The recent and ongoing fires in Southern California stir more than casual memories. My mother had to evacuate her house in the Laguna hills in the autumn of 1993 when a wind-driven fire raced through parched canyon scrub and turned many of the houses across the street to cinders.

When I was a kid, we used to devote part of each Thanksgiving weekend to clearing brush and needles from around the 70-year-old Shelton family cabin in eastern San Diego County. There were a couple of close calls over the decades, but in 2003 the 600,000-acre Cedar Fire roared up Cuyamaca Peak and left our cabin a pile of smoking stones. No amount of clearing would have saved it.

When the current cycle began my mother was in Washington, D.C., visiting my sister. They watched the news like everybody else, and my mother felt a rising panic. She wanted to get home right away, even though none of the fires were near Laguna this time. Instead, she called my brother and asked him to pack up her car, just in case. Take the photo albums, she instructed him. The rest is up to you.

The national media has Alzheimer’s when it comes to wildfire and Southern California. They’re treating this event as if it were a fiery Katrina, a once in a lifetime disaster. But with all due respect to the people who’ve lost their homes and to the firefighters who have worked tirelessly to save them, fire season comes every year to California. Some years are worse than others, but the season always comes.

The consequences are worse now because of what SoCal has become: 25 million (and counting) people who long ago jammed the coast and are now overflowing onto every available chaparral hillside. It used to be the hills would burn and nothing much of value was threatened. Everything’s different about Southern California now.

This was made clear to me at my 40th high school reunion this summer. I had not been to a reunion before. My friends and I had scattered and mostly lost touch. But I figured I’d better attend one while we were still ambulatory.

Funny, the people looked just the same, if a little grayer. There was Marshal Savage, the class athlete, with his little smirk and his soft loafers. Of course he won the golf tournament the day before. And Dan Orr, who organized the event, still hale and hearty in his loud Hawaiian shirt slapping shoulders.

We were about 80 (out of a class of 400) stuffed into a generic meeting room downstairs at the Newport Beach Yacht Club. The room did open out onto a bayside deck where, in the afternoon light sailboats bobbed on their moorings and the houses of Balboa Island lined up cheek by jowl across the channel.

It was at once a familiar scene and an unimaginably inflated one. As a boy I rode my bike across the island bridge to visit friends. Their houses were tiny 1930s bungalows with sand in their front yards and seashells for window decoration. Gulls camped on working Monterrey trawlers. Spilled diesel made rainbow patterns on the water’s surface, and the afternoons smelled of diesel fuel, barnacles and sea grass.

Now the boats stuffing private bayside docks are uniformly scrubbed white fiberglass. The boats are like the Italianate houses steadily replacing the modest bungalows; they’re built taller now Đ so valuable is waterfront footage Đ lot line to lot line, as if yard space, or deck space (forget the elegant lines) were too great a luxury.

This was not just a case of childhood nostalgia. The demographics and the aesthetics have changed. Eccentrics and fisherman have been dislodged by Wall Street moguls and NBA stars. Maids drive BMWs. Most of my classmates, it seemed, were realtors or lawyers, or real-estate lawyers. And most of them couldn’t afford to live in Newport Beach now. 

As kids, we loved the Santa Ana winds. They brought warm desert air to the always-cool shore. You could surf without a wetsuit. And they did a wonderful thing to the waves. The off-shore Santa Anas held the waves up longer, rippled their teetering faces and blew diamonds off the lip. If the October winds also blew smoke out to sea, well that was part of the natural order, like earthquakes, like the waves themselves.

Now CNN and the rest would have us believe these are ill winds. They’re not. In some ways Southern California has actually courted disaster. Or at least turned a profitably blind eye away from the probabilities. And the rush to this erstwhile paradise shows no sign of slowing.