Among the Ruins

ENLARGE PHOTO+

A burned car in a burned neighborhood in Escondido, California. The owner's insurance-policy number is painted on the door.

Amanda Friedman for TIME

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It's not often that much of a state is hot to the touch. But that's the case this week in Southern California, as the last of the wildfires that burned more than 500,000 acres (about 200,000 hectares) wink out. Even as the blackened landscape still smokes and pops, the nation is sorting through the equal measures of heroism and folly that accompany such disasters.

There is the army of firefighters and other personnel who waded into the flames and slowly beat them back. There is Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, adept at both crisis management and showmanship, who moved fast, stayed visible and received a general's welcome after the crisis as he tossed the coin to begin the San Diego Chargers game at a spotless Qualcomm Stadium, which only days earlier had been home to thousands of evacuees.

There was, too, the fumbling FEMA, which, desperate for redemption after the fiasco of Katrina, almost seemed to get it right, until it staged a faux news conference touting its achievements and the comeback campaign came undone. Finally, of course, there are Americans as a whole, a stubbornly homesteading people who never seem to tire of building in the paths of fires, hurricanes and coastal floods. There is little to suggest that the California blazes have broken us of that obstinate habit. But there is much to suggest that when the crises do hit, we'll at least be ready to help one another out.