I moved to a house in an old mining claim in the foothills prone to fires outside of Boulder, Colo. It is what experts call the “urban interface of the wild land”, basically, ground zero for forest fires. I am based on Phoenix these days, but I still think about that house under Sugarloaf Mountain as his home.
I have covered forest fires in six Western states. When I know people in the evacuation centers or together with their destroyed homes, they often assume that, as a reporter of the New York Times, I am from, well, New York. I have to tell you that the fire zones are also close to me for me.
Sometimes we end up comparing notes on why we choose to make our houses in the hills where the fire looms. How we have weighed the risks against the attractiveness of nature and the most affordable housing stock. We talk about cleaning trees and shrubs to harden our houses against fire, and if that makes any difference in this era of hottest and fatal megafirs. We talk about the planning of evacuation routes, our high insurance premiums, what we have in our go boxes.
I’m lucky. I have not had to return home with a lot of rubble and agonize about reconstructing or taking a loss in my greatest bigger financial investment and trying to start again elsewhere. Maybe it is silly or irresponsible to live where we do it. There are 16 million homes in the urban interface of the wild land. And every new fire that I cover is a marked reminder that the next one could swallow mine.
Mrs. Page was attracted to her new home overlooking El Prieto Canyon for her views and tranquility, the sense of serenity and closeness to nature. The Eaton fire incinerated the two houses next door. His survived, but smoke and soot made him uninhabitable.
“I just wanted to be in a safe place,” Page told me.
Then he said what millions of people throughout the west, including me, have been thinking lately: “I wonder if somewhere is safe.”