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.
