Living With Fire

By ALAN DEAN FOSTER, NYT

PRESCOTT, Ariz. — WHEN you build a fire in a fireplace, you start with paper, add kindling, and finally arrange the larger logs on top. That perfectly describes the summertime environment in the southwestern mountains of the United States.

Yet many thousands of us choose to live here.

I live in Prescott, Ariz., where a wildfire called the Doce fire is now almost completely contained, after burning 6,767 tinder-dry acres. It started two weeks ago, six miles or so from the house where my wife and I have lived for more than 30 years.

We live in the bottom of a small canyon, and it took a moment for me to realize that the smoke I was seeing from the study window was all wrong. Distant fires, which we are used to, score the blue sky with a thin haze, like a watercolorist’s brown wash. But this cloud was massive, a darker brown, moving too fast, and flush with orange.

I drove to the top of the highest hill behind our house and as I swung around the crest, between homes with neat desert landscaping, a view opened before me that bordered on the apocalyptic. Someone had switched the channel of my life.

(More here.)