Strolling through the hillside urban forest that’s my California neighborhood, my dog thrusts his nose in the air, catching the scent of redwood, bay laurel and eucalyptus on the breeze as San Francisco Bay glitters in the distance. It’s a picture-perfect but disturbingly warm autumn day in the Berkeley Hills, and a premonition flashes in my mind, an echo of the scene in Terminator 2 when Skynet incinerates Los Angeles in a nuclear firestorm.
Instead of nukes raining down, on hot and gusty days like this one I see hundreds of thousands of flaming embers. They are launched, in my imagining, from a faraway wildfire igniting an unstoppable inferno that consumes my densely populated neighborhood, burning down into the city of 120,000. That my watch buzzes with real-life alerts about small fires breaking out across the East Bay only adds to the unease. It’s a sense of existential doom that I can’t seem to shake as California enters another season of Santa Ana and Diablo winds this month.