At home sick yesterday, I watched the wind cover our lawn with live oak leaves. This was unusual. The oak is east of our lawn. We get plenty of wind, but it’s almost always from the southwest. Yesterday, my windmill was pointed at Utah.
Weather like this makes Californians nervous.
Fourteen years ago I spent a Sunday at a retreat meeting, trying with about 24 co-workers to iron out the dysfunction in the non-profit that employed us. It was a contentious meeting, with decade-old grudges and a legacy of mismanagement weighing on us. We had a few professional facilitators who did team-building tricks, asking us to pass rubber balls around in circles out in the yard. Frustration at the uselessness of the exercise raised the hair on the back of my neck.
Or was it something else?
In October and November pressure builds over the desert. Air pushes west to the ocean. The wind is dry, having been squeezed over the mountains, and warm, gaining in temperature as it descends toward the coast. Meteorologists call them “F�hn winds.” In Los Angeles they’re called “Santa Anas,” and “Chinooks” in British Columbia. Every once in a while, someone in the Bay Area will decide we need our own name for them and trot out the colorful phrase “Diablo Winds,” after Mount Diablo, which is to the east of a small part of the Bay Area. It never catches on.
Surfers love the winds, as they generate giant swells. Everyone else curls their lips. Some say the winds themselves agitate people, the sheer dry prickle of them. Or perhaps it’s body memory, a recollection of what previous winds have brought.
Early that Sunday afternoon, I was distracted and not paying attention during the meeting — business as usual — when I suddenly smelled smoke. My co-worker Steve and I ran out to look for the fire. We found a small bonfire on an adjacent lot, downhill a bit. A man sprayed it with a garden hose, waving at us as if to say everything was under control. We waved back. We turned to head back into the house.
And we stopped. And stared, jaws slack.
A giant column of smoke boiled from the Oakland Hills perhaps five miles north.
We ran back into the meeting, which broke up in less time than it took us to finish our sentences. I rode with Steve toward the fire. His house was right beneath the plume, mine only a little further away. I spent the next two days breathing in smoke and soot, running out now and then to hose down the garage and wooden steps. Live embers the size of chickpeas rained down on our yard. The heat of the wind dried the wood within ten minutes. I slept little.
Twenty-five people died in the Oakland Hills Fire, one of them a close friend of a close friend. A hundred times that many houses were destroyed, and more than 400 apartments. A few of our friends — some of whom we would not yet meet for years — lost their houses that day.
One of them was Becky’s friend Suh. Suh lived in a block of apartments near the center of the fire. It was incinerated. Suh was out of town that day, but her cat — Oliver — was at home.
A week after the fire Becky and I walked past the Berkeley — East Bay Humane Society, and I suggested we go in. What if the building had collapsed part-way before the fire, or if Oliver had clawed his way out a window screen? He might be in there, and Becky would recognize him.
Becky was doubtful, but agreed. We walked past a row of caged dogs to the cat room, and I saw a few gray cats there that matched the description. Turning to ask Becky whether any of the cats was Oliver, I noticed for the first time that she wasn’t in the room.
I poked my head out the cat room door. Down by the entrance to the shelter area, at the very first dog cage right next to the door, Becky was rapt. She stared into a pair of brown, moist eyes, which stared back at her.
Those brown eyes are clouded over now, but they still noticed the oak leaves blowing in odd directions on the lawn yesterday. He stood in the warm wind, shivered. A leaf skittered to his feet. He bent painfully, sniffed it, looked up at me. The hair stood on the back of his neck.
I know how he feels.
Posted by: Chris Clarke
Categories:
Zeke
Pets
Family
Biography
Science
The Neighborhood
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