In the three years since I came to college, my hometown has more or less been on fire. Santa Barbara, California sits between the mountains and the sea, a casually picturesque city north of the Los Angeles sprawl. It has made its name as a somewhat luxurious tourist destination ever since the eighteenth century, when Spanish friars at the Mission realized that the scenery was simply too fantastic to be wasted on oppressing the native peoples all day. And who can blame them? When the air isn’t thick with smoke, and the hills don’t glow red through the night, the weather is really quite pleasant.

Santa Barbara has not been burning continuously, of course. Each has had its own casual beginning, something as simple as a cigarette tossed from a car or an untended campfire, and its own oddly tourist-friendly name. Of the names Zaca, Marmonte, Jesusita, Biltmore, Tea Garden, and Sandpiper, half are wildfires, half are hotels; without the internet or working knowledge of the area, it can be tough to tell which is which. By slapping a vaguely Spanish or scenic label on them, we try to force these fires to blend in with the red-tiled roofs and stucco walls of the city and become part of it, rather than something feral eating away at its edges.

The summer I came home, after my first year at Williams, the sun shone red and ash rained down on us so heavily that you had to scrape it off your windshield in the mornings, just like the New England snow I had left behind. Smoke rose up high from behind the mountains and towered over the entire city in the shape of a mushroom cloud. In short, it was a little like the Apocalypse. But California has never been particularly interested in the end of the world. From the Gold Rush to reality TV, from William Randolph Hearst to Governor Schwarzenegger, there’s never been much room for thinking things through to their logical end. And so, while we waited for the Four Horsemen to arrive, there was always the secret hope that if or when they did, they’d be more interested in having a beer and a walk on the beach than carrying out the Book of Revelation.

Still, last year, when I was studying on the other side of the world in Egypt, the fires neared our house and my family was asked to evacuate. My parents refused on the grounds that “it really wasn’t that close… yet.” In their token laidback fashion, they tried to casually slip into our Skype conversations that, if they were to, you know, hypothetically have a box of keepsakes that might happen to be sitting in the trunk of the car, what would I potentially want to be in it? I picked journals, pictures and letters. When you’re asked about the things you would save from a burning building on a personality test, you can worry about being original, but when it really comes down to it, everyone just wants the same thing. We want the touchstones of our memory, which we cling to as dearly as if they were our own childhoods, our history itself.

It was not the fire that got me in the end. The winds changed, the fire department tamed the Tea Garden Fire, my family didn’t evacuate, and my house remained safe and pleasantly uncharred. No, it was nothing so dramatic as a wildfire. Instead, it was the most avoidable and mundane of modern tragedies that destroyed my keepsakes.

The day before I came back for my senior year, my hard-drive, with no whimpers or warnings, completely died. Melted. Kicked the bucket. Apparently, all the little moving bits on the inside of its tiny computer-brain got jostled around one time too many and fell out… or something like that. At least, that’s what I gleaned from the MacMechanic employee who made an admirable attempt to explain the mysteries of technology to me, at a time when I was not in a place to pretend to understand it.

The computer itself was salvageable, but leaving the repair shop was like taking a little plastic amnesiac home with me. Though my laptop looked as it always had, it was just not the same reliable screen I had stared into for so many years in that comfortable and deeply unsettling Brave New World-type way. The trust was gone, and so were a good deal of the electronic files I held dear. While I was pretty good about backing up papers and most of my music, I somehow did not have the same healthy sense of fear and preparation for my pictures.

I tried to remind myself that photographs should save as place cards for memories, not substitutes for them. After all, it’s not like actual experiences have been stolen from me. Yet, it’s surprisingly difficult to keep the two apart. How else are we supposed to keep track of all of it?There was a time when I actually thought I was going to remember everything in my life: every conversation, every thought, every slow afternoon or half-clear dream I ever woke up with. When I realized that this wasn’t going to work out, I tried to document it myself, almost to the point of obsession, writing everything down that I could for the better part of a year. But this, it turns out, is also not how it works.

I sometimes think we might need these fires more than we think we do. There is a type of plant, the chaparral, that grows in the foothills of California that are so often aflame, which actually relies on the cycle of wildfires to grow, whose new seeds simply will not take in the soil without the ashes of previous generations to help sustain them. Now, I’m not advocating torching your most precious possessions for the sake of metaphor, but it does not seem unimportant. For in the event that you do find a fire on your doorstep, you are presented with two options: you can climb on your roof, brandishing a garden hose in a dangerous attempt to save everything, or, you can take your small box of keepsakes, place it in the trunk of the car, and leave the flames behind.