Often when you’re visiting Los Angeles, you walk up the 282 steps to the Baldwin Hills scenic overlook. You pass the sagebrush and the primrose. The high rises of downtown come into view. Then, as you stand under a live oak and take a swig of water, you notice the oil wells, those nodding donkeys pumping grease out of the ground, symbols of the oil-hungry economy that birthed this sprawling city and now makes it more flammable.

You don’t dwell on the oil wells. You know they’re there. They’ve always been there. You focus your gaze elsewhere. The Santa Monica mountains reveal their crowns as the marine layer lifts. You see a flash of the Pacific. You are distracted by a monarch butterfly.

This seeing and not seeing — this knowing and not knowing — for me, is the essence of inhabiting Los Angeles. You believe in its golden story, or else how could you possibly live here? Perhaps this is also key to rebounding from this latest calamity.

I am a child of Los Angeles. I’ve run away from it. I’ve come running back to it. My family refuses to leave Los Angeles, which makes it forever a part of me.

It’s not like we don’t know the hazards. The road rage, the heat rising from the pavement, the insane housing prices, the strung-out kids on the Metro, the tents of misery that you drive past when you drop your kid at school. It’s not like we don’t understand that if a hillside is on fire, there’s only one skinny, winding road that leads to safety.