If you’re going to live the California dream, you’ll never escape the nightmares.

I’m a boy-dreamer from Pasadena. The second morning after the firestorm, I put on my press pass and headed up to Altadena, the unincorporated foothill town on my hometown’s northern border. It’s a journey I’ve made a thousand times.

I drove through my life. Past the Pasadena Jewish Temple, where my three boys went to preschool, now destroyed. Past the Altadena Town & Country Club, where my sister got married, now a ruin.

Past Eaton Canyon — where I hiked on my honeymoon and countless field trips — which is now synonymous with one of the most devastating fires in state history.

The higher I ascended the mountain, the more burnt-out houses I saw. Many belonged to friends. By the time I reached Loma Alta Drive, almost everything was rubble. Overwhelmed, I parked next to a little road.

The little road’s sign read, “Zane Grey Terrace.”

I laughed through the tears. What would Zane Grey say about all this?

Zane Grey is now forgotten. But in the first half of the 20th century, he was perhaps the country’s best-selling author. He produced dozens of pulpy novels about the American West. Many were about urban people’s struggles to settle in the canyons and hills of unforgiving environments. His books could be clunkily written, but Hollywood turned so many Grey stories into films that they became stock images of Western life.

Grey’s personal journey resembled his novels. He was a depressed New York City dentist when he started selling stories. Then he moved to California, settling in a Myron Hunt-designed estate on Mariposa Street in Altadena. There he lived the California dream.

“In Altadena, I have found those qualities that make life worth living,” he wrote.

In public, Grey was a font of progressive piety, inveighing against alcohol, sex, the “jiggle and toddle and wiggle” of dancing, and fortune-seeking. “Money is God in the older countries. But it should never become God in America,” he wrote in “The Call of the Canyon.”

But Grey himself never stopped making books and money. He relentlessly fulfilled his own desires — for homes, travel, women. He met one mistress in Eaton Canyon.

“She seemed to be the embodiment of the West I portray in my books, open and wild,” he wrote.

In his hypocrisy and self-centeredness, Grey was like today’s Californians — moralizing to the world about living responsibly, while denying themselves nothing.

When our homes burn up, we tell ourselves that this is the price we pay for all the beauty and bounty of everyday life. And in this age of climate change, we make resolutions — to retreat from firelands, to accept limits. But will we keep any of our promises? Do we believe ourselves?

We know the honest answer. We never dare say it.

Except when we watch billionaires’ beach homes burn on TV. Or drive down Mariposa Street and find that the Eaton Fire has destroyed the Zane Grey Estate.

Only then do we blurt out the truth.

“Unbelievable,” we say.

Of course, it’s not the fires that are unbelievable.

We are unbelievable.

In our defense, Californians must be unbelievable to survive. We can’t acknowledge that death and destruction apocalypse are routine, or we’d never be able to live here. So, we conjure our own worlds.

As the outlaw Bess says in Grey’s novel, Riders of the Purple Sage, “You dream or you’re driven mad.”

But we can only defend ourselves with dreams for so long. Eventually, the nightmares awaken us.

The biggest nightmares, the disasters that shake us, are considered a California curse. But they also might be our state’s greatest gift. Because they rouse us from our distracting dreams. They make us look away from all that California beauty, and compel us to see one another.

When we awake to the nightmare, we are at our most generous. We make new plans. We are, however fleetingly, believable.

Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square.