• Originally published July 7, 2008 at 10:55 p.m., updated July 7, 2008 at 10:55 p.m.

“Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.”

It’s been a rough summer already for some of the American places that I love the most.

Rivers raging out of their banks, tornadoes swooping down from the thunderheads, wildfire sweeping across the hills are laying waste to places I’ve visited and loved over the years.

Strangely, the last time I visited Missouri, and took a trip up into the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, it was 1993, and I looked down on a Mississippi River that was several miles wide.

In its floodwaters, cars, trees and many homes were swept downstream toward the waiting Gulf of Mexico so many miles away. I still remember the television footage of a large farmhouse floating like an awkward boat down that swollen, flood-ravaged landscape.

This year, tornadoes have hit close to some dear friends of mine in several states. The scariest storms, however, hit Tennessee, where I once walked my daughter down the aisle and where she became a wife and mother to four of my grandchildren. But prayer works, and God answered those I offered up for the safety of my girl and her family.

Now, over the past weeks, thousands of firefighters have waged war with wildfires that have consumed some of the places I found most beautiful in California.

As I read the Advocate’s Associated Press story Monday about fires overtaking Santa Barbara County, I could close my eyes and remember the beautiful hills that rise from the Pacific there, with level upon level of beautiful homes going higher and higher from the downtown area.

What a lifestyle, I thought as I drove those hills. But now, the homes stand threatened unless nature and man can team up to stop the flames.

Days ago, the Big Sur area, which has been used by countless film makers such as Clint Eastwood and Elizabeth Taylor, was partially overrun by a wildfire.

I remember driving the Coast Highway through that beautiful area, where the tops of mountains long ago tumbled into the sea, and marveling at the majesty of land’s end.

To see any of that area scorched would be a tragedy, to be sure, but the hot winds and the wildfire are hard to stop.

The season of disaster will pass, that’s for sure, but then every season brings its share of challenges for we poor humans.

Somehow, we make it through.

But sadly, some beauty is lost along the way.

Jim Bishop is a senior editor for the Advocate. Leave him a message at 361-574-1210 or jbishop@vicad.com, or comment on this column at www.VictoriaAdvocate.com.

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