You know, I gotta say, everyone knew this would happen; it wasn’t a question of “if.” We as humans have this amazing ability to ignore instinct, and not learn from the past.

I lived in that part of the world for 23 years, and every fall these horrible, wind-driven fires would take out a few neighborhoods. One night just a few years ago, sustained 80-mile an hour winds knocked a power line down on the roof of the house upwind of the one-acre horse property I lived in, by the base of the foothills in Sylmar. The only reason my guitars, masters, gear and who knows what else wasn’t wiped out was that my roommate was unable to sleep, and went outside on a perimeter patrol.

The fire-heroes were amazing in their response time and in how effectively they shut that fire down; the neighbor’s whole house was involved, and the embers were blowing horizontally for over a hundred feet onto our property (a horse ranch with lots of open ground, but also lots dry shrubs and trees). That the whole neighborhood didn’t go is still a source of amazement to me, and I’ll never forget the surrealism of having to assure myself that I wasn’t panicking (or dreaming) during a hurried evac at 4:00 a.m.

This year was no different, except that there were so many fronts simultaneously, we had no defense. What a freaking nightmare. I haven’t been able to think clearly for a week, for stressing about my friends. I’m still waiting to hear from three people about how their homes fared; everyone else I know (or could think of) in the ravaged areas made it through OK (notwithstanding Tracy and Dave waiting so long before leaving their house in Bouquet Canyon that the flames burst out the back window of their SUV, and the three kids were in the back covered with clothes as they drove right through the flames for their very god-damned lives).

I like to think that we’ll learn. But we won’t. That people will know better than to build a city below water level, or in Tornado Alley, or along the coast, or to enact fire/brush management policies that result in things like this. But we won’t.

American Indians were never this stupid. Hate to say, “I told you so,” but I’ve never really been able to buy into this whole “western civilization” doctrine, and its attendant philosophy of domination over Nature. We either achieve balance, or we get bitch-slapped by Queen Nature, as should be the case.

If there is a silver lining here, it will be in our gaining humility as a people, and respecting The Queen, and learning that if we don’t let routine fires cleanse the land periodically, bad things happen.