As the federal investigators from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives begin to lay out their 3 foot-by-3 foot squares with sticks and string surrounding the ignition point of the Eaton fire on the ridge below Henninger Flats this week to find out what started the wildfire that killed more than a dozen people and essentially destroyed Altadena, sure, they’ll be looking at the Southern California Edison power lines that run along the front range of the San Gabriel Mountains as a possible source of ignition.

But they’ll also be looking at what one Altadena woman who frequently hiked the trail from the Pinecrest Gate on the Eaton Canyon rim up to Henninger had noticed: Right under those power-line towers, the cigarette butts and keep-warm campfire spots residents of a small homeless encampment there left behind almost every day.

Now, if you’re in the lawsuit business, or are just a resident trying to lay correct blame, surely you’re going to sue deep-pocketed Edison, and not some poor homeless guys who were living there not by choice but at the collective fault of all of us who comprise a society that can’t keep a roof over the heads of tens of thousands of our neighbors in Los Angeles County.

But the investigators are going to get to the bottom of it.

And whatever they find out, the answer is not going to be the paranoid rumor being spread on Facebook — no fact-checking there! — by an Altadenan claiming: “These fires did not happen naturally. They were planned and executed. Just like they were in Maui, just like they were in Paradise California.” The supposed logic behind this Marjorie Taylor Greene-like theory is that the county, which recently passed a West San Gabriel Valley Area Plan, is so interested in promoting high-density housing over single-family homes that it would actually ignite a deadly fire in the mountains knowing that it would destroy Altadena in order to allow for massive apartment construction.

Uh-huh. Must have been them “Jewish space lasers” Rep. Greene likes to spout off about, wildfire-wise.

Back here on planet Earth, we are instead dealing with reality.

Saturday afternoon, thanks to my press pass, I was able to get past the National Guard roadblocks and into Altadena for a two-hour drive through the neighborhoods I grew up in during the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, and onto the street where I owned my first home in the ’80s.

It was almost all just chimneys. The chimney of my son-in-law’s family home off Chaney Trail. The chimney of my former house on Alpine Villa Drive, just below the Cobb Estate and the National Forest boundary. The sweet young Sheriff’s Department volunteers who were looking for the remains of people who may not have gotten out on my old block. Two very young firefighters all the way from Utah who parked their truck in front of the — unrecognizable; scorched to the earth — lot that once held my little cabin.

On Loma Alta Drive I stopped to talk with our former Altadena Weekly photographer extraordinaire Ted Soqui, the only person not in a uniform I saw that day. His old family home was also burnt to the ground. Check out his photos at CalMatters. And, wow, the work of our photo staffers Sarah Reingewirtz, Hans Gutknecht, David Crane, Altadena native Will Lester among others and the stellar reporting team led by Managing Editor Tom Bray and City Editor Ryan Carter — I couldn’t be prouder to be a member of the absurdly maligned mainstream media for our crucial coverage this past week.

I headed where I had dreaded to — Sunny Oaks Circle, and two of my childhood homes. Amazingly, contrary to what I wrote on Sunday, the first of them at the top of the block was intact. Rolling down its steep incline, I soon saw, though, that the house my parents had built in the oak grove — my mother insisted that every tree be saved, and created a square courtyard in the middle for one — was gone. I walked down the drive and into its ashes. The fact that nothing was left made it hard to believe it was ever there, except in our family memories.

Novelist Naomi Hirahara, many of whose books from “Summer of the Big Bachi” on are set in Altadena, got it right in posting her Loma Alta Elementary School class photo showing Asian, Black, Latino and White kids standing tall in their best clothes one day in the ’60s. Our little town was never, unlike Tuesday, on the front page of The New York Times. But it was one of the most deeply diverse, creative, wildland-adjacent American places ever to get raised up in. We had magical lives there. If we are as resilient a people as we claim to be, another generation should be so lucky. Let’s do it in the name of the late genius Altadenan Afrofuturist Octavia Butler: identity, agency and freedom through art and the power of what it means to be human creators.

Write the public editor at lwilson@scng.com.