At 6:30 on the morning of January 7, 2025, as I set out for my daily swim at the Pacific Palisades High School pool, I noticed a thin column of smoke rising above the mountain to the north, about a mile from our house. It seemed, at first, the ordinary language of fire in Southern California — an old threat we had learned to respect but also to live with. For 24 years, we had made our home two thousand feet above the Pacific, on a narrow shelf of land that juts into Topanga State Park. To dwell