Fire? That’s Just the Nature of the Suburban Interface

The street is called Forest View, and, in fact, you can see a national forest if you stroll the few steps past the cul-de-sac to the community basketball hoop. Just those few steps and there it is, the story of development as it has played out forever in California: On one side of the line, rows and rows of stucco houses. On the other, wilderness.

Dry wilderness. Late last week, though there was this whole basketball court to divert them, three boys from this subdivision, ages 10 and 11, came up to the wild side of this ridgeline on the far side of Mission Viejo to play. Up past the wide, gated streets; up past the blocks of new four- and five-bedroom McMansions; up to where the 3-year-old cul-de-sacs of Quail Run, as the tract is called, gave way to fire country. A neighbor heard firecrackers, but saw no one. By dinnertime, everything past the basketball hoop was engulfed in flames.

“You could hear it crackle,” Tom Sly, a homeowner two doors down from the ridgeline told me. This was Friday. From his front walk we could see the big swath of blackened chamizo and thistle where the fire had been. The homes on Forest View go for about half a million dollars apiece--big, manicured jewel boxes with marble foyers and red bougainvillea and blue Peter Pans in the flower boxes. The fire was about 10 minutes along when the boys ran for their mothers, who called the firefighters, who arrived about 10 minutes later. By the time Quail Run was out of danger, 12 engines, 65 firefighters, a water tender, a bulldozer and a water-dropping helicopter had to be sent in.

Sly allowed as how he’d not seen anything quite like it, but then again, he was as new here as these houses, having just moved south from Seattle three years ago. I asked if he’d come to this edge, as so many do, to be closer to nature. He looked surprised. Not at all, he replied. The wilderness was lovely, but he’d come for a different sort of beauty--the beauty of order. He’d come for the planning, the wide streets, the shopping malls.

He invited me in to his marble foyer. If you didn’t breathe deeply or look behind you, there wasn’t a clue to how close this street had come to incineration the night before. There was a Persian rug and air conditioning. The stereo piped in easy listening. “This street isn’t nature,” he smiled, shutting the door.

It is easier than people think to live as if nature can be conquered, and the mind-set involved isn’t really denial, though that tends to be the common word. Everyone knows, at some level, that Southern California is a wilderness with, essentially, two seasons--getting-ready-to-burn and burning. It’s just that beauty trumps danger and second-guessing is pointless once you’ve made that choice.

That said, it’s worth noting this week that Nature has been gearing up of late for what is expected to be one of the scariest fire seasons in a while. In the county firehouses and offices of the California Department of Forestry, the talk is all of “June gloom,” and how it didn’t show because it was dried out by La Nina, and of how the “ignition index” is way up now.

“Our comparative five-year averages are to where we have burning conditions that are potentially disastrous,” Department of Forestry regional Chief Kerry Elite reported. Or, as the firemen are saying to each other: “We’re there.” There in Santa Clarita. There in the Puente Hills. There on the backside of Arrowhead. There in Corona and Anaheim Hills and Laguna and Coto de Caza and Malibu and all those places where danger meets beauty, and man meets fire.

The standard local response to such warnings tends to be kind of informed machismo. The choice having been made, people cop a kind of bravado, one-upping each other with fire stories at cocktail parties and such. (“When the Laguna fire hit,” a man told me once, “we just put everything we could grab in a suitcase and went to Maui.”) A cub reporter’s first order of business here is to learn the vocabulary of fire season--”containment,” “knockdown,” “Bambi buckets.” Show me a homeowner with a eucalyptus in the yard and I’ll show you a guy who keeps his family pictures beside the front door.

But the “urban-wildland interface,” (more fire lingo) has become an increasingly widespread worry. Last month’s development-meets-nature calamity in Los Alamos, N.M., prompted a congressional initiative to cut fire risks in developing wilderness areas. Will the fact that much of the West now shares California’s “interface” make the danger harder to block out here? Maybe, though it’s hard to imagine. In the hills this holiday weekend, the kids played and the sparklers sizzled and the chaparral rattled like tinder. And yet, nature seemed as tame as ever from my backyard.

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Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.