THE BELL CURVE:

Some months ago, I cleaned out the box labeled “earthquake” in our garage. I don’t know how long it had been there. Fifteen, maybe 20 years. I‘d been moving it around all that time with growing irritation because it was heavy and cumbersome and — I was convinced — of poor odds ever to be useful.

So I opened it and found soggy moth-eaten blankets and corroded cans of food and yellowing bottles of water and a dank radio that I can recall. I ditched the whole mess and told myself that I’d think about replacing it later. Like next week. Or next year.

I haven’t, of course. But I’ve been thinking about that box this week as I read about the terrible destruction from the wildfires burning in all of our backyards, symbolic to most of us but very real to the people surveying their burnt wreckage today. While I’ve been agonizing for them, I’ve also been thinking about the attitude those of us like me bring to the imminent dangers that surround us.

I don’t know what, if anything, the victims of this current fire might have done to prevent their loss short of moving to a less historically endangered area.

But the folks in Malibu, especially, are willing to gamble the splendor of their setting against the risk of losing it to migrant wildfires.

And so they will rebuild with whatever protections are possible and once again tilt the odds in their favor.

It’s a curiosity to me how people who live in other parts of the world embellish the hazards of living in California while they mostly ignore their own.

We once had a friend visiting when a modest earthquake that sent the water splashing out of our swimming pool hurried his departure before the aftershocks struck. For years afterward whenever there were earthquakes anywhere in California, we received a phone call from him that went like this:

“Hey, Joe. You all right out there?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“The earthquake, man. We’re reading all about it here,”

“It’s 350 miles away, and it’s a two-point-five. Barely enough to rattle dishes.”

“Well, those things spread, don’t they? Fault lines and all that stuff I remember reading about when I was staying at your place during the big one.”

“It wasn’t a big one. It was a little one, for God’s sake.”

“Whatever. We’ve got a spare bedroom here if you have to evacuate.”

I’m familiar with the irony in such an exchange.

Several times I stood on a hill behind our Indiana lake cottage — a few miles from where this man lives — and watched ominous black funnel clouds on the horizon. Once one of them split a tree in half a few hundred yards away. They are taken as a risk of living there, just as we are at risk for fires and earthquakes.

I greatly admire the foresight of people who take whatever steps are possible to protect themselves and their families from random natural disasters.

Thinking along these lines might even motivate me to consider packing a new earthquake box.

Like next week. Or next year.

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.