We lived in Idaho for a decade. During those years I was able to do a lot of skiing. Bogus Basin, the ski resort near Boise, had night skiing. Compared with many other downhill ski resorts, the annual pass was expensive, but affordable for families. I would buy a season pass. That way I didn’t feel bad if I could only ski for a couple of hours. When you buy a day pass, you feel like you have to ski all day long to justify the expense. With a season pass, you look at how many times you get to go skiing in a season, instead of hours in a day. I found I was able to ski quite a bit even though we had a growing family and I was working long hours. Being immersed in the culture and activity of skiing, I also took opportunities to ski at other resorts when they presented themselves.

I skied at Sun Valley several times over those years. Sun Valley had much higher prices, and for the most part, I felt I couldn’t afford such a luxury, but on “all Idaho” day, my pass from Bogus Basin worked at Sun Valley and from time to time, I would ski Bald Mountain with friends.

It was during those years that I became aware of the phenomenon of resort towns. Sun Valley is the playground of the rich and famous. There are lots of signs of that wealth all around the town. Restaurants have high prices and long waits to be served. Lodging is expensive. I used to stop by the thrift shop that supported the local library because it was easy to pick up a brand-new, never before worn silk tie for a dollar. But if you talked to the wait staff at the restaurants or the lift operators at the resort, which I am known to do, you found out that the “locals” couldn’t afford to live in Sun Valley. They lived in Hailey, or further down the road at Bellevue or Picabo. Most of the jobs in Sun Valley were low-paying service jobs. They didn’t pay enough for the workers to be able to live in Sun Valley. Most of the people who owned homes in Sun Valley didn’t live there year round. They owned multiple homes and kept a home in Sun Valley to use when they came there to ski.

The phenomenon is common across the west. Up north in Coeur d’Alene, the same thing was happening. Wealthy people from out of state bought all of the real estate and locals ended up having to commute from more distant places to work in the service sector.

It is with that knowledge in the back of my mind that I am reading about the evacuation of Lake Tahoe this week. We’ve drive through the area a couple of times, so I don’t really know it, but have a sense of how Tahoe City, Incline Village and Stateline all are situated. It is very much a ski resort area. People from California drive up into the mountains to get away from the cities and to enjoy outdoor recreation. The lake is a beautiful place for boating in the summer. It is swimmable, but the water is pretty cold year round. And the mountains are filled with resorts. People like me drive through the area because we aren’t going to shell out $700 for a night in a 5-star hotel. I’m too cheap to pay $250 for a three-star. I’ve never skied in those resorts. I choose other forms of recreation. But I know that there are servers in all of those restaurants, and cleaners in all of those hotels, and lift operators, cooks, childcare workers, and cleaners at all of the resorts. Those people can’t compete with the ultra-rich who own houses and condos in the area. They have to live farther away from the lake and commute in to work.

Frankly, I’m not concerned with the jet set. They probably haven’t been spending much time at their fancy places with all of the smoke from the fires that have been raging all summer long. Even just a few states away it is difficult to imagine what California is like right now with all of the national forests closed due to fire risk and some of the largest fires in the history of the stat burning out of control. The Caldor Fire that threatens the Lake Tahoe area, has already burned more than 1911,000 acres and is only 16% contained. It has been burning for more than two weeks. And winter snows are still a long ways off. And the Caldor fire isn’t the biggest one. The Dixie fire has burned more than 800,000 acres.

If you look at the pictures of the evacuation crowds fleeing the Tahoe area, you’ll see lots of 10- and 15-year-old SUVs lined up. Those are cars that were bought by wealthy people when they were new and later traded for other sports luxury vehicles. They ended up on a somewhat glutted used car market in the area at reasonable prices because they were no longer wanted by the wealthy folks. Those cars are what the service workers could afford. Those cars are what they use to drive into the area to work and back home to where they can afford to live. Those cars are the vehicles that are now transporting them away from their homes, wondering if they will have a home to return to. As the fires bear down on the area, embers fly long distances ahead of the main fire. When they land on a fireproof roof they go out. When they land on a pile of pine needles, they start a new fire. When the fires spread to a house the blaze quickly travels from house to house as more embers fly through the air. More than 700 homes have been destroyed or severely damaged. More will go.

For now, I’m not very worried about the people who have other homes to which to flee. I’m more concerned about those who are fleeing the only home they have. There are tens of thousands of those folks who have received mandatory evacuation orders. For many the fire will result in them having to permanently leave the beautiful places where they have worked so hard to live.