Most of us are digging in. It’s exciting to be on the front lines to many of this country’s biggest problems — climate change and energy, economic disparity and infrastructure, race and immigration among them.

Ingrained with a wanderlust that I try to foist on my children, I probably see more of California than most. If I plotted my in-state movements over the last three months on a California map, it would look like someone confused, looking for an exit, circling like a caged cat.

On one Saturday afternoon, I crossed the northern border from Oregon and drove more than 1,000 miles, all in California, by Sunday evening. (It’s a long story.) I have made trips to Crescent City on the northern coast and San Diego on the southern one. I have been to Sacramento, Fresno, Bakersfield and Tehachapi, all on separate trips. I have been to two national parks (Yosemite and Redwoods), 500 miles apart.

Here might be the most California sentence of all: The only reason we canceled our weekend camping reservations at Lassen Volcanic National Park in October was that my son had an appointment at the Department of Motor Vehicles, and the earliest it could be rescheduled was December.

All those excursions came as California-bashing boiled over. It changed my perspective as I looked around. What will California represent once the smoke clears?

Just a few charred trees on a hillside

The grapes were plump on the vine, and there was little sign of the swath of death and destruction that began here a year ago, off tiny Bennett Lane, just a few miles north of Calistoga in the Napa Valley. Just a few charred trees on a hillside and more on the hill after that.

They named it the Tubbs Fire, because it was initially thought to have started off Tubbs Lane, not nearby Bennett Lane. It was, at the time, the most destructive fire in California’s history. Like a nightmare, it started after dark and did most of its damage by dawn. It killed 22 people and destroyed about 4,000 homes, fueled by 80-mile-an-hour gusts and the element of surprise.