Three generations later, the vast citrus forests that once surrounded Los Angeles, as well as cities like Riverside and Anaheim, have been transformed into pink stucco death valleys full of bored teenagers and desperate housewives. East of Los Angeles, in the San Gorgonio Pass above Palm Springs, where 4000 giant wind turbines harvest the Santa Anas, new subdivisions are being built next to fifty-year-old chaparral standing eight feet high and yearning to burn. Throughout the foothills, meanwhile, free-range McMansions – often castellated in unconscious self-caricature – occupy rugged ocean-view peaks surrounded by what foresters grimly refer to as ‘diesel stands’ of dying pine and old brush.
The loss of more than 90 per cent of Southern California’s agricultural buffer zone is the principal if seldom mentioned reason wildfires increasingly incinerate such spectacular swathes of luxury real estate. It’s true that other ingredients – La Niña droughts, fire suppression (which sponsors the accumulation of fuel), bark beetle infestations and probably global warming – contribute to the annual infernos that have become as predictable as Guy Fawkes bonfires. But what makes us most vulnerable is the abruptness of what is called the ‘wildland-urban interface’, where real estate collides with fire ecology. And castles without their glacises are not very defensible.
On 26 October, day six of the fires, I saw the ruins – perched precariously on a wild mountainside – of what my friend Kozy Amemiya described as ‘a Tokugawa fortress in a Kurosawa film’. Its twin turrets had been reduced to some twisted girders rising 9/11-like from a smouldering mound of grey ash, but the putting green next to the driveway remained eerily pristine. Kozy and her English husband, Tom Royden, are Ramona avocado growers, the last of a dying breed in a rapidly suburbanising landscape. One of their two ranches is located in the hills east of Ramona where Van der Veer’s horses once grazed; the other, larger orchard occupies the side of a boulder-studded mountain overlooking Lake Ramona. Kozy has a PhD in sociology, but Tom’s graduate degree – from California State Polytechnic at Pomona – is, literally, in avocados.