Living With Fire - NYTimes.com 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. The mountains were on fire. At that moment the wind was so strong that much of the smoke was lying down, the flames blown almost parallel to the ground. It didn't look like a movie. I could smell it. Confronted by the immediacy of destruction, technology is the first thing that flees. I was reduced to tossing bits of dried weed into the air to check the direction of the wind. You think: water, family, pets. What do I put in the car first? By then the mass of orange-brown smoke had taken over the north sky. Move, your mind tells you. Yet you can't stop staring. If you stare at it long enough, perhaps it will go away. But the monster doesn't go away. It burns north-northeast, luckily almost directly away from our house. It burns right into the backyards of some homes, but no structures are lost, no lives are lost, thanks to the coordination of multiple fire units. Among the best of these, the front-line fighters, are the Hotshots. They're the best trained, the best conditioned, the hardest working of all. They go right up to the fire line, and sometimes into it. On Sunday they showed up to fight another fire, near the small, picturesque town of Yarnell, some 30 miles southwest of here. At first it wasn't a big fire, nor was it considered a dangerous one. But a monsoon blew up. The southwest monsoon is not technically a monsoon, but that's what we call it. Rain poured down in Prescott - welcome, drenching rain. Out in front of the storm, however, winds rose, turned erratic. The fire essentially flipped over a team of Hotshots, the Granite Mountain Hotshots, from Prescott. Nineteen of them died, the worst loss of firefighter life in a wildland fire in Arizona's history, the worst in the country in 80 years. The greatest tragedy to strike the firefighting profession since 9/11. I did not know any of them personally, but based on the group photo that has been widely distributed, I think some of them went to my gym. It's strange to think I won't see them again. Small blank spaces in one's existence that used to be occupied by actual people. Terrible calamity, the television anchors keep repeating. Horrible tragedy. If you live here, you don't need those words. You call those you know to make sure they're O.K. You meet people in the drugstore, on the street. A knowing look, a regretful nod convey all that needs to be said. People living in proximity to disaster don't shout; they just prepare in case it turns and comes for them. Two major fires in two weeks. Why stay there, people who live elsewhere must wonder as they watch such tragedies unfold. Why not move someplace where you don't spend every summer wondering if your house is going to burn down. Why do humans live on the slopes of active volcanoes? Why do they live atop major earthquake faults? Why on earth do people continue to dwell, year after year, in a part of the country called Tornado Alley? Because such places are beautiful, are peaceful and, for better or worse, are home. No place is safe. Not on this planet. So you choose your home for what you love about it, and not what you fear. If we let fear dictate where we should live, we would all end up huddled together in one great shivering ball of humanity, and that wouldn't be safe, either. The Doce fire could have been infinitely worse. All it would have taken was a shift in the wind. Yarnell is still burning. But I have to go feed the towhees and the hummingbirds, maybe shoo away a too-curious coyote. This is my home, and I'll deal with Mother Nature's dark side when and if it comes my way. As must we all.