It starts and ends with the hills.

Golden and crackling, scorched beneath the sun, they cradle all five square miles of my hometown in their palms. When I shade my eyes against the sky, I can see a heat haze shimmering in the air over their gentle slopes. When I brush through the dry grass, it sings back to me.

During summer evenings, I frequently find myself perched atop the soft peaks behind my elementary school, or just past the pond, or bordering the end of my street. From there I have a birds-eye view of the burn scars that bloom yearly across the miles of yellow-brown slopes. They are remnants of our annual fire season: when blazes ignite across southern California and the smell of smoke permeates the air everywhere you go.

I’ve grown up hiking alongside my parents and friends, mapping the paths of the burnt land and trekking through the clouds of dust we kick up. I run my hands over snapped branches upon the earth, blackened remnants of oaks snarling towards the sky. I can’t imagine home any other way.

i.

The first time I was told to pack my life up into a duffel bag, I was in seventh grade, studying for my anatomy test at the dinner table.

I remember the experience in foggy snatches. The email announcing that school was canceled for the rest of the week, my phone exploding with OMGs from my friends, that dark smell of smoke that seeped through our walls. Later, it was called the “Woolsey Fire”; I turned the name over and over in my mouth for hours.

The word evacuation: first a question, then an answer.

My dad’s voice as he told us, “Everything will be okay.” The spill of hastily-packed bags in the trunk as we drove to a family friend’s apartment in Century City. My mom’s face in the flash of the streetlamps when she thought my sister and I weren’t looking. The orange radiance atop the hills like a thousand dragon tongues, hungry, starving for kindling.

ii.

Somewhere, something is always ablaze.

The Congressional Research Service defines wildfires as “unplanned fires, including lightning-caused fires, unauthorized human-caused fires, and escaped fires from burn projects.” From 2013 to 2022, America experienced an average of 61,410 wildfires annually. In fact, there are 29 large active wildfires burning across the country at the time of writing. 

While wildfires are often caused by “unusually long-lasting hot lightning bolts,” the leading cause is unquestionably humans. According to the National Park Service, almost 85% of wildfires in America are lit by manmade disturbances like unattended campfires, burning debris, carelessly-tossed cigarettes, and even arson.

Historically, Indigenous people in Yosemite and elsewhere would light small controlled burns as forest management tools: these fires kept canopies about 40% open, allowing a greater diversity of fire-resilient plants to flourish. When European settlers entered California, they suppressed these burns and even outlawed them in 1850, believing Indigenous practices to be uncivilized and primitive. A vast amount of forests were logged to the brink and then replanted in dense clusters, completely destroying the biodiversity fostered by the Indigenous people and nature herself.

Decades later, the United States Forest Service’s aggressive policy of fire suppression began in 1935 with the "10 a.m. policy," in which they aimed to contain every fire by 10 a.m. the morning after it was reported. This has led forests to grow even more dense and thick—the tall trees and close-knit canopies acting as “a kind of deadly highway” for flames to spread.

Fires have been exacerbated primarily by climate change: the ticking time bomb we try to ignore, hovering over the horizon like a plume of smoke.

iii.

When we returned from the evacuation four days later, we’d heard our house had thankfully been undamaged; now, it was just a matter of getting home. For the most part, everything along the way looked untouched too.

Then we turned down a side street, and in half a moment, I understood fire for the first time.

The burnt houses looked like corpses. It felt impossible to observe them head-on, and so, as our car crawled by, I tried to take in one aspect at a time: the walls stripped bare from the foundation, the blackened beams like gnarled tree roots, the debris hanging from the torn gaps between. In the distance, huge blackened swathes clouded the hills.

We went home. Stepping through the doorframe felt like greeting an old friend. I thought of the skeletons of those poor people’s houses, their torn-up foundations slumping to the earth. I thought of, so very selfishly, the five-minute drive between there and here. 

I sat on my bedroom floor for what felt like hours. I imagined the wood might cave in at any second, that some ember could suddenly erupt. I thought of permanence, and the newly-fleeting nature of it all, and then everything in the world was just as hazy as the shadowy black-and-gold landscape in the distance.

iv.

A 2023 Nature study found that manmade climate change has increased the risk of “extreme daily wildfire growth” by about 25% in California compared to preindustrial conditions. The last five years alone have seen 10 of the state’s 20 largest fires of all time.

This, naturally, is driven by human activity. As we burn fossil fuels, our atmosphere grows oversaturated with carbon dioxide, causing temperatures to rise: a statewide increase of about 1.5 degrees Celsius has been observed over the past 40 years. Over the same time period, California has seen a 30% seasonal decrease in rainfall, an increase in dry vegetation, and even a spike in the length and intensity of heat waves. Taken together, the state makes the perfect kindling.

Chris Field, the Perry L. McCarty Director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, says simply, “We are in an era when every fire season is likely to be out of the ordinary.” 

The pond down the street from my house shrinks each year, and the creek has long since thinned to a trickle. Every autumn, the burn spots on the hill shift, but they are always there: a sense of permanence and change all in one. Each time I gaze over the landscape I’m reminded of it all, that nothing—from home to homeland—can ever be taken for granted.

v.

One July morning, just before sunrise, I picked up a friend and drove to the open space behind our old elementary school. We spent an hour trekking up to the highest point in the area, alternating between banter and meditative quiet.

We could see our entire hometown from up here: a smattering of brown and red roofs amongst rolling waves of hills, the sun seeping slow and gold over the horizon. The world was quiet. Tall grass swayed around our hips. Only a handful of weeks remained before we separated for college, and although neither of us vocalized it, the thought hung heavy in the air.

(Later that day, the very hill we were standing atop would make national news; by some unknown cause, it’d been set aflame. I’d watch the pictures of ashy dirt scroll across my screen, thinking of the serene yellow grass we’d stood among a matter of hours before. In a matter of hours, the fire department had the small blaze under control.

The next time I went hiking, a few days later, the wounds would still be apparent—black and gray stretched across the yellow hills, as if a giant had smeared sooty fingerprints onto the earth.)

Of course, that morning, perched on the peak, we couldn’t have known what would happen. And yet a curious feeling swooped in the pit of my stomach when I gazed over the edge, across my home and the hills, the lightening sky. A thought seized me: This will never be the same again.

I said a goodbye to my friend that day, but added another one under my breath into the morning air. I knew that when we returned, the landscape would be different, and so would we; this moment, this homeland, were all the more precious for it.

vi.

There are seven principles to the National Park Service’s “Leave No Trace” nature preservation campaign: ranging from “camp on durable surfaces” to “respect wildlife.” However, the one that’s been drilled into every Californian’s mind is to “minimize campfire impacts,” and for good reason. 95% of wildfires in California are manmade; in 2023 alone, humans caused over 7,000 blazes statewide.

Over and over, we’re taught that wherever you tread in the wild must remain pristine. The trees may appear to be sturdy enough to survive anything and the hills so endless that they are untouchable, but in the end, nothing is permanent. Nature is delicate and constantly in flux. One spark can ignite a conflagration. One ember can leave a house in ruins.

There are ways to combat climate change-driven wildfires in the long run. Methods include clearing dry vegetation and brush from vulnerable areas, building stronger power and water systems, developing effective evacuation routes and emergency plants, and more. Most critical is the educated usage of controlled burns, which are used to clear dry plant matter and mitigate fires before they even begin. There’s hope—we just have to take action on it.

Whenever we enter nature, nobody should be able to tell that we were ever there—we’re simply passing through. And yet even as we’re instructed to leave no trace wherever we tread, the wilderness has molded each and every one of us in return. I’ve found homeland not just among the chaparral of California, but in my friends’ laughter rising as we crest the slopes, my parents’ hands sliding into mine—the people I journey through the dust with, our footsteps scattered to the Santa Ana winds.

vii.

And it starts and ends with the hills.

Three thousand miles away, surrounded by trees and birds I don’t know the names of, I think of them more than I expected to. I picture them yellow and black, brown and gold, illuminated by high noon sun and hazy twilights and everything in between. I see my feet planted in the earth and my home sprawled out below. I taste the salt of my sweat, the clear morning air, the smoke wafting from over the horizon.

I don’t know what they’ll look like when I return in December. Perhaps this winter will be rainy, and they’ll be emerald green, trees and bushes bursting to life. But it’s more likely I’ll find myself remapping a dozen new ashen scars, unfurled across the slopes, the constancy of change once again making itself known.

The next fire season will come, and the one after, and after. The mountains will erupt again and again. Nothing will ever be the same as it is today.

So here’s what the years have taught me: Take care of the nature that cradles you. Treasure each wild and flashing moment. Leave no trace on the landscape, look across the world, capture it in your memory.

Let yourself love. Let yourself change. Hold it all close and careful in your roughened hands.