Californians are all connected by disasters, regardless of where they live

We're skimming across flat water on blue Lake Tahoe, ringed by granite peaks still capped with winter snow. But a mile offshore we can't see squat.

It's like being socked in by fog on Santa Monica Bay. Only this stuff won't be burning off by noon. Better have a compass on board; preferably a GPS.

The crud is wood smoke from a few hundred Northern California wildfires. The unhealthy haze has been carried by prevailing south-westerlies up over the Sierra summit and now fills the Tahoe Basin.

People are leaving their boats on buoys. There's little clamoring for view tables at lakeside restaurants, especially outside on deck. The sweet scent of pine has been overcome by the stench of smoke.

And hikers beware: These aren't optimum conditions for strenuous ascents in the thin -- now dirty -- alpine air.

It seems surreal. There isn't a wildfire within 60 miles of Lake Tahoe. Most are hundreds of miles away. But up here we're still victims, if minor ones.

This rude act of nature is an unmistakable metaphor for an increasingly stark fact of California life: We're all connected, regardless of where we live. We're all in the same soup -- in this case, the same soot.

(Nod to the Lake Tahoe visitors bureau: Yes, the smoke blanket I describe was last week's. Since then the air has been clearing. "A lot of people are worried about the media coverage," says Julie Regan of the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency. "We're open for business.")

Typically after I write about a natural disaster, e-mails pour in from cranky Californians who assert that anyone who builds in harm's way -- in the woods, along the seashore, on a slide-prone cliff, in a flood plain, on a quake fault -- gets what they deserve when calamity strikes. But that covers just about all of us.

No Californian should be smug. A major quake can occur practically anywhere, except -- knock on wood -- the Sacramento Valley. But flooding is a given in the Sacramento Valley and along the North Coast. Mudslides are a fact of coastal life in Southern California. And fires are everywhere that pines, manzanita and housing developments sprout.

Last week, virtually everyone from Big Sur to the Oregon and Nevada borders was breathing bad air from the estimated 1,450 wildfires, most of them ignited by lightning.

All Californians pay -- and not just with clogged lungs -- when any disaster hits. If not with personal loss, we at least pay through the pocketbook.