Stalked by wildfire all over California
Childhood memories burned in Paradise
The canyon walls plunge to the Feather River from the edge of Paradise, California, and there are many hazards. The ones I remember best are the rattlesnakes.
The land still felt wild outside my uncle’s front door, and when he and I slipped and careened down to the water for a summer swim we passed an old snake-infested mine, relic of a time when there was still much to be discovered, extracted, cut down around here. I only visited a couple of times as a kid, but Paradise is the very image of the American West in my mind.
All of it is gone in the Camp Fire. Gone like my neighbors’ homes in Redding, California, a small regional city about 90 minutes north, where I live now. In late July, the Carr Fire burned tree to tree, then house to house, and left some of our most spectacular natural vistas barren and black.
Gone like the one-room cabin where I lived as a child, on the edge of National Forest land near Yosemite National Park, lost to a wildfire last summer.
In September, my wife and I got away to Santa Monica for a weekend alone. We drove up the coast to taste wine in the Malibu Hills. The Woolsey Fire just burned those.
To live in California in 2018 is to be stalked by wildfire.
The images from Paradise show the worst-case scenario: lines of melted and abandoned cars. People plunged into the inferno, rather than stay and burn alive. Metal hulks stand near decimated mobile home parks.
The death toll, already California’s worst, will almost certainly still rise. How are we doing out here? Not well. As a journalist, I’m better than I should be at compartmentalizing emotions. But I’m badly shaken. Each new column of smoke sends us scrambling to pull out the evacuation boxes. My colleagues are tired and wary, my friends are on edge.
Many of us also are good and angry. Like New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina, none of this is a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention. In place of bad levees we have dry forests, tangled with brush. Unlike Katrina, the repercussions of bad policies and unintended consequences aren’t just one catastrophic event. The fire comes over, and over and over. It’s relentless in punishing our mistakes.
Men who dug those mines a century ago, who fed forests into sawmills and sneered in contempt at the wisdom of native peoples, may have committed the original sins. But the generations that followed are culpable, too.
In response to rapacious logging, environmental lawsuits shut the chainsaws out of the forests without any reasonable plan to replace their work of thinning and fire-breaking.
We pursued policies of aggressively extinguishing small beneficial wildfires, instead letting vegetation build up until there was no such thing as a small, “good” fire anymore and suppression was the only logical approach.
We starved the U.S. Forest Service for resources by waiting until earlier this year to fix its budget so that prevention work was kept separate from emergency firefighting funds.
And all the while, we kept building our homes in and near the forests.
Climate change, which doesn’t care whether you believe in it or not, provided the final spark. Combine historic droughts and heat waves with the dense fuels and an inopportune wind, and you don’t get fires. You get explosions. You get phenomena that are behaviorally identical to tornadoes.
You get Redding. And Oroville. And Malibu. And Santa Rosa. And Thousand Oaks.
These days in America, it seems like everyone’s on Team Red or Team Blue. But last week, fire burned the homes of rich liberals in Malibu and poor white folks in Paradise. It didn’t care, and neither should we.
There has to be a better way. I remain hopeful for reasonable compromise, for common-sense forest management that would make our communities safe again. But I’m going to keep scanning the horizon for smoke.
Rattlesnakes are no longer the scariest thing in that forest.