Member-only story
Thirty Over Fifty
California and Living With Fire
You live where you know you could lose everything
I live in the flyover state of Iowa now, in my seventies. Our beautiful, sparsely populated state is often confused with Idaho or Ohio. But we aren’t the Potato State or the home of Thomas Edison’s birth. We are known for corn, soybeans, and thousands and thousands of pigs!
The population of Iowa just tops three million. Los Angeles alone has that amount. The State of California has a population of thirty-nine million! Traffic? We never think about it. Weekend trips are a pleasurable, traffic-free drive anywhere in the four-state area. Jobs are plentiful and the cost of living is affordable.
None of those reasons alone are why we retired here, but they all helped. Our most important reason was being tired of running from natural disasters every year. California is beautiful. But also fraught with danger from so many directions.
The first time I had to pack up a three-bedroom house or lose everything we owned was when I was first married. We lived in the foothills of the Santa Barbara coast. The fire in Ojai was advancing to the coast and you could see the glow over the foothills of the ridge behind our rented house.
