Southern California is the landscape of dreams, or so the mythology goes. Newcomers arrive. They raise the roof beam high over the simplest foundations and pass on to a new generation the hope that they too might believe in this sun-drenched paradise.
Time, however, has cast a shadow on this pact, and it sometimes feels like a distant romance. Yet glimpses of it can still be seen, as the fires of this last week have shown.
Beginning Monday night, the conflagration has been indiscriminately cruel, incinerating homes, killing horses and upending lives. It has touched mogul and farmer, homeowner and renter, young and old alike.
Flaring up almost at random, it has linked disparate cities and neighborhoods — Ventura and Sylmar, Santa Paula and Bel-Air, Malibu and Bonsall — and forged a common experience among dusty inland horse ranches, coastal mansions, oak-hidden enclaves and ocean-view apartments.
