It happens this time each year, and each year of late the results seem more dramatic. Hot, dry winds race out of the desert onto California’s coastal cities. The effect is like aiming a hair dryer at smouldering coals.
Before it was colonized, most of California west of the deserts burned every hundred years or so. Some of the fires were set by lightning, more of them deliberately by Native Californians managing the land. A century of fire suppression ran concurrently with a hundred-million-fold increase in sources of ignition, and now the south coast burns from the desert to the sea.
I hope everyone you know is well and safe. My fear for the Torrey Pines has eased today: the Witch-Poomacha fire may not threaten Del Mar after all, and the stand of trees to its south — trees with the smallest range of any pine species in North America, in that one little park on the coast and a few trees on Santa Rosa Island — might well be here next year.
Sherwood sends along a link to a fairly good story with an idiotic headline: “Californians Pay Price For Communing With Nature.” The headline writer should have read more than the first few paragraphs of the story. The vast majority of the people fleeing are not those who found themselves little forest hideaways where they breakfast each day with sharp-shinned hawks. There are a few, but they tend to be those who regard the inevitable fires with resigned acceptance, if not equanimity. We Californians are paying the price, this week, for supplanting nature, for transforming it, for ignoring it. Levittown and its upscale descendants do not work here.
Hank sent me the above photo. (The CRN silverbacks have been hard at work keeping me informed.) It was taken Monday. The Santa Anas blow the smoke offshore. The official hope is that those winds will go slack today, and that the prevailing winds will resume, blowing moist air eastward from the ocean. Four years ago I left for the desert in a moment very much like this. I wrote:
What a week to choose to go to the Mojave! We have what would be called Santa Ana winds if they were down south: from the east, dry and warm. What’s saving the Bay Area so far from the conflagration they’re having down in San Bernardino is the fact that the wind up here is but a mere breeze. We went to San Francisco Bay this afternoon: the surface of the water was like glass all the way to San Francisco.
But I’ll be — as they say — at altitude for much of my trip, up where the Joshua trees grow at around 5000 feet or higher, and might thus escape some of the heat.
I got to that Mojave altitude, at Mid-Hills Campground, and woke in the middle of the night smelling smoke. I panicked: the campground was in a thick forest of juniper and pine. Had I left a stray ember in my firepit? I burst out of the tent. There was no light to be seen, no fire, no moon, no stars. The air was thick. The wind had shifted, and all the smoke from 2003’s fires in San Diego and San Bernardino streamed toward the interior. My campsite was 120 miles from the nearest fire, the Devore Fire in Cajon Pass. A hundred twenty miles away and the smoke stung my nostrils.
My campsite neighbor and I spent a few minutes that morning coffee in hand, staring at the sun, counting sunspots. I wrote, later that night, in my blank book:
I reflected on the coyote I saw yesterday, running across the road just before I reached the campsite, as I watched the sunspots crawl across the face of the sun. When I rolled the truck this year, and walked away uninjured, Ron suggested my guardian angel was a coyote. “I’ll save your life, after creating the situation that threatens it.” Not such a bad prank for the trickster to play, I thought. Definitely throws a big monkey wrench into the trip, but not a bad story, and I get to sit here in the middle of the Mojave and drink coffee while watching sunspots on the move. Getting up to rinse out the coffee cup, I made a mental note of thanks to Coyote for playing such an easy trick on me. Then the spigot of the water jug broke off in my hand.
After coffee I tried to go for a hike. Here is a shot from that hike, in the Providence Mountains a few miles down the road from Mid-Hills, about 10 a.m.:
I walked perhaps a half mile, wheezing painfully after the first hard climb. This was nuts, I thought. Time to try to escape the plume of smoke. There was a grove of Joshua trees in Northern Arizona I’d always wanted to visit, and it was nearly twice as far from the Devore Fire as Mid-Hills, essentially at the mouth of the Grand Canyon. I aimed the truck east and north.
This is what it looked like when I got there, at around two in the afternoon.
A full day of breathing that crap in, followed by another the next day, and my lungs ached for weeks, though I suppose the burro that head-butted my sternum that afternoon may have had something to do with that.
Two years later Mid-Hills burned for real, a devastating and tragic fire, which fire was quite honestly one of the most painful losses I have borne. Miguel Alondra, who introduced me to Mid-Hills in the first place, asked me this weekend if I had visited since the fire. I have not, and decided to take a look this weekend, a desert trip I’d planned for the last month and a half.
I have been watching the fire news, and the weather forecasts, rather closely the last few days. It looks as if the Santa Ana winds are starting to slacken a bit. By this time tomorrow, the smoke may well be heading into the Mojave.
I’ve decided to postpone my trip for a couple weeks.
Unsurprisingly, I’ve been following the coverage of the San Diego fires closely. The eerie thing is how much of the area I can picture from just the line-by-line descriptions and evacuation alerts. I knew the region far better than I realized.
The color and smell of those smoky skies is something unreal and unlike anything else. Growing up, the smell of brush fires in the distance was a regular feature of childhood; one of the hardest things about living in the Midwest was not freaking out when people burned leaves in the fall; I’d smell that leaf-brushy smoke and worry about wildfires.
When my friends’ houses in the backcountry burned, many things were vaporized, not even leaving ash. It’s somewhat disturbing to think that less than an hour’s drive away I was inhaling things like televisions and automobile tires.
And now the cycle’s repeating. My friends evacuated with time to spare, and are hopeful that this time the fires will spare their new homes. Even though it’s a horrible time, and I’m thousands of miles away, I have this odd regret that I’m not there. Smoky and dangerous though it is, California is part of who I am - even though it’s likely I’ll never live there again.
Sounds wise, Chris.
Was listening to a story about the million evacuees in the San Diego area on my way home - they did a series of interviews with a bunch of people moved from a nursing home to the sports arena, where they are in wheelchairs all day, army cots at night, and diapers all the time, whether they are continent or not. And this a situation of relatively good care and active involvement.
Heartbreaking.
Well, FEMA is getting involved, so things should be resolved in just a few… sorry. Not even funny.
good idea to postpone. i can’t remember anything like this set of fires.
yes, and the fearless leader is also stopping by for his photo op tomorrow.
Rather as the stories about dogs and cats were what sent me over the edge with Katrina, the news about evacuating all the thousands of horses from the hills has me kind of on edge.
my misanthropic streak in benign form, I suppose. Hoping they’re OK.
=v= Mumblings that FEMA will do so much better now have absolutely nothing to do with the lighter pigmentation of this round of refugees.
I love the smell of leaves burning in the fall. I grew up in Pennsylvania, where that had none but pleasant associations. Which is why I was so puzzled 4 years ago when I woke up one morning and it was still dark out. I do sleep odd hours but whatever time I had gone to bed, I didn’t expect to wake up before dawn. Despite knowing there were wildfires burning - as there are every year in San Diego Co. - I didn’t get it until I saw that the clock said 9:00, and I knew it wasn’t p.m. When I went outside, I found the walkway, the little yard, everything, covered in ash.
I live in Old Town San Diego, which has never been directly threatened by wildfire in the time I’ve been here, even the really bad ones like 2003 and now. But it’s eerie to open your door and see your entire neighborhood coated with the ashes of other people’s lives.
For domestic animals and people, I think the fact that the Cedar and Paradise fires are still so recent will help preserve lives. People remember, and they’re getting themselves and their animals out without hesitating. So much of the back country is on fire or threatened that getting the horses and other large animals out is difficult, but situations like this encourage diminished misanthropy, at least temporarily, I think. In addition to people volunteering to help other people, so many people work tirelessly to rescue animals, and to provide for those rescued. People will take in animals who’ve been separated from their people, or whose people have no means to care for them, take care of them as long as necessary, then give them back when the owners are able to claim them. Horse owners will take in an extra horse or two, which isn’t as easy as taking in a kitten.
Human stupidity and self-absorption cause so much suffering, but when we’ve managed to bring the house down on ourselves, we rediscover or renew our capacity for kindness, and then I think we have to forgive ourselves a little. If only our attention spans were longer.
Jym,
Two more things which have nothing to do with greater attentiveness anticipated from FEMA: relatively greater wealth (in a few areas, much greater wealth) of those affected, and large majority Republican voter registration in San Diego county. Thanks for reminding me, just when I was going all warm and squishy.
CRN silverbacks. I’m still grinning at that. (Although don’t they have, like, REALLY SMALL genitalia?)
Ook, ook.
...
I read one story that said the policy in this emergency was to get the animals out with their people. (Something like 60% of the animal owners in Katrina supposedly refused to leave without their pets—which makes me wonder what the hell that other 40% were thinking.)
It’s a unusually SMART idea, seems to me, in contrast to the intelligence level the fedgov zoids demonstrated during and after Katrina.
But I also can’t help thinking of all the mountain lions, coyotes, bears and such that must live in the area, and wondering how most of them are faring.
...
As to what’s causing all this, so far it seems to be a combination of gays, terrorists, arsonists, environmentalists, liberals and atheists.
No global warming here, move along, move along.
Chris Clarke, I am growing old,
A silver back among the bold
Posters on your blog today;
Life is fading fast away;
But, Chris Clarke, you will be, will be,
Always young and fair to me,
Yes, Chris Clarke, you will be,
Always young and fair to me.
—Uncle Grampa